MOVIES IN

AMERICAN HISTORY
This page intentionally left blank
 MOVIES IN
AMERICAN HISTORY
AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
Volume 1

Philip C. DiMare, Editor

Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a
review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Movies in American history : an encyclopedia / Philip C. DiMare, editor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978–1–59884–296–8 (hardcopy (set) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–1–59884–297–5 (ebook (set))
1. Motion pictures—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—
United States—Biography—Encyclopedias. 3. Motion picture producers and directors—
United States—Biography—Encyclopedias. 4. Motion picture industry—United States—
Encyclopedias. I. DiMare, Philip C.
PN1993.5.U6M68 2011
791.4309730 03—dc22 2011006901
ISBN: 978–1–59884–296–8
EISBN: 978–1–59884–297–5
15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.
Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.
ABC-CLIO, LLC
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction xix

Films 1
Ali 3
Alien 5
All about Eve 7
All Quiet on the Western Front 8
All the King’s Men 10
American Graffiti 12
American in Paris, An 14
Angels with Dirty Faces 15
Annie Hall 18
Apocalypse Now 19
Badlands 23
Bambi 24
Batman 26
Battleship Potemkin 27
Best Years of Our Lives, The 30
Big 32
Big Chill, The 33
Big Heat, The 35
Big Parade, The 37
Big Sleep, The 38
Birth of a Nation, The 41

v
Contents

Blade Runner 46
Blair Witch Project, The 48
Blue Velvet 50
Bond Films, The 51
Bonnie and Clyde 54
Bowling for Columbine 62
Boys in the Band, The 64
Boyz N’ the Hood 65
Breakfast Club, The 66
Breaking Away 68
Breathless 69
Bridge on the River Kwai, The 71
Brokeback Mountain 73
Bulworth 75
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 76
Caddyshack 81
Carnal Knowledge 82
Casablanca 84
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 87
Chinatown 89
Cinderella 91
Citizen Kane 92
City Lights 97
Cleopatra 99
Clockwork Orange, A 101
Clueless 103
Conversation, The 104
Cool Hand Luke 106
Crash (1996) 108
Crash (2004) 110
Crying Game, The 112
Dances with Wolves 115
Days of Wine and Roses 117
Dead Poets Society 118
Deer Hunter, The 120
Deliverance 124
Die Hard 126
Dirty Dancing 128
Dirty Harry 130
Do the Right Thing 132
Double Indemnity 134
Dr. Strangelove 136
Driving Miss Daisy 139
Duck Soup 141

vi
 Contents

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial 145

East of Eden 147
Easy Rider 149
Erin Brockovich 151
Exorcist, The 153
Fahrenheit 451 159
Fail-Safe 160
Falling Down 162
Fargo 163
Fast Times at Ridgemont High 165
Fatal Attraction 167
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off 169
Few Good Men, A 171
Fiddler on the Roof 174
Finding Nemo 175
Flags of Our Fathers 177
400 Blows, The 180
Frankenstein 182
French Connection, The 183
Friday the 13th 186
Front, The 187
Full Metal Jacket 189
Gattaca 193
General, The 194
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 196
Giant 198
Gladiator 199
Glory 201
Godfather Trilogy, The 203
Going My Way 207
Goldfinger 209
Gone with the Wind 211
Goodfellas 213
Graduate, The 215
Grapes of Wrath, The 217
Grease 219
Great Dictator, The 222
Great Escape, The 224
Great Train Robbery, The 226
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 228
Halloween 231
Harold and Maude 233
Harry Potter Series, The 235
Heaven’s Gate 240

vii
Contents

High Noon 241

Hoop Dreams 243
How Green Was My Valley 246
In the Company of Men 249
In the Heat of the Night 250
Independence Day 252
Indiana Jones 254
Insider, The 258
Interiors 260
Intolerance 261
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 263
Iron Man 265
It Happened One Night 267
It’s a Wonderful Life 270
Jaws 275
Jazz Singer, The 277
Jerry Maguire 279
JFK 280
Judgment at Nuremberg 282
Jurassic Park 284
Karate Kid, The 287
Killing Fields, The 288
L.A. Confidential 291
Land Beyond the Sunset, The 293
Last Picture Show, The 295
Lean on Me 297
Left Handed Gun, The 298
Lethal Weapon 301
Letters from Iwo Jima 302
Lion King, The 305
Little Big Man 307
Lord of the Rings, The 309
Lost in Translation 311
Love Story 313
Magnificent Ambersons, The 317
Magnificent Seven, The 318
Malcolm X 320
Maltese Falcon, The 322
Manchurian Candidate, The 324
Manhattan 326
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The 328
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media 329
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The 331
Mary Poppins 333

viii
 Contents

M*A*S*H 335
Matrix Series, The 338
McCabe and Mrs. Miller 341
Meet Me in St. Louis 343
Memento 344
Metropolis 346
Midnight Cowboy 349
Million Dollar Baby 351
Miracle on 34th Street 353
Modern Times 355
Moulin Rouge! 357
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 359
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 360
Music Man, The 362
My Darling Clementine 364
My Man Godfrey 366
Nixon 369
No Country for Old Men 371
Officer and a Gentleman, An 373
On the Waterfront 375
Ordinary People 376
Paper Chase, The 379
Passion of the Christ, The 380
Philadelphia 382
Philadelphia Story, The 385
Piano, The 386
Pillow Talk 388
Place in the Sun, A 389
Planet of the Apes 391
Platoon 393
Postman Always Rings Twice, The 395
Pretty Woman 397
Pride of the Yankees, The 399
Producers, The 400
Psycho 402
Pulp Fiction 404
Quiet Man, The 407
Rebel Without a Cause 409
Rio Bravo 411
Risky Business 413
Rocky Horror Picture Show, The 414
Roger & Me 416
Rosemary’s Baby 418
Saving Private Ryan 421

ix
Contents

Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932) 423

Schindler’s List 425
Searchers, The 427
Serpico 429
Sex, Lies, and Videotape 431
Shadows 432
Shaft 433
Shane 435
Shawshank Redemption, The 438
Shining, The 439
Shrek Series, The 441
Silence of the Lambs, The 444
Singin’ in the Rain 446
Singles 448
Sixteen Candles 450
Sixth Sense, The 452
Sleepless in Seattle 454
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 456
Sound of Music, The 458
Splendor in the Grass 460
Stagecoach 461
Star Trek Series, The 464
Star Wars Series, The 468
Streetcar Named Desire, A 474
Sullivan’s Travels 476
Sunset Blvd. 478
Superman: The Movie 480
Taxi Driver 483
Terminator Series, The 485
Thelma and Louise 489
Third Man, The 491
Three Kings 493
Titanic 494
To Kill a Mockingbird 497
Top Gun 499
Touch of Evil 501
Toy Story 503
Traffic 505
12 Angry Men 506
2001: A Space Odyssey 508
Unforgiven 511
Vertigo 515
Waiting for Guffman 519
Way We Were, The 521

x
 Contents

West Side Story 524

When Harry Met Sally 525
White Christmas 527
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 528
Wild Bunch, The 530
Winchester ’73 532
Witness 534
Wizard of Oz, The 535
Woman of the Year 538
Working Girl 539
Yankee Doodle Dandy 543

People 547
Allen, Dede 549
Allen, Woody 551
Altman, Robert 554
Arzner, Dorothy 557
Ashby, Hal 559
Astaire, Fred 560
Beatty, Warren 563
Bergman, Ingrid 567
Berkeley, Busby 568
Berry, Halle 571
Bigelow, Kathryn 572
Bogdanovich, Peter 576
Borden, Lizzie 579
Brando, Marlon 580
Brooks, Mel 582
Burton, Tim 584
Cagney, James 587
Campion, Jane 589
Capra, Frank 592
Carpenter, John 595
Cassavetes, John 597
Chaplin, Charlie 599
Chayefsky, Paddy 602
Coen, Joel and Ethan 603
Colbert, Claudette 606
Coppola, Francis Ford 607
Corman, Roger 610
Costner, Kevin 612
Cukor, George 614
Curtiz, Michael 616

xi
Contents

DeMille, Cecil B. 619

De Niro, Robert 621
Deren, Maya 623
Disney, Walt 626
Donner, Richard 629
Duras, Marguerite 630
Eastwood, Clint 633
Ebert, Roger 636
Edison, Thomas Alva 637
Eisenstein, Sergei 639
Ephron, Nora 642
Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr. 645
Fleming, Victor 647
Flynn, Errol 649
Ford, John 650
Foster, Jodie 655
Frankenheimer, John 656
Friedkin, William 658
Gable, Clark 661
Garbo, Greta 663
Gibson, Mel 664
Gish, Lillian 667
Grant, Cary 669
Grier, Pam 671
Griffith, D. W. 672
Hawks, Howard 677
Heckerling, Amy 681
Hepburn, Katharine 682
Heston, Charlton 685
Hill, George Roy 687
Hitchcock, Alfred 688
Hopper, Dennis 694
Huston, John 696
Kasdan, Lawrence 699
Kazan, Elia 700
Keaton, Buster 702
Keaton, Diane 705
Kubrick, Stanley 707
Lang, Fritz 711
Laurel and Hardy 715
Lee, Ang 717
Lee, Spike 719
Lewis, Jerry 721

xii
 Contents

Lloyd, Harold 723

Lucas, George 725
Lumet, Sidney 727
Lumière, Auguste and Louis 729
Lupino, Ida 730
Lynch, David 732
Mann, Michael 735
Marx Brothers, The 737
May, Elaine 738
McDaniel, Hattie 740
Méliès, Georges 742
Micheaux, Oscar 743
Miller, Arthur 745
Monroe, Marilyn 747
Moore, Michael 749
Mulvey, Laura 752
Murnau, F. W. 753
Muybridge, Eadweard 755
Newman, Paul 759
Nichols, Mike 761
Nicholson, Jack 766
Pacino, Al 769
Peckinpah, Sam 771
Penn, Arthur 773
Pickford, Mary 775
Poitier, Sidney 777
Polanski, Roman 779
Pollack, Sydney 781
Preminger, Otto 784
Ray, Nicholas 787
Robeson, Paul 788
Sarris, Andrew 791
Schoonmaker, Thelma 793
Scorsese, Martin 796
Scott, Ridley 799
Sinatra, Frank 803
Singleton, John 805
Spielberg, Steven 807
Stone, Oliver 810
Streisand, Barbra 812
Sturges, John 814
Sturges, Preston 817
Tarantino, Quentin 821

xiii
Contents

Taylor, Elizabeth 822

Towne, Robert 823
Truffaut, François 826
Valentino, Rudolph 829
Van Peebles, Melvin 831
Varda, Agnès 833
Vidor, King 835
Von Stroheim, Erich 837
Washington, Denzel 841
Waters, John 843
Wayne, John 845
Weber, Lois 850
Welles, Orson 852
Wenders, Wim 856
Wilder, Billy 858
Williams, John 862
Wyler, William 864
Zanuck, Darryl 867

Subjects 871
Academy Awards, The 873
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) 875
Action-Adventure Film, The 876
African Americans in Film 881
Ancient World in Film, The 888
Animation 894
Auteur Theory 896
Biblical Epic, The 903
Blackface 910
Cannes Film Festival, The 913
Cinéma Vérité 914
Cinematography 917
Color 919
Coming-of-Age Film, The 921
Committee on Public Information, The 924
Documentary, The 927
Drive-in Theaters 930
Early Movie Houses 933
Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema 935
Feminist Film Criticism 941
Film Criticism 946
Film Editing 949
Film Noir 951

xiv
 Contents

French New Wave 955

Gangster Film, The 961
German Expressionism 964
Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The 967
Hays Office and Censorship, The 969
Hollywood Blacklist, The 971
HUAC Hearings, The 974
Independent Film, The 977
Intellectual Montage 979
Italian Neorealism 980
Judaism and Film 985
Kuleshov Effect, The 993
Male Gaze, The 995
Melodrama, The 997
Method Acting 1001
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) 1002
Movie Star, The 1004
Music in Film 1005
Musical, The 1012
Native Americans in Film 1017
New Technologies in Film 1022
Nickelodeon Era, The 1024
Politics and Film 1027
Product Placements 1032
Product Tie-Ins 1033
Religion and Censorship in Film 1037
Religion and Nationalism in Film 1040
Representations of Disability in Film 1045
Romantic Comedy, The 1052
Science and Politics in Film 1065
Science Fiction Film, The 1071
Screen Actors Guild 1076
Screenplay and the Screenwriter, The 1077
Silent Era, The 1081
Slasher Films 1084
Social Movements and Film 1086
Sound 1091
Sports Film, The 1094
Studio System, The 1096
Sundance Film Festival, The 1098
Superhero in Film, The 1099
Television 1107
War Film, The 1111

xv
Contents

Western, The 1122

Women in Film 1129
Index 1139

About the Editor 1227

List of Contributors 1229

xvi
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It was with a great deal of excitement that I accepted the assignment as General Editor
for the ABC-CLIO offering Movies in American History: An Encyclopedia, during the
summer of 2008. The project had been proposed by James Sherman, the Editorial
Manager for ABC-CLIO’s American History products, and I was pleased that he
entrusted me with seeing the project through to its end. I would like to thank James
for his patience in guiding me through the initial stages of the project—his advice
and firm hand were invaluable.
As with every encyclopedia project, Movies in American History had a great number
of contributors, some 150, all of whom must be contracted for the work that they
submit and registered with the publishing house. I would like to thank the Project
Coordinator for our encyclopedia, Barbara Patterson, who took on the monumental
task of gathering together and coordinating the vast amount of materials from contrib-
utors that flowed into the Santa Barbara offices of ABC-CLIO. I would also like to
thank all of the technical wizards who keep the ABC-CLIO Author Center site up
and running—having access to this site made my job, and those of my contributors,
immeasurably easier.
Anyone who has written or edited a book understands how important a good editor
is; thankfully, I had the very best, my Submissions Editor, Kim KennedyWhite. Over
the past 18 months, Kim, who has now accepted a position at ABC-CLIO as an Acquis-
itions Editor for products on Race, Ethnicity, and Multicultural Studies, has read and
commented on each and every entry that has come in from my contributors—some
450. She has also shepherded me through every moment of the project, from advising
me on how to make the materials for Movies in American History more powerful to lifting
my spirits when I grew discouraged about my progress on the encyclopedia. I congratu-
late her on her new position and very much hope that I will have another opportunity to
work with her in the future.
Perhaps the part of the editorial process that is least noted when a book is published
is that of copy editing. Copy editors have the often tedious task of insuring that the
technical aspects of a project—the spelling, grammar, style, and attributions—are all

xvii
Acknowledgments

correct. I would like to thank my copy editor for this project, Gary Morris, who
poured over hundreds of pages of text to find all those little mistakes that prove to be
so glaring if they are missed. In the end, he saved me from all manner of stylistic error,
something I greatly appreciate.
I would like to thank all of my contributors for the hard work that they put in on
Movies in American History. For such a project to succeed, it requires that contributors
commit themselves to producing quality work in a timely fashion—my contributors
performed admirably in this regard. Although I obviously could not have completed
the project without the assistance of all of my contributors, I would like to single out
two for distinction, Dr. Robert Platzner and Dr. Van Roberts. I have had the privilege
of working with Bob Platzner since I arrived at California State University, Sacramento
14 years ago. More than simply a colleague, Bob has been a mentor during my time at
Sac State; indeed, he helped me to develop the film studies courses that I have had the
privilege of teaching at the university, and the many discussions we have had about cin-
ema have honed my thinking on the subject. In regard to Movies in American History,
Bob was my most prolific author, contributing no fewer than 15 entries to the project.
It is an honor to have his work included in the encyclopedia. It is hard to say enough
good things about Van Roberts, with whom I had not worked before he became a con-
tributor on our project. Van was there from the very beginning, working tirelessly on
his entries and—an editor’s dream—making every deadline. His enthusiasm, good
nature, and grace are truly unique, and he has taught me a good deal about what it
means to be a better colleague and person—thank you, Van Roberts.
I would also like to thank my colleague and dear friend Judith Poxon, who, in addition
to contributing a number of entries to the encyclopedia, was always willing to sit and listen
to my woes; and my fellow café denizen Chuck Watson, who provided me with never-
ending doses of encouragement during numerous early morning conversations.
Finally, I would like to thank my darling wife, Jennifer, my friend and slayer of life’s
demons without whom none of this would be possible; our precious five-year-old son,
Luca, who has spent half his young life watching his daddy work on his book; and my
sister Lesley, who has graciously watched over her headstrong brother for his entire life.

Philip C. DiMare
California State University, Sacramento

xviii
 INTRODUCTION

Philip C. DiMare

The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by the explosive growth of
American industry, with the railroad leading the way in defining how this industrial
process would unfold. As rail systems flourished after the completion of the transcon-
tinental railroad in 1869—their development eagerly supported by local, state, and
federal governments that provided monies and land grants; and aided by technological
advancements, such as steel rails that could carry heavier locomotives, and new cou-
plers, braking systems, and signals—these systems became foundational elements in
growing America’s market economy. Literally connecting the nation’s sprawling territo-
ries, railroads employed thousands of workers and created large-scale industrial
bureaucracies to manage their operations. They also defined the business model that
would be adopted by leaders of other important U.S. industries, such as steel and iron,
petroleum, electricity, mass-produced foods and clothing, and farm machinery
(Heilbroner and Singer, 1999).
The first great American industrialists, shrewd and often ruthless men like Jay
Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller
dominated the late nineteenth-century business world. Employing the processes of
“vertical” and “horizontal” integration, which allowed owners to control all aspects of
specific industries and to drive competitors out of those particular markets, these early
industrialists, often referred to as “robber barons” by their critics, created monopolistic
mega companies such as U.S. Steel and Standard Oil. Forming themselves into large
and powerful business “trusts,” which gave a limited number of trustees dictatorial
control over extensive, interconnected corporate networks, these business leaders drove
industrialization in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
until, by the 1910s, American industrial production would comprise one-third of the
world’s total output (Morris, 2006).

xix
Introduction

Industrialization and the Rise of American Cinema

Significantly, America’s entry into world cinema was intimately connected to the
industrial expansion that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century
and to the extraordinarily gifted inventors it spawned. Thomas Alva Edison (see:
Edison, Thomas Alva) for instance, who had invented the phonograph in 1876, was
instrumental in driving the development of the film industry in the United States
during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Edison was intrigued by reports
that Eadweard Muybridge (see: Muybridge, Eadweard) had invented a machine
called the “zoopraxiscope,” which could project moving images onto a screen. In early
1888, Muybridge literally took his show on the road, touring the United States and
screening his short motion picture Animal Locomotion for amazed viewers. When the
Muybridge tour stopped over in Orange, New Jersey, in February of that year, Edison
invited Muybridge to visit his lab in West Orange. Impressed by Muybridge’s zoopraxi-
scope, Edison suggested that the two become partners. (Although Edison denied it in
his journals, the story still circulates that during their meeting, Edison pitched the idea
to Muybridge of joining together his phonograph and the zoopraxiscope in order to
create motion pictures with sound!) Although they were interested in each other’s
ideas, the partnership was never formed, and the two inventors went their separate
ways. Still fascinated by the zoopraxiscope, Edison took the technology Muybridge
had utilized to develop his invention and fashioned a more efficient projector, which
came to be called the Kinetoscope. Sadly for Muybridge, after Edison filed patents
for the kinetograph (the camera) and the kinetoscope (the viewing implement) in
1891, Muybridge and his contributions were all but forgotten (Sklar, 2002).
Edison debuted his Kinetoscope at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in
1893. Customers were able to step up to his moving-picture machine and view short
film clips such as the “Blacksmith Scene,” which ran for 20 seconds and showed three
of Edison’s employees hammering on an anvil. What was considered Edison’s first
“film” bore the rather cumbersome title Edison’s Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze. Also
known as Fred Ott’s Sneeze, the short film captured the eponymously named Edison
employee in the midst of sneezing. Other Edison films followed—American Gymnast,
for example, which showed a young woman performing a somersault, and The Barber
Shop, which recorded the everyday activities of barbers as they serviced their clients
(Sklar, 2002).
In regard to their format, all of Edison’s early motion pictures were the same: they
were simply descriptive recordings of some sort of action, what came to be called
“actualities.” Edison did expand on this notion of descriptive recording, presenting
audiences with two filmic series that possessed more entertainment value. The first of
these displayed the European muscleman Eugene Sandow set against a black backdrop
and moving through a number of different poses in order to show off his remarkable
physique. The other series featured a dancer named Annabelle Whitford, who, like
Sandow, was positioned in front of a black backdrop. For her part, Whitford danced
for her audiences in short films such as Annabelle Serpentine Dance and Annabelle
Butterfly Dance. Edison even made the first picture that shocked viewers. Titled The

xx
 Introduction

Kiss, the film depicted a rather awkward kiss between two stage actors, May Irwin and
John Rice. The first cinema “still” of a motion picture image—the actors poised with
lips together—was drawn from Edison’s film, appearing in an American newspaper
and raising even more eyebrows. In the end, The Kiss elicited the first calls for censor-
ship of the radical new medium (Lewis, 2008).
Edison had neglected to secure international patents for his kinetoscope, and invent-
ers in Europe began to develop their own motion picture projectors. Two of the most tal-
ented of these European inventors were the French-born brothers Auguste and Louis
Lumière (see: Lumière Brothers, The). Familiar with, and inspired by, Edison’s kineto-
scope, the Lumières created a complex machine that was camera, projector, and film
developer rolled into one. Much more practical than Edison’s machine, the Lumières’
cinématographe ran at 16 fps (frames-per-second), which became the standard for silent
pictures. It also allowed images to be taken “out of the box,” as it were, and to be pro-
jected on a screen so that they could be viewed by multi-member audiences.
Toward that end, the Lumières rented out the basement of the Grand Café in Paris
on December 28, 1895, and the brothers became the first filmmakers to screen their
cinematic offerings for a paying audience when they exhibited a series of motion pic-
ture shorts. They opened their 1895 screening with a picture titled La sortie des usines
Lumière (Leaving the Lumière Factory). In a certain sense the picture was much like
those produced by Edison, as it merely recorded workers leaving a factory in Lyon after
a long day of work. Yet La sortie des usines had a very different feel to it, as the film-
makers had staged the scene—by the use of special lighting, camera position, and the-
atrical blocking—in a way that gave it a certain expressive depth. Other films followed
that had the same depth-level quality, perhaps the most famous the startling L’arrivèe
d’un train en gare á la Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat), which legend has it
had viewers covering their eyes and turning away from the screen for fear that the train
would land in their laps.

The Creation of Narrative Films and the Spread of Early Movie Houses
Unlike Edison, then, the Lumières by way of their use of innovative filmmaking
techniques, began to define what came to be known as the cinematic mise-en-scène.
Borrowed from the stage, the phrase, which may be translated as “putting on the scene,”
defines the process by which the film set (much like the theatrical stage) is framed—how
it is lit, where the camera is placed, where the actors are positioned. Rather than just
recording action, then, filmmakers began to “put on scenes” that conveyed meaning to
their viewers. Ironically, the first filmmaker who began to make a name for himself as a
master of mise-en-scène in America was another Frenchman, Georges Méliès (see:
Méliès, Georges). Méliès was a magician who had experimented with trick photography
and what would come to be understood as special effects. Although like other filmmakers
he had begun his cinematic career by making actualities, he eventually began to make
motion pictures that told stories—Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard) in 1902, for instance, and
later, La sirène (The Mermaid) in 1904 and Le diable noir (The Black Imp) in 1905.

xxi
Introduction

Certainly his most famous offering, though, was Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the
Moon), which was released in 1902. Although like almost all the films of the day, Le voy-
age dans la lune was shot as if the viewer were looking at a theatrical stage, Méliès used
what would now be considered crude special effects—such as making moon men disap-
pear in clouds of smoke and shifting scenery around the set in unexpected ways—that
gave his motion picture a narrative quality that actualities did not possess.
The possibility of screening narrative motion pictures such as Méliès’s Le voyage
dans la lune for ever-larger audiences was facilitated by Edison’s development of the
Vitascope during the mid-1890s. Dubbed by some Edison’s “Greatest Marvel,” the
Vitascope was instrumental in attracting increasingly larger audiences to film-viewing
venues. Individual viewers had initially watched moving pictures in film houses such
as the Holland Brothers’ Kinetoscope Parlor. For a small fee, customers were entitled
to view the filmic fare that flickered to life on five separate machines, an experience
they thought well worth the price. Kinetoscope parlors quickly became wildly popular,
springing up in cities across the country. Eventually, though, film shorts began to be
screened for multiple-member audiences who were attending vaudeville shows, the
most popular form of entertainment during the late nineteenth century. When vaude-
ville performers went on strike in 1900, theater owners wagered that audiences were so
enthralled by motion pictures that they would not care if the live acts were dropped
and they were presented with “all-film” shows. Much to the delight of the owners their
wager paid off, as audiences flocked to theaters to see these all-film programs.
By the early twentieth century, the popularity of motion pictures gave rise to the
creation of nickelodeons (see: Nickelodeon Era, The), movie houses that got their
name as a result of owners charging customers a nickel to view a program of film
shorts. By 1908, New York City could boast that 600 nickelodeons had opened there,
and other large cities also saw the growth of this cinematic craze. Nickelodeons were
not exclusively urban phenomena, however, as these early film venues spread to rural
areas, as well—indeed, by 1910, nickelodeons were even popular in Oklahoma, which
at that time was still considered “Indian Territory.”

Filmmaking Becomes a Business

The five-cent charge for entry into a nickelodeon made these public spaces available
to thousands of immigrants who made their way to America during the last decades of
the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Largely illiterate and
initially unable to speak English, these immigrants, especially those from different
countries in Europe who settled in East Coast urban centers such as New York City,
became part of a lower- and middle-class consumer culture that began to dominate
America’s increasingly industrialized and urbanized twentieth-century landscape.
Capitalizing on the creation of this rapidly emerging consumer culture, investors with
money and vision began to provide competition for Edison. One of his former
employees, W. K. L. Dickson, for instance, helped found the American Mutoscope
and Biograph Company, which ultimately came to be called simply Biograph. Work-
ing with a 70mm film format, which provided audiences not only with much larger

xxii
 Introduction

but also much clearer images, Biograph became a force in the burgeoning film indus-
try. Its founders, especially Dickson, were fascinated by the new medium and sought
to advance it technologically. Toward this end, they developed innovative equipment
such as a panning-head tripod that allowed the camera to swivel, at least in a basic
way, from side to side. The possibility of even rudimentary camera movement repre-
sented a vastly important step forward in the evolution of moving pictures: Instead
of being limited to viewing simple action sequences from a single perspective, audi-
ences were now treated to screen images that seemed increasingly lifelike.
Biograph did not break completely from its predecessors, churning out its own list
of actualities; yet, by 1900, they were already making what can be considered early nar-
rative films. Largely cautionary tales concerning the evils of alcohol, infidelity, and
prostitution, they bore titles such as The Downward Path, She Ran Away with a City
Man, and The Girl Who Went Astray. The company also produced a series of shorts
that provided viewers with troubling racist messages. Three of these films—Dancing
Darkies, A Watermelon Feast, and A Hard Wash, the last depicting an African American
woman desperately scrubbing her child in order, audiences were left to infer, to wash
away the child’s “blackness”—appeared in 1896, the same year that the U.S. Supreme
Court handed down its disturbing Plessy v. Ferguson decision that ushered in the Jim
Crow era of a “separate but equal” America (Lewis, 2008).
Edison fought back against Biograph by piecing together his own mega firm in
1908, the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). A powerful corporate trust
in the manner of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel,
Edison’s MPPC joined together nine of his competitors—including Biograph. Like
Rockefeller and Morgan, who used the business practices of horizontal and vertical
integration to gobble up smaller companies and to dominate every aspect of their
respective industries, the MPPC overwhelmed the film industry during the first decade
of the twentieth century. Taking advantage of their monopolistic position in the indus-
try, MPPC built larger studios, streamlined their productions, and became ever more
technologically advanced. Their commitment to organizational excellence allowed
MPPC to reap huge profits; it also led to the production of better films and lower costs
for exhibiting those films. By 1910, filmmaking had become a thriving industry, one
that would begin to shape the way that America looked in powerful and often unset-
tling ways.
Surprisingly, MPPC’s monopolization of the industry lasted little more than a year,
as independent companies started to resist Edison’s corporate dominance. A number of
these companies formed themselves into the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales
Company, and by the early 1910s, 30 percent of the industry was controlled by busi-
ness interests not connected to the MPPC. In the end, the U.S. government broke
up the MPPC trust, and the independents were successful in carving out a permanent
place in the industry—they were also instrumental in shifting the geographical center
of the industry from the East Coast to the weather-friendly West Coast mecca of
Hollywood. Although there were attempts to develop filmmaking sites in Florida
and the Southwest, by 1915, the vast majority of people making motion pictures were
doing so in California.

xxiii
Introduction

The Western and the Myth of American Exceptionalism

As motion pictures became an increasingly popular form of entertainment, individ-
ual filmmakers began distinguishing themselves by producing more complex narrative
films. Among the first of these early filmmakers was Edwin S. Porter. Porter, who had
been a navy electrician and a telegraph operator, worked for Edison producing a
series of motion picture shorts before making his first two important films, Life of an
American Fireman in 1902 and an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1903 (Sklar, 2002). Porter began to experiment with different
editing techniques in these films, and the latter set an industry standard with a running
time of 15 minutes, a stunning accomplishment during the early years of cinema. After
completing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Porter turned his attention to the film for which he is
best known, The Great Train Robbery (see: Great Train Robbery, The).
Comprised of 14 individual shots, The Great Train Robbery was a quantum leap for-
ward in filmmaking, representing, as it did, what can be understood as the first modern
narrative motion picture. Although Porter’s shots were mostly stationary, he demon-
strated his extraordinary skills as a filmmaker by cutting back and forth among these
shots, allowing him to express simultaneous action and to provide context to images that
by themselves had little meaning. With a running time of 11 minutes, the film tells the
story of a ruthless band of outlaws who carry out a train robbery, make good their escape,
and who are then hunted down and killed by the members of a posse. Featuring a fight
on top of a moving train, men being brutally gunned down, explosions, and Porter’s sig-
nature final shot of a cowboy (Broncho Billy Anderson) looking directly into the camera,
raising his gun, and firing it at the audience, The Great Train Robbery amazed viewers
with its imagistic articulation of human cruelty, revenge, and retribution.
Although it stands as a predecessor to later action adventure and hardboiled detective
movies, The Great Train Robbery can properly be understood as the first of what many
consider the quintessential American film type, the western. Sweeping tales of heroic
men who conquered an ever-expanding frontier, westerns gave expression to iconic
notions of American exceptionalism—John Winthrop’s idea of the Puritans’ new home-
land as a divinely gifted “city upon a hill,” Thomas Jefferson’s description of the hard-
won republic as an agrarian paradise, John L. O’Sullivan’s claim that it was the nation’s
“manifest destiny” to spread west all the way to the Pacific shore. Generally set in the
post-Civil War era—the period during which the nation’s destiny was conclusively ful-
filled—and set in territories west of the Mississippi, the western “created its own land-
scape, its own character-types, and its own narrative forms as a way of investing this
time and place with mythic significance” (see: Western, The).
Oddly enough, by the time The Great Train Robbery was released in 1902—the
same year that Owen Wister published The Virginian, generally considered the first
“cowboy novel”—the American frontier had been “closed” for more than a decade.
The closing of the American frontier during the late nineteenth century had been
noted by figures such as Josiah Strong in his 1886 publication Our Country: Its Possible
Future and Its Present Crisis and Frederick Jackson Turner in his seminal paper “The
Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which Turner initially presented at

xxiv
 Introduction

the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Society convened at the Columbian
Exhibition in Chicago. In his paper, Turner had rather ominously suggested that the
closing of the nation’s frontier might have dire consequences, as “[u]p to our own
day American history has been in large degree the history of the colonization of the
Great West.” In Turner’s mind, it had been the nation’s “perennial rebirth” along a
frontier line,” its “expansion westward with its new opportunities,” that had furnished
the “forces dominating American character” (Turner, 1997).
Interestingly, the western provided the filmic framework for Turner’s notions con-
cerning the conquest of the frontier: over and over again on the big screen—initially
in hundreds of B-westerns made during the first three decades of the twentieth century,
and then in dozens of classic westerns made from the late 1930s on—audiences
watched with rapt attention as the American West was won from the forces of evil—
Indians, Mexicans, cattle barons, railroad owners. Why, though, if the West had
already been won by the time film westerns became so popular, did audiences flock
to see these motion pictures?
Josiah Strong, perhaps, provided an answer to this question in Our Country. As
sometimes happens, although he published his book a number of years before Turner
presented his 1893 paper, Strong’s work was not greeted with the same enthusiastic
response with which Turner’s was met—it was Turner, after all, who was credited with
defining the “Frontier Thesis.” This lack of recognition accorded Strong and his work
is somewhat surprising, as Strong, much more so than Turner, it seems, appeared to
understand just how desperately the nation’s people would cling to the idea that
America had been singled out—by God, Strong would argue—as an exceptional place.
Casting his discussion in much the same way that Turner would cast his, Strong laid
the foundation for his arguments in a chapter of Our Country entitled “The Exhaus-
tion of the Public Lands.” Here, Strong suggested that the “rapid accumulation of
our wealth, our comparative immunity from the consequences of unscientific legisla-
tion, our financial elasticity, our high wages, the general welfare and contentment of
the people hitherto have all been due, in large measure, to an abundance of cheap
land.” The problem, he went on to say, was that “when the supply is exhausted, we
shall enter upon a new era, and shall more rapidly approximate European conditions
of life.” Regardless of “how we may look at the matter,” warned Strong, it “seems cer-
tain that, in twenty-five years’ time, and probably before that date, the limitation of
area in the United States will be felt” (Strong, 1963).
Clearly, this was essentially the same argument that Turner would make in his 1893
paper. Strong, though, went much further than did Turner in describing the unique
qualities of the people who tamed the American frontier. In a stunning chapter of
Our Country entitled “The Anglo-Saxon and World Future,” Strong began by sug-
gesting that the Anglo-Saxon “is representative of two great ideas, which are closely
related.” The first of these was the notion of “civil liberty,” an idea that Strong claimed
was enjoyed almost exclusively by “Anglo-Saxons: the English, the British colonists,
and the people of the United States.” In “modern times,” said Strong, “the peoples
whose love of liberty has won it, and whose genius for self-government has preserved
it, have been Anglo-Saxons.” The “other great idea,” according to Strong, was that of

xxv
Introduction

“a pure spiritual Christianity,” what he understood as a Protestant Christianity. It was,

reasoned Strong, the “fire of liberty burning in the Saxon heart that flamed up against
the absolutism of the Pope” during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth cen-
tury. In Strong’s opinion, this could only lead to one conclusion: “the most spiritual
Christianity in the world” was to be “found among Anglo-Saxons and their converts,”
a group that had now become, especially in America, the “great missionary race.”
According to Strong, the weaving together of the love of civil liberty and pure spiri-
tual Christianity ultimately gave rise to “another marked characteristic of the Anglo-
Saxon,” what he called “an instinct or genius for colonizing”: “His unequaled energy,
his indomitable perseverance, and his personal independence, made him a pioneer.
He excels all others in pushing his way into new countries. It was those in whom this
tendency was strongest that came to America, and this inherited tendency has been fur-
ther developed by the westward sweep of successive generations across the continent”
(Strong, 1963). It is hard to imagine a better description of the heroic figures who
populated film westerns: undaunted by the terrible task that lay ahead of them, and
infused with a powerful sense of God and nation, they were perfectly fitted to accom-
plish what Strong identified as the westward sweep across the continent. This, it seems,
is what made these western heroes so appealing to American film audiences. Bound
together in cinematic solidarity in darkened theaters across the country, viewers could
live out the conquest of the savage frontier and the building of their great nation again
and again.

The War Film and American Imperialism

Strong made no secret of the fact that he believed that the “solution for the spiritual,
economic, and political problems of the day” lay in the spread of Anglo-Saxon ideals
across the land—by force if necessary. Indeed, declared Strong in Our Country,
“God, in his infinite wisdom and skill,” was “training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour
sure to come in the world’s future.” Then, intoned Strong, “will the world enter upon a
new stage of its history—the final competition of races for which the Anglo-Saxon is
being schooled” (Strong, 1963). According to Strong, because America’s frontiers
had all been conquered—and its uncivilized peoples subdued—the final “competition
of races” would necessarily be played out in foreign, and often exotic surroundings.
Strong’s prediction, as it turns out, proved correct, as little more than a decade after
he published Our Country, the United States would wage a war against Spain that was
not only fought on foreign shores but which also exposed a deeply troubling sense of
racial intolerance that many Americans harbored. The Spanish-American War broke
out in Cuba in 1898, and was quickly extended to the Philippines. Both of these island
territories had for centuries been colonial possessions of Spain, and the indigenous
peoples who populated them chafed at being controlled by their European overseers.
When Cuban nationalists began a 10-year struggle for independence against the
Spanish in 1868, most Americans supported the rebels, although few advocated armed
intervention. This was especially true in the South, where, despite the “long-
standing . . . desire to acquire the island, memories of the Civil War combat were too

xxvi
 Introduction

vivid, the trials of Reconstruction were too immediate, and southern racial apprehen-
sions were too pervasive” (Fry, 2002). Although the rebellion was ultimately put down
by Spain—without U.S. military involvement—resistance to Spanish rule remained
strong among Cubans throughout the 1880s. In 1896, the rebellion in Cuba once
again exploded, and Spain sent 150,000 troops to the island. Led by General Valeriano
“The Butcher” Weyler, the Spanish military sought to cut off rebel forces from the
island’s workers by forcibly relocating thousands of the latter into reconcentrados, over-
crowded, disease-ridden prison-camps, within which some 200,000 Cubans eventually
died. As a result of this, many Americans, including numerous members of Congress,
began to campaign for military intervention in Cuba on humanitarian grounds, a posi-
tion that was fueled by “muckraking” reports coming back from the island.
Although a number of congressional resolutions urging U.S. military involvement
were debated, President McKinley was worried that a Caribbean war would stall the
economic recovery that finally seemed to be lifting the United States out of a severe
1890s depression. McKinley, then, pursued a policy of diplomacy, an executive posi-
tion that was supported by both military leaders and businessmen who agreed that it
would benefit the United States enormously if Spain put down the rebellion itself. This
would remove the “distraction” of Cuba while also protecting U.S. commercial inter-
ests on the island, allowing America to turn its full attention to the “new frontier of
exports” in Latin America and Asia (Williams, 2009).
All of this would change, of course, once the American battleship Maine exploded
in the harbor of Havana in the spring of 1898, killing 260 sailors. Although the explo-
sion was probably an accident caused by some problem onboard ship, an American
naval court attributed it to an external mine planted by the Spanish. American newspa-
pers, blaming mysterious Spanish spies for the catastrophe, now ran headlines that
“seemed deliberately intended to inflame the public”: “ ‘The warship Maine was split
in two by an enemy’s secret infernal machine’; ‘Captain Sigsbee practically declares that
his ship was blown up by a mine or torpedo’; ‘Strong evidence of crime . . . ’; ‘If this
can be proven, the brutal nature of the Spanish will be shown in that they waited to
spring the mine until after all men had retired for the night.’ ” One headline in particu-
lar spoke volumes about the tone of the time: “THE WHOLE COUNTRY THRILLS
WITH WAR FEVER” (Wisan, 1955).
The editors of America’s newspapers did their part by publishing the muckraking
stories sent back from Cuba accompanied by prowar illustrations depicting such things
as cheering crowds sending their troops off to war or “Uncle Sam” hailing his “latest,
greatest, shortest war.” News agencies also utilized the recently developed form of
reportage that would come to be known as photojournalism, releasing heroic and often
startling images of brave American troops and starving Cubans. Film, however, would
become the medium of choice for spreading America’s message concerning the “march
of freedom” in Cuba (see: War Film, The).
Significantly, even though “no motion-picture films were made of the fighting in
Cuba,” the “war with Spain in 1898 gave regular film producers their first opportunity
for spectacle” (Sklar, 1994). Albert Smith and the British-born J. Stuart Blackton, for
example, produced for the Vitagraph Company what is considered the first

xxvii
Introduction

commercial combat picture, Tearing Down the Spanish Flag. The short film, comprised
of a single, enormously powerful scene with a flagpole set against the sky and a pair of
hands reaching up and taking down the Spanish flag and replacing it with Old Glory,
was shot on a Manhattan rooftop. Blackton and Smith took advantage of the fervent
audience response to their first combat film, following it up with the more complex
production of The Battle of Santiago Bay, a cinematic depiction of the victory of the
U.S. Navy over the Spanish fleet in Cuba.
America’s “Splendid Little War,” as it was dubbed, lasted only a few short months,
with United States troops quickly driving the Spanish from both Cuba and the
Philippines. The war would prove to be a great political and economic success, as the United
States forced Spain not only to surrender its sovereignty over Cuba, but also to cede to
the United States Puerto Rico, Guam, and several other small islands and to give up its
colonial authority in the Philippines. Ironically, however, once it had won the war, the
nation found itself in an unsettling position, having to decide whether or not to take
imperial control of the Philippines. Although he claimed that he never wanted all of
the islands that made up the Pacific territory, President McKinley ultimately came
down on the side of annexation. This was necessary for several reasons, suggested the
president. The islands, of course, could not be given back to Spain, as that would
be “cowardly and dishonorable.” They also could not be turned over to economic rivals
of the United States, such as France or Germany, as that would be “bad business and
discreditable.” Nor could they be left on their own, as they were clearly “unfit” to gov-
ern themselves and self-rule would soon lead to “anarchy and misrule” that was worse
than that in Spain. The only solution to this colonial dilemma, claimed McKinley, was
to “take control of the islands and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and
Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow
men for whom Christ also died” (Zinn, 1999).
McKinley’s message concerning the need to uplift and Christianize uncivilized for-
eign populations, so much like that preached by Strong, would be taken up and refined
by political leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt, who became president after McKinley
was assassinated in 1901, and Woodrow Wilson, who was elected to his first term in
the White House in 1912, on the eve of World War I. Filmmakers also did their part
in communicating the idea that America bore a responsibility to intervene militarily
in order to tame foreign frontiers, churning out a slew of war films between 1898,
when the Spanish-American War began, and 1914, when World War I began. Bearing
titles such as A Day with the Soldier Boys, Rally Round the Flag, Faithful unto Death, and
None but the Brave Deserve the Fair, these films “were in effect recruiting posters that
moved, calculated to stir the emotions and stun the intelligence” (Butler, 1974).
Wilson resisted calls for America to enter WWI during his first term in office, argu-
ing that what was going on across the Atlantic was strictly a European affair. Film-
makers followed suit, shifting their focus away from the production of prowar films,
like those released during and after the Spanish-American War, toward antiwar pictures
such as Be Neutral (1914), War Is Hell (1915), and The Terrors of War (1917). These
films acted to support President Wilson’s 1914 isolationist call for the public to be
“neutral in fact as well as in name,” “impartial in thought as well as action,” reinforcing

xxviii
 Introduction

the message of his first term that the European conflict was “a war with which we have
nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us” (Horowitz, 2005).
Although the United States refused to become directly involved in the war that
raged in Europe during its early years, geopolitical concerns eventually led Wilson to
become a wartime president after he was reelected in 1916. Now seeking to convince
the American people that the United States should enter the war in order to make
the world “safe for democracy”—especially after he had asked them to reelect him
because he had “kept them out of war”—Wilson turned for advice to one of his most
loyal supporters, George Creel. Appointing Creel head of what came to be called the
Committee on Public Information, the president allowed this powerful figure to shape
the nation’s war message (see: Committee on Public Information, The).
Taking advantage of the extensive resources provided to him by the U.S.
government, once appointed, Creel immediately set about developing a core group
of public relations people and professional historians to assist him in putting in motion
a campaign of “moral publicity.” He also called on his entertainment industry associ-
ates to produce propaganda pictures that could be used to demonstrate the whole-
someness of American life and to “slander all things German.” Wilson had himself
seen the power of the cinematic message firsthand when he allowed D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation to be screened in the White House in 1915 (see: Birth of a
Nation, The). Considered by most film historians as the most important motion pic-
ture of the silent era that extended from 1915 through 1929 (see: Silent Era, The),
The Birth of a Nation was a technically brilliant example of early filmmaking that gave
expression to a profoundly troubling message concerning black-white race relations in
America. Adapted from the Thomas Dixon novel The Clansman, a work that depicted
the post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan as the last, best hope of Southern whites beset by
emancipated, maniacal blacks, Griffith’s film depicted “the creation of a new nation
after years of struggle and division, a nation of Northern and Southern whites united
‘in common defense of their Aryan birthright,’ with the vigilante riders of the Klan
as their symbol” (Sklar, 1994).
Realizing that The Birth of a Nation was extremely controversial, Dixon, who had
known Wilson when both attended Johns Hopkins University, approached the
president and invited him to attend a screening of the picture. Fearing that it might
appear unseemly for him to venture out while he was mourning the death of his wife,
Wilson suggested that the film be screened in the White House. After watching the
film, Wilson, who had displayed his own racist attitudes after he was elected in 1912
by creating separate work spaces for blacks and whites in Washington, D.C., is pur-
ported to have uttered, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret
is that it is all so terribly true.”
Although it was met with a great deal of resistance, especially from black leaders such as
Booker T. Washington and social progressives such as Jane Addams, the founder of Hull
House, The Birth of a Nation played to packed houses across the nation and garnered
glowing reviews. It also set the tone for war films created by filmmakers working in con-
junction with Creel’s Committee for Public Information. Filled with salacious images of
crazed Germans and bearing titles such as The Prussian Cur (1918), The Hun Within

xxix
Introduction

(1918), and The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin (1918), the films spread a message of racial
hatred and exclusionary nationalism that helped to usher in one of America’s most
conservative political, cultural, and religious eras, a period extending roughly from the
end of WWI in 1918 until the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

The Golden Age of Film Comedy

Beyond the many westerns and war films that made their way to the big screen
during the first decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of film comedies were also
made during this time. Indeed, the silent era years that stretched from 1915 to 1929
came to be identified as the Golden Age of Film Comedy. In retrospect, it is not sur-
prising that film comedies became so popular at this point in time, as the thousands
of viewers who watched these films were in desperate need of some relief from an
increasingly troubled world. Already overwhelmed by what felt like the ceaseless pres-
sures of industrialization and urban life, people had been shocked by the horrifying
carnage wrought by a Great War that left millions dead and millions more physically
and psychologically wounded. Before they could come to grips with what had seemed
the impossibility of a worldwide military conflict, they were once again rocked, this
time by an influenza pandemic that swept across the globe and in two short years
between 1918 and 1919 left between 20 and 40 million dead—more than had peri-
shed during all of World War I. If only for brief time, then, film comedies provided
movie audiences with a chance to laugh.
Golden age film comedies traced their roots to the vaudeville programs that had
become so popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Character-
ized by song, dance, juggling, and acrobatics, vaudeville programs also typically
included comedy acts, most of which were oriented around physical comedy. As
motion pictures became more sophisticated, and more profitable during the silent
era, gifted physical comedians such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold
Lloyd, all deeply influenced by vaudeville, began to showcase their skills on the big
screen (see: Chaplin, Charlie; Keaton, Buster; and Lloyd, Harold).
Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were all enormously talented—and willing to put
themselves in harm’s way by performing their own stunts—and film fans flocked to
theaters to watch their pictures. Like dozens of other lesser known film comedians,
Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd all relied on lowbrow humor—pratfalls and sight gags,
strung together one after another, wrapped around flimsy narratives in an attempt to
elicit laughs—they just did it better than the others. Given this, however, the social sig-
nificance of the pictures produced by these three filmmakers should not be underesti-
mated. Ironically, in the very same moment that the filmic idea of the American hero
was being defined in westerns and war films, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were shaping
their own versions of what can be understood as the antihero: the little guy—given par-
ticularly poignant expression by Chaplin with his “Little Tramp” character—mercilessly
buffeted about by an increasingly mechanized world and forced to use his ingenuity,
physical abilities, and childish charm to survive. Like the vast majority of viewers who

xxx
 Introduction

watched their films, the antiheroic characters played by Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were
invariably knocked down by life; they never failed to get back up, however, in hilariously
appealing ways, and to soldier on in a world that too often left little time for laughter.

The Movie Star, Scandals, and Censorship

Although Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd all became major motion picture stars, it was
Chaplin who became the offscreen sensation. Wildly popular with his fans, Chaplin
was able to use his celebrity—and the profits it generated—as a bargaining tool in
his negotiations with studio heads over his salary and his demand for creative control
of his pictures. Understanding the power of the cinema to convey messages to the pub-
lic—and believing that his celebrity allowed him the privilege to speak his mind in
ways that the average person could not—Chaplin began to make his political ideas
known to the public, both on-screen and off. Although personally anti-militaristic,
Chaplin supported America’s entry into WWI; attempting to enlist, he failed his
physical and was turned away. He did his part for the war effort, however, touring with
fellow motion picture stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks on the third Liberty
Bond Drive. Ironically, Chaplin caused a stir in 1921 when, readying himself for a
return to his homeland in England, he was asked what he thought of Bolshevism.
The normally forthright Chaplin provided an answer that many found ambiguous,
leading some to conclude that he was a communist sympathizer, a problematic posi-
tion during the conservative 1920s. During the early 1940s, as America entered
WWII, Chaplin ran afoul of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover over his political affiliations,
and, after a decade of accusations—and facing a second paternity suit—Chaplin effec-
tively went into exile in Switzerland.
Interestingly, Chaplin’s offscreen troubles only seemed to make him more popular
with his adoring fans. Such expression of adoration for motion picture personalities
emerged early on in film history, as audiences began to recognize the actors who
appeared in various roles in different films. These first film fans began to press studios
for behind-the-scenes information about their favorite actors; realizing that selling
their stars could be extremely profitable, studios responded by setting aside sections
in their trade publications in which they profiled popular film personalities. By
1911, the first fan magazines began to appear. With titles like Motion Picture Story
Magazine and Photoplay, the information in these “gossip columns” was tightly con-
trolled by the studios (Sklar, 2002) (see: Movie Star, The).
The first male silent movie stars were men like Rudolph Valentino and Douglas
Fairbanks, who played swashbuckling heroes on-screen (see: Valentino, Rudolph;
Fairbanks, Douglas; Action-Adventure Film, The). The two stars could not have
been more different. Although the smoldering Valentino made women swoon in thea-
ters, his personal life was rife with romantic despair, as he never seemed to be able to
find the right relationship. His willingness to titillate audiences by creating characters
marked with a thinly veiled androgyny also made him a controversial figure among
male viewers, most of whom seemed deeply to resent—and fear, it seems—his

xxxi
Introduction

extraordinary appeal. Fairbanks, on the other hand, was a man’s man, the ideal “Ameri-
can type”—“instinctive, rugged, and fiercely independent” (Lewis, 2008).
Female movie stars were every bit as popular as their male counterparts during the
early years of cinema, none more so than Mary Pickford (see: Pickford, Mary).
Known for her girlish good looks—she continued to play adolescent roles well into
her twenties—Pickford replaced the first female movie star of the silent era, Florence
Lawrence, becoming the new big-screen “it” girl by the mid-1910s. A true rags-to-
riches success story, Pickford began playing bit parts in 1908, earning a respectable
$5 per week. By 1913, now a member of Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, she was
bringing in an amazing $2,000 per week. In order to assure production quality, Zukor
eventually gave Pickford, who by that time was earning a staggering $10,000 per pic-
ture, her own division, Artcraft. Demonstrating that women could be equally influen-
tial figures in the film industry, Pickford joined her future husband, Douglas
Fairbanks, along with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith to found United Artists.
Seeking exclusive control over their film projects, the company proved untenable in
the hands of its founders, who ultimately turned over the day-to-day operations of
United Artists to Joseph Schenck.
Pickford’s seemingly perpetual girlishness was the polar opposite of Theda Bara’s
wickedly erotic vamp persona. The first example of a star who was created by a studio,
Bara was born Theodosia Goodman in Ohio. She was given the name Theda Bara—an
anagram of Arab Death—by William Fox (who launched the Fox Film Corp.), and
after exotic stories were concocted about her being the daughter of a sheik and an
Arabian princess who was involved in the “black arts,” she became notorious for play-
ing the “vamp”—a vampiress whom men could not resist. The studio released incred-
ibly provocative publicity photos of Bara, and she did her part on screen playing vamps
that exist only to seduce and destroy powerful men (Sklar, 2008; Lewis, 2002).
As the decade of the Roaring Twenties dawned, film fans began to demand increas-
ingly personal information about what their stars were doing when they were not busy
making films. Some stars, who were making more in a single week than most working
people made in an entire year, lived lives of conspicuous consumption, spending
untold sums on houses, cars, and elaborate, often drug-fueled parties—and fans longed
to know what that was like, even if only vicariously. Realizing that there was money to
be made, mainstream newspapers began to run stories about the decadent lifestyles of
Hollywood celebrities, which film fans could hardly wait to read and share with each
other.
Although much of what was reported in the stories about movie stars was fabricated,
a distressing amount was true. The first star scandal with fatally tragic consequences
exploded in 1920, when a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl named Olive Thomas was found
dead of an apparent drug overdose in a room at the Hotel de Crillon, in Paris. The
incident, which turned out to be a bigger story than it probably would have been
had not Thomas been married to Jack Pickford, Mary’s brother, led Archbishop
George Mundelein to publish a cautionary work on the motion picture industry enti-
tled The Danger of Hollywood: A Warning to Young Girls. Although Mundelein’s warn-
ing seemed overweening to many, it proved prescient when one of the most

xxxii
 Introduction

notorious scandals in film industry history broke in 1921. Although details of the case
were sketchy at best, it involved accusations that film comedy star Roscoe “Fatty”
Arbuckle had raped and murdered a young starlet named Virginia Rappe at a sensa-
tional party—even by Hollywood standards—that had stretched from L.A. to San
Francisco, 400 miles away. Although Arbuckle was never convicted of the crime, his
career was effectively over after he was put on trial in 1922 (Lewis, 2002).
Realizing that some aspects of Hollywood were, indeed, out of control, and that sto-
ries such as that involving Arbuckle could negatively affect their financial bottom line,
the studios created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
(MPPDA) in 1922 (see: Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America).
The MPPDA was headed up by former postmaster general Will Hays, to whom fell the
task of convincing local and state-level reform groups that the film industry was every
bit as concerned as they were that Hollywood remain scandal free and concern itself
only with producing films that were wholesomely entertaining and that provided
appropriate social messages. Although there were those in Hollywood who supported
the creation of the MPPDA for the right reasons—to act as an oversight agency that
could help to prevent situations like that involving Arbuckle—most were simply wor-
ried that if the process of censorship was carried out by reform groups, Hollywood
would become overly regulated (see: Hays Office and Censorship, The).
Censorship had been an issue since the birth of cinema—once it became clear that
motion pictures were more than simply entertainment novelties and that they actually
could be used to communicate messages to viewers, questions immediately began to
arise concerning what those messages should be and how some of them might be
censored—so it is hardly surprising that in a post-WWI America marked by the rise
of the second Ku Klux Klan, the Red Scare reaction to communism, the Scopes Trial
and the articulation of a formal Christian fundamentalism, two-thirds of the nation’s
states were actively attempting to pass regulatory legislation that would act to control
an industry that had grown as powerful, persuasive, and, many thought, as perverse
as filmmaking. What is surprising is that the creation of the MPPDA actually con-
vinced 35 of 36 states that were considering imposing regulatory legislation on the dis-
tribution and exhibition of motion pictures that it was safe to halt their efforts. Much
of this, it seems clear, had to do with the appointment of Hays to head the organiza-
tion, as he was considered by almost everyone—inside and outside the industry—as
just the kind of no-nonsense, morally appropriate man who could get the job done.
At least for now, then, the film industry would be left to police itself.

Technological Innovation, the Studio System, and New Forms of Censorship

On October 6, 1927, moviemaking changed forever when The Jazz Singer opened
in New York City’s Warners’ Theatre (see: Jazz Singer, The). Considered the first
sound film, The Jazz Singer starred Al Jolson, a Jewish singing star who was already
well known as a stage performer. Jolson had made a name for himself in vaudeville,
often darkening his face and whitening his lips with makeup and performing his num-
bers before eager white audiences in what came to be called “blackface” (see:

xxxiii
Introduction

Blackface). Although it received rather tepid receptions from audiences and lukewarm
reviews from critics when it was first released—Jolson was lauded for his singing but
universally panned for his attempt at acting—the film is noteworthy for ushering in
a new era in cinema, one marked by increasingly sophisticated expressions of sound
that made motion pictures seem even more lifelike (see: Sound).
The Jazz Singer was not actually a synchronized sound film, as it had been shot as a
silent picture with the soundtrack added later. Indeed, except for the musical numbers,
there are only two dialogue sequences in the picture—one of particular note, where
Jolson looks directly into the camera and, prophetically as it turned out, enthusiasti-
cally says to the audience: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’
yet!” The changeover to synchronous sound did not occur overnight. In fact, like
The Jazz Singer, the majority of early sound films, such as William Wellman’s Wings
and F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, were really hybrid offerings, mixing together silent and
sound formats. But there was no disguising the fact that viewers wanted pictures with
sound, and after 1927, studios invested heavily in producing the sound films that their
audiences craved.
Although it did not have quite the effect on film production and viewing that sound
did, the introduction of color nevertheless dramatically changed the way films were
produced and viewed (see: Color). Experiments with coloring film date back to the
middle of the nineteenth century, and by 1905, the French Pathé company had moved
from hand tinting film to running it through tinting machines, making the process
much less labor intensive and time consuming. It also allowed them more effectively
to create motion pictures that expressed “moods”—individual segments could now
quickly be colored with particular shades expressive of different emotions and experi-
ences. In 1915, the Technicolor Corporation was formed, and in 1917, the company
showcased a new two-color process they had developed in The Gulf Between. By the
early 1930s, Technicolor had developed a three-color process that would become the
industry standard for two decades—the Technicolor process required that films be shot
with special cameras, which Technicolor owned and leased to studios, allowing the
company to dominate their segment of the industry until Eastman Kodak introduced
a single-color process in 1950 that could be used on a wide number of cameras avail-
able on the market.
Although moviemaking had always been a complex process, the introduction of
new technologies, especially sound, made the process infinitely more complicated—
and financially risky. With the advent of sound, for instance, a “myriad of technical
problems was created whose solution demanded the soundproofing of studios, the wir-
ing of cinemas and the employment of a whole new range of technicians whose services
had never previously been necessary” (Schindler, 1996). The expense and expertise
required for filmmaking, coupled with the responsibility of self-regulation, increas-
ingly shifted the control of producing, distributing, and exhibiting films to a small
group of very powerful studios—the “Big Five,” Loew’s, Inc., RKO, Twentieth
Century-Fox, Paramount, and Warner Bros., and the “Little Three,” United Artists,
Columbia, and Universal Studios—which were headed by enormously influential cor-
porate leaders. Mostly Eastern European Jews—a blow to those in the industry such as

xxxiv
 Introduction

Edison and the other company heads at MPPC with anti-Semitic sensibilities who had
done their best to keep men of Jewish descent out of the corporate world of cinema—
studio heads such as Carl Laemmle, William Fox, Adolph Zukor, Marcus Lowe, and
the four Warner Brothers were not filmmakers, at least not in any artistic sense. Rather,
much like the industrialists who had come before them, they were shrewd—and often
ruthless—businessmen who created what came to be called the “Studio System” (see:
Studio System, The). Seeking to limit competition and to maximize profits, these
men each created a studio that functioned as a “self-contained filmmaking factory with
its own labor pool of producers, directors, writers, players, and technicians, turning out
many films a month during the years of peak production”—roughly from 1930 to
1950 (Kolker, 2000).
Will Hays did his part to help insulate the studios during the late 1920s by offering
up the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America’s first formalized self-
regulatory system of censorship. Comprised of a list of “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls,”
Hays’s censorship system sought to regulate “what the uneducated, unwashed masses
that consumed motion pictures so avidly might do with what they saw up there on
the screen” (Lewis, 2008). This notion of regulating what was viewed by the less than
civilized masses harkened back to the very beginnings of cinema, when what proved
so problematic about motion pictures for many reformed-minded Americans was the
fact that they were largely marketed to immigrants and native-born members of the
lower classes who represented the majority of the nation’s newly emerging industrial
mass-consumer culture. Now that the affluence of the 1920s had swollen the ranks
of lower- and middle-class mass consumers, Hays and the MPPDA felt responsible at
least to suggest to filmmakers what was appropriate for inclusion in their motion pic-
tures. The list of Don’ts, which included things that Hays deemed inappropriate “irre-
spective of the manner in which they are treated,” included profanity, “suggestive or
licentious nudity,” miscegenation, childbirth, and drug trafficking. The Be Carefuls
were especially concerned with depictions of crime—theft, robbery, safecracking,
arson, smuggling, and rape—that might prove to be “potentially informative” to mem-
bers of the lower classes who might be tempted to cross over legal lines (Pramaggiore
and Wallis, 2005).
Although Hays’s lists were well intentioned, they had little effect on the way that
motion pictures were made, as most studios simply ignored the MPPDA regulations.
Now convinced that the industry could not—or would not—regulate itself, church-
related and public organizations—Mothers of Minnesota, Combat, the NAACP, the
Catholic War Veterans, the Parent Teacher Association—pooled their efforts in an
attempt to force studios to produce more appropriate material. Concerned about pro-
tecting the studios from becoming overly regulated by citizens’ groups, Hays turned to
Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest, to develop an even more formal censorship
document than the MPPDA’s lists of Don’ts and Be Carefuls (see: Religion and Cen-
sorship in Film). Unrestrained by the sort of relationship to the film industry that
obviously influenced Hays’ decisions concerning censorship, Father Lord made his
position clear in the Motion Picture Production Code (MPPC), which he was instru-
mental in defining in 1930. Unlike the merely suggestive Don’ts and Be Carefuls, the

xxxv
Introduction

MPPC set out, in minute detail, 12 areas of grave concern, including Crimes Against
the Law, Sex, Profanity, Religion, Obscenity, National Feelings, and Repellent Sub-
jects. Ironically, although he took no part in producing it, the MPPC was ultimately
labeled the “Hays Code.”
Although it seemed that should they want to avoid the wrath of church and citizen
groups, the studios would have to abide by the Production Code, between 1930 and
1934 they largely ignored it, much like they had Hays’s Don’ts and Be Carefuls. Pro-
ducing dozens of what came to be called “pre-Code” films between 1930 and 1934—the
Code was in place during this time, just disregarded—the studios thumbed their noses
at those who sought to control them—especially the Catholic Church. From Mae West
comedies like She Done Him Wrong (1933), to monster films such as Frankenstein (1931)
and King Kong (1933), to melodramas like Madam Satan and Young Sinners—which
sought to seduce viewers into theaters with the tagline “Hot youth at its wildest . . . loving
madly, living freely”—the studios allowed their filmmakers to produce motion pictures
that flaunted the very things the Code sought to regulate.
No motion picture genre violated the Production Code more than did the gangster
film (see: Gangster Film, The). It is certainly no coincidence that early sound-era
gangster films began to be made at just the moment that the Production Code was ini-
tially put into effect in 1930. After a decade of relative prosperity during which
increasing numbers of Americans were able to afford what had once been considered
luxuries, the nation was stunned when the stock market crashed in 1929 and the coun-
try—indeed, the entire world—descended into the dreadful depths of the Great
Depression. By the time Franklin Roosevelt took office in the spring of 1933, unem-
ployment stood at a staggering 25 percent and more and more banks were failing.
Unprotected by any sort of government-backed financial guarantees—the Federal
Insurance Deposit Corporation (FDIC) was not put into place until 1936, under
Roosevelt’s so-called second New Deal—many Americans had arrived at their banks to
find the doors locked and their hard-earned savings gone. Even after Roosevelt instituted
a four-day banking holiday the day after he was inaugurated, and was eventually able to
stabilize the banks, the monies that had been lost were never recouped.
Bitter and confused, many people blamed the banks for losing their money; and thus
it was not surprising that they showed little sympathy when these institutions began to be
robbed with alarming frequency by Depression-era gangsters. By the early 1930s, gang-
sters had already become part of American culture. Figures like Al Capone—incredibly
violent, ultra-organized thugs who dressed in silk suits and portrayed themselves as
men of the people—had emerged during the Prohibition era of the 1920s. Born and
raised in New York, and eventually rising to the top of Chicago’s criminal underground,
Capone controlled speakeasies, bookie joints, and houses of prostitution. Other flashy
outlaws, such as Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, became prominent during
the Depression Era, most notably as bank robbers. Although like Capone, Bonnie and
Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd were nothing more than ruthless thugs who cared nothing
about the lives they destroyed, their extravagant, uncontrolled lifestyles had a certain
appeal for average people overwhelmed by poverty and despair.

xxxvi
 Introduction

Realizing how appealing many Americans found the nation’s criminals to be, film-
makers began producing dozens of gangster pictures during the 1930s. Three of the
most important of these were Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931), starring Edward
G. Robinson, and Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932), starring Paul Muni, both of which
were loosely based on the criminal life of Al Capone; and William Wellman’s The Pub-
lic Enemy (1931). Making stars of their leading men, all three of these films were
immensely popular with audiences, a fact that supporters of the Production Code
found troubling. Even though the criminals in these pictures almost always fell from
grace and died in the end, reform-minded members of church groups such as the
Catholic Legion of Decency, which emerged in 1933, still felt that gangster films
glorified their immoral lifestyles.
Although by 1934 the studios had resisted attempts at censorship for more than a
decade, what they had not counted on was the willingness of the Catholic Church to
call for its members, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands in America, to
boycott inappropriate films—or more ominously, all motion pictures. This was no
small threat, as George Mundelein, for instance, who had written The Danger of Holly-
wood: A Warning to Young Girls in 1921, and who was now Bishop of Chicago, had a
huge account with a Wall Street firm that administered mortgages for a number of
Hollywood studios, and the prominent Catholic A. P. Giannini was president of Bank
of America. Finally convinced that they had misplayed their hands by ignoring the
mandates of the MPPDA and that the industry could indeed be hurt by boycotts,
the studios began to abide by the Hays Code in 1934. In July of that year, the MPPDA
created the Production Code Administration (PCA) as an industry oversight agency
that would insure the studios continued to produce what were deemed appropriate
motion pictures. Hand-picked by Bishop Mundelein, the lay Catholic, staunchly
pro-censorship Joseph Breen was tapped to head the PCA in 1934—his reign would
last for the next two decades, during which the Hays Code would greatly affect how
motion pictures were made.

Musicals, Romantic Comedies, and Populism during the Depression

As the Depression deepened, Americans, much as they had in the past, turned to the
cinema for relief, especially to a new film type that took full advantage of the industry’s
evolution toward sound. Not surprisingly, one of the film genres that benefitted most
handsomely from the introduction of sound was the movie musical (see: Musical,
The; Music in Film). Although it initially proved difficult to produce musicals that
audiences liked—large, cumbersome cameras made it tricky to film dance numbers,
and film directors found themselves at a loss to determine how to transpose stage-
oriented variety shows to the big screen—the genre took off in 1933 when Warner
Bros. began to release the first in a series of musicals oriented around show-business
narratives with dance numbers choreography by Busby Berkeley (see: Berkeley,
Busby). In pictures such as 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Footlight
Parade (1933), and Dames (1934), Berkeley “completely freed the musical from

xxxvii
Introduction

adherence to stage conventions,” allowing the camera to soar over the heads and even
between the legs of scores of scantily clad female dancers, much to viewers’ delight
(Sklar, 2002).
Another incredibly popular form of film musical that appeared alongside the
Berkeley spectacles of the 1930s focused on individual performers and their romantic rela-
tionships. Although it was often necessary to suspend disbelief as everyone on screen
broke into a show number, audiences loved watching their favorite performers dance their
way into each other’s hearts—especially Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (see: Astaire,
Fred). Rogers was already a seasoned screen professional by the time she linked up with
Astaire, having carved out a niche as a “wisecracking dame” in pictures like Hat Check Girl
(1932) and Professional Sweetheart (1933) and also having worked with Berkeley on 42nd
Street and Gold Diggers. Astaire, who had danced for years with his sister, had finally given
Hollywood a shot, giving rise to one of the most famous screen test evaluations in cin-
ematic history: “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.” Believing that
being able to “dance a little” was, perhaps, enough, RKO gave him a chance. They almost
killed his career before it could get going, though, when they loaned him out to MGM,
who paired him with Joan Crawford in the abysmal Dancing Lady (1933). Luckily,
RKO brought him back and teamed him with Rogers in Flying Down to Rio (1933),
and the die was cast: Fred and Ginger—as they were affectionately known to fans—would
dance together in nine films between 1933 and 1939. In films such as Top Hat (1935) and
Swing Time (1937), scored by composers such as Irving Berlin (“Cheek to Cheek”),
Jerome Kern (“The Way You Look Tonight”), and George Gershwin (“A Foggy Day”),
Fred and Ginger wowed audiences with their elegantly staged, beautifully articulated
musical numbers.
In 1934, just a year after Fred and Ginger were flying down to Rio and falling in
love, three motion pictures were released that defined another new film type, the
romantic comedy (see: Romantic Comedy, The). Although they bore similarities to
the comedies that had been so popular during the golden age of film comedies, It Hap-
pened One Night, Twentieth Century, and The Thin Man provided audiences with
something different: film couples who, although they did not usually dance and sing
together, still possessed “slangy, combative, humorous, unsentimental” and “power-
fully romantic” sensibilities, and who, in the end, overcame adversity to live happily
ever after (Harvey, 1987).
Although films about romance certainly had the potential to cross over the censor-
ship boundaries put in place by the MPPDA—Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night,
for instance, finds its lead characters, Peter and Ellie, forced to spend the night together
in the same motel room, although they are not married—(see: It Happened One
Night) the scores of romantic comedies that were made between 1934 and 1954, the
years during which the Production Code exercised its greatest control over Hollywood
filmmaking, were generally representative of the wholesome, morally appropriate cin-
ematic offerings for which reform groups had been calling. Indeed, unlike the gangster
films that reform groups found so objectionable because of their glorification of the
profligate lifestyles of criminals, many romantic comedies, especially the screwball
variation of this genre, poked fun at the extravagance displayed by the members of

xxxviii
 Introduction

the upper class, suggesting that it rendered them incapable of understanding the plight
of the average person. As the middle-class, everyman Peter says to the upper-class Ellie
after giving her a piggyback ride in It Happened One Night: “To be a piggybacker
requires complete relaxation—a warm heart and a loving nature.” “And rich people,”
asks Ellie, “have none of these qualifications I suppose?” “Not one,” Peter responds.
“You’re prejudiced,” says a chastened Ellie. “Show me a good piggybacker,” declares
Peter, “and I’ll show you somebody who’s a real human. Take Abraham Lincoln for in-
stance—a natural piggybacker.”
In the minds of many, the allusion to Lincoln as a real human might just as easily
have been applied to Franklin Roosevelt, who, in 1934, was deeply involved in trying
to resolve a national crisis that seemed in many ways as profoundly unsettling as that
which Lincoln had faced almost a century earlier. Roosevelt had swept into office in
the spring of 1933 and immediately began to implement his New Deal programs.
Although initially not as radical as what would come during his second term, when
he would put in place huge social service programs such as Social Security—when he
entered office in 1933, Roosevelt agreed with Herbert Hoover that financial support
for those who were suffering from the devastating effects of the Depression should
come by way of work programs and not through the creation of a modern welfare state
such as those that would be fashioned in European countries—New Deal programs
such as the National Recovery Act (NRA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps
(CCC) went a long way toward helping middle-class citizens who had fallen into pov-
erty to get back on their feet.
Although Roosevelt had come from privilege, the majority of Americans—who
elected and reelected him four times—saw him as a man of the people. Roosevelt
played his part, reassuring the American people, especially by way of his “fireside
chats,” that things would be okay. Filmmakers during the 1930s and early 1940s gave
expression to the president’s New Deal sensibilities on the big screen with populist
offerings that provided hope to a desperate nation. Of the many gifted directors who
were making motion pictures that expressed populist sentiments during this time—
one thinks of Michael Curtiz’s Dodge City (1938), or William Wyler’s The Westerner
(1940), or John Ford’s The Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath
(1940)—perhaps the filmmaker who is most closely connected to the populist cinema
of the 1930s and ’40s is Frank Capra. Capra followed the success of It Happened One
Night with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
and It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) (see: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington; It’s a Wonderful Life). Capra chose the perfect leading men for these
three pictures, Gary Cooper for the first and Jimmy Stewart for the latter two. Both
were tall and a bit gangly, and neither possessed the matinee-idol good looks of some-
one like Errol Flynn—in other words, they were more like us. Cast as Longfellow
Deeds, Jefferson Smith, and George Bailey, respectively, Cooper and Stewart repre-
sented “classic Capra heroes—small town, shrewd, lovable, and triumphant by virtue
of their honesty and sincerity” (Schindler, 1996).
While Jefferson Deeds must reconcile the problems that come with becoming sud-
denly rich—he inherits a $20 million estate in Manhattan—and Jefferson Smith must

xxxix
Introduction

fight the good fight of the people in Washington, D.C.—he suddenly becomes a U.S.
senator—George Bailey never leaves his bucolic home of Bedford Falls. Like most of
us, he has grand plans—he wants to travel the world and to design buildings that soar
to the sky. His plans are foiled, again and again, however, and he ends up on the verge
of suicide before a charmingly clumsy angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) steps in
and shows him what would have happened had he never been born. George is sur-
prised to learn that, in his own simple way, he has actually made the world a much bet-
ter place and that he really does have a wonderful life.

The War Years and Postwar Discontent

Capra’s message was clear in It’s A Wonderful Life: it is family, friends, and commu-
nity that count most, that make a man truly wealthy—“A toast to my big brother
George,” says Harry Bailey. “The richest man in town.” It is not insignificant that it
is Harry Bailey who gives this toast, as he makes it back to Bedford Falls just in time
to celebrate George only because his brother saved his life when they were boys. A
Navy pilot, Harry is a decorated war hero who himself saves the lives of scores of
American soldiers aboard a transport ship by shooting down a Japanese plane. Referen-
ces to Harry’s heroic deed provide us with a context for Capra’s film, which was
released in 1946. By the time the film was in theaters, Roosevelt and Hitler had both
died and Churchill was out of office, Germany had surrendered and the plans for Hit-
ler’s “Final Solution” had been revealed, and atomic bombs had been dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands almost instantly and forcing
the Japanese to surrender, as well. People across the globe also received the sobering
news that World War II had been even bloodier than the Great War, with 55 million
people perishing during the course of this long, brutal struggle.
Although it might have seemed natural for post-WWI filmmakers to produce
motion pictures that depicted the United States as the heroic power that had turned
the tide in a global conflict, especially given how many “rally-round-the-flag” pictures
were released after the Spanish-American War, once the true horrors of the Great War
were revealed, American filmmakers began to make the first antiwar pictures—D. W.
Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918), King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), and Lewis
Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) are powerful examples. During and
after WWII, however, as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet
Union began to heat up and U.S. troops were deployed to Korea, filmmakers began
churning out prowar pictures. From Capra’s Why We Fight series—supported by the
government’s Office of War Information—to Wellman’s The Story of G. I. Joe, these
films, and scores of others like them, depicted the invincible American hero fighting
a just war in order to maintain America’s democratic stability and religious freedom
(see: War Film, The). Although there were non-genre war films released at this time,
such as Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) and William Wyler’s The Best Years of
Our Lives (1946), that were more narratively complex, almost without exception for-
mulaic, prowar combat films, set in Europe and the Pacific, and to a lesser extent in
Korea, would continue to be made until Americans grew tired of war and its brutal

xl
 Introduction

effects after the nation suffered its first military defeat in Vietnam in the mid-1970s
(see: Casablanca and Best Years of Our Lives, The).
Oddly, in the same moment that audiences were flocking to theaters to view combat
pictures that picked up and extended the filmic myth of American exceptionalism, they
were also being drawn toward a new motion picture type, eventually dubbed “film
noir” in the 1950s by French critics and filmmakers (see: Film Noir). Although film
noir—literally “black,” or “dark” film—is often defined as a film genre, it is probably
not correct to think of it in this way; film noir is actually better understood as a style
of filmmaking that crosses over genres and is often used in non-genre films. Character-
ized by both a look—low-key lighting, a predominance of night scenes, darkened,
rain-splashed streets—and a feel—labyrinthine, psychologically convoluted narratives
and characters—that perfectly captured the sense of alienation, fear, and fragility expe-
rienced by many in the postwar world, noir-style pictures had both cinematic and,
especially, literary roots. Clearly resonant with pre-Code gangster films—in particular
The Public Enemy and Little Caesar—noirs were also deeply indebted to the “hard-
boiled pulp and pop fiction of James Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always
Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce), Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and Red
Harvest), and Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep)” (Lewis,
2008). In addition, a number of film historians have also suggested that although it
is not thematically oriented around crime and punishment, Orson Welles’ 1941 Citi-
zen Kane nevertheless was instrumental in helping to lay the foundations for the noir
pictures that would appear during the 1940s and 1950s (Kolker, 2000; Lewis, 2008;
Schatz, 1981). Citizen Kane, says Robert Kolker in A Cinema of Loneliness, “altered
the visual and narrative conventions of American film.” Indeed, says Kolker, “in the
years immediately following it, the darkness of its mise-en-scène began to inform
much of Hollywood’s output, particularly those films involving detectives, gangsters,
and lower-middle-class men oppressed by lust and the sexuality of destructive women”
(Kolker, 2000).
Drawing on pre-Code gangsters films, the work of their literary forbearers—some
of whom wrote screenplays for noirs—and Citizen Kane, noirs provided audiences
with multi-dimensional characters and narratives that often dealt with crime and pun-
ishment in intriguingly complex and modern ways. Unlike the one-dimensional crimi-
nal characters of 1930s gangster films, for example—“ethnic monsters” such as Rico
Bandello in Little Caesar and Tom Powers in The Public Enemy, for whom their lives
of crime seemed foregone conclusions long before they arrived to live them—most of
the men who are caught up in extralegal activities in noirs are not “professional crimi-
nals.” Generally ordinary guys doing ordinary things—one thinks of Fred MacMur-
ray’s Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (1944) (see: Double Indemnity), who sells
insurance and stops off at the local bowling alley after work to relax, or of Alan Ladd’s
Johnny Morrison in The Blue Dahlia (1946), who just wants to get on with his life
after serving his country as a bomber pilot in the Pacific—these men are usually over-
whelmed by incredibly beautiful, sexually available women—classic femme fatales—
Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson to MacMurray’s Walter Neff and Veronica
Lake’s Joyce Harwood to Ladd’s Johnny Morrison—who seduce them into departing

xli
Introduction

“from the boring reality of middle-class life into a fictive world of sexual pathology and
illegal enterprise” (Lewis, 2008). Throughout the 1940s and 50s, then, film noirs
“played on basic themes of aloneness, oppression, claustrophobia, and emotional and
physical brutality, manifested in weak men, various gangsters and detectives, and
devouring women who lived—or cringed—in an urban landscape that defied clear per-
ception and safe habitation” (Kolker, 2000).

HUAC, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Resistance to Censorship

As film historians have pointed out, gender-bending characterizations of noir men
and women—the anxiety-ridden males, so different from the heroic men who popu-
lated scores of genre westerns and combat pictures, and the dangerously aggressive
females who represented perversely attractive obverses to the loyal, demure women of
the majority of Hollywood films—were so pervasive in these pictures “that they must
have been responses to some profound, if unconscious, shifts in the way the culture
was seeing itself ” during the 1940s and early ’50s:

Perhaps it was a response to the deep trauma of fascism, a brutality so profound that
the culture had to deal with it, in part, through representations of lesser, more know-
able and contained brutalities and helplessness. Perhaps the vicious noir woman was
somehow a response to the fears of returning soldiers that the sweethearts they left at
home were busy betraying them—or even more terrifying, successfully working at
their jobs? . . . Perhaps she was a more general representation of the misogyny par-
ticularly rampant in the culture and its films after the war, or a dialectic response
to this misogyny in the figure of women who would free themselves from the
restraints of the domesticity portrayed as normal in so many films. (Kolker, 2000)

While noirs offered viewers little in the way of fear reducing redemption—by picture’s
end both the fatal female and the wayward male were usually dead—the postwar com-
bat pictures that were released during the 1940s and ’50s seemed wholly redemptive.
Reflective in their own way of the shifts in how American culture was seeing itself after
the end of the war—although in radically different ways than were noirs—the combat
pictures that audiences viewed during the 1940s and 50s provided comfort, at least
temporarily, from the specter of Cold War communism.
Much as it had been after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, communism was
blamed for almost everything that was wrong in America during the Cold War years:
labor unrest, racial tension, gender problems, and a host of other issues. In response
to the threat of communism, a congressional committee was formed in 1946 to inves-
tigate “un-American activities.” The committee eventually came to be known as the
House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC (see: HUAC Hearings, The),
and between 1947 and 1954 it called witnesses from the film industry to testify about
Communist influence in Hollywood. The committee initially called a number of
“friendly witnesses,” prominent among them Walt Disney, Jack Warner, and Ronald
Reagan. Unable to get these men to “name names,” the committee then called a second
group of witnesses, a number of whom—notably Elia Kazan and Roy Huggins—

xlii
 Introduction

agreed to cooperate with the members of HUAC. Ten of those who would not
cooperate—nine screenwriters and the director Edward Dmytryk, who had made
Crossfire in 1947, a film that drew the attention of committee members—were eventu-
ally dubbed the Hollywood Ten.
The first official Hollywood blacklist was instituted on November 25, 1947, the day
after the 10 men of the group were cited for contempt (see: Hollywood Blacklist,
The). In a press release issued a week later by Eric Johnston, then head of the Motion
Picture Association of America, 48 of the most powerful studio heads in the industry
stated that they “deplore[d] the actions of the 10 Hollywood men who have been cited
for contempt by the House of Representatives.” Although they claimed that they did
not “desire to prejudge their legal rights,” they nevertheless declared that they had no
choice but to “forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation” each member
of the “10 until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and
declares under oath that he is not a Communist.” All of the members of the group were
ultimately fined and jailed for their refusal to bow to the dictates of Congress and
industry heads.
The HUAC hearings and the institution of the Hollywood blacklist had a chilling
effect on the film industry. Although most industry figures had nothing to do with
communism, and those that did were guilty of no legal wrongdoing, hundreds from
the filmmaking community were eventually blacklisted. Anticommunist fears were
only exacerbated when Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, came
to prominence after giving a speech in February 1950 in which he claimed that he had
the names of over 200 communist spies who had infiltrated the federal government.
Although McCarthy was discredited and ultimately censored by his congressional col-
leagues, the fear he inspired remained palpable until 1954.
The Hollywood blacklist remained in place until 1960, and had lingering effects
even after that. Unable to get work, many of those who refused to cooperate with the
HUAC investigations lost everything they had worked so hard to attain. Interestingly,
because they were able to work behind the scenes, some screenwriters were able to hire
“ghosts” to front for them, notably Dalton Trumbo, whose script for The Brave One
(1956) won an Academy Award. Not surprisingly, the situation divided the filmmak-
ing community, with those who were blacklisted accusing those who had named names
of betraying their colleagues simply so they could continue working. Without question
the most celebrated figure who chose to cooperate was Elia Kazan. Ironically, Kazan
had directed progressive stage productions before making his way to Hollywood, a
number of which were produced by the Group Theatre, which was eventually targeted
by HUAC in the late 1940s. When he began working in Hollywood, he was praised
for producing socially relevant films such as Gentlemen’s Agreement (see: Judaism in
Film), an indictment of anti-Semitism for which he won his first Oscar for direction,
and Pinky, which examined the issue of a light-skinned African American woman
who “passes” in the white community (see: African Americans in Film)—because
the latter picture dealt so openly with race and miscegenation, it was actually banned
in many areas of the South. In 1948, Kazan founded the Actors Studio, where some
of Hollywood’s leading “method actors” of the 1950s—Marlon Brando, Montgomery

xliii
Introduction

Clift, Eli Wallach, Kim Hunter, Eva Marie Saint—studied (see: Method Acting). In
1951, before he was called to testify before the HUAC committee, he directed A Street-
car Named Desire, which featured a brooding, existentially fragile Marlon Brando as
Stanley Kowalski.
Kazan’s testimony before HUAC was met with a great deal of criticism from his
industry colleagues. He responded with the “trenchant blacklist allegory” On the
Waterfront, which also starred Brando. Despite portraying itself as a populist celebra-
tion of the common man—Brando as the physically and psychologically bruised and
battered Terry Malloy, who stands up for himself and his fellow dockworkers against
the mob—On the Waterfront is really a “deeply reactionary film, as it implausibly cele-
brates the nobility of naming names” (Lewis, 2008). Kazan would go on to make some
of most highly regarded films ever to come out of Hollywood during his post-HUAC
career, including East of Eden (1955), which starred another method actor phenome-
non, James Dean; Baby Doll (1957); A Face in the Crowd (1957); and Splendor in the
Grass (1961), which Warren Beatty credited with launching his career. When Kazan
was honored in 1999 with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Motion Picture
Academy, though, many in Hollywood refused to celebrate the renowned director,
demonstrating how controversial the whole sordid situation had been—and continued
to be 50 years later.

The Decline of Production Code Censorship

While the imposition of the MPPDA’s Production Code and the HUAC purges hit
Hollywood hard, the industry also faced threats from other problematic sources. In
1948, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the issue of violation of antitrust laws
by Hollywood studios, who were accused of creating a market monopoly that limited
the possibility of competition in the filmmaking industry. The Supreme Court had
made its voice heard early on in American film history, deciding in the 1915 Mutual
case that although plays and novels were protected by the First Amendment right of
free speech, films were not—the thinking being that those who watched plays and read
novels were sufficiently sophisticated not to be negatively affected by what they con-
sumed, while those who watched films—the uneducated masses—were not. The Para-
mount case of 1948—so named because Paramount was the first studio listed in the
suit, the others being RKO, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, Loew’s-MGM,
Columbia, Universal, and United Artists—was decided against the studios. Deemed
trusts by the Court, the studios were forced to divest themselves of their extraordinarily
profitable theater chains—in major cities, the studios controlled as much as 70 percent
of first-run theaters. The decision had an immediate effect on the studios, whose reve-
nues plummeted during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Ironically, in writing the majority opinion in the Paramount case, Justice William
O. Douglas, a staunch civil libertarian, took the time to revisit the Mutual case of
1915, declaring that the decision violated the rights of filmmakers. The practice of
punishing theater owners with fines if they exhibited films that did not bear the PCA

xliv
 Introduction

stamp rendering them appropriate for viewing, wrote Douglas, was unconstitutional.
Although the Hays Code remained very much in effect until the mid-1950s, this loos-
ening of free speech restrictions was at least a step toward the more radical filmmaking
that characterized the late 1950s and 1960s.
Interestingly, the decline in revenues that resulted from the Paramount decision,
exacerbated by the increasing popularity of television, which kept potential moviegoers
at home, led to attempts by certain filmmakers to defy the PCA and to make pictures
that would bring audiences back to the theaters. One of those filmmakers was the
Eastern European émigré Otto Preminger, who had already made a number of com-
mercially successful films in America, including the early offering Laura (1944). Pre-
minger raised eyebrows in 1952 when he purchased the rights to a stage play that
had garnered a reputation as a rather risqué Broadway comedy, The Moon Is Blue.
Thrilled at the thought of adapting the play and making it into a motion picture, Pre-
minger signed William Holden and David Niven to star. When PCA head Joseph
Breen got wind of the fact that Preminger was going forward with the production,
he contacted him and informed the director that he had seen the play on Broadway
and that it was wholly inappropriate. Preminger was undaunted by what he considered
the threat from the PCA and signed a distribution deal with United Artists. Assuming
that the lack of a PCA stamp would be the kiss of death, Preminger, and a great many
others in Hollywood, was pleasantly surprised when The Moon Is Blue went on to gross
over $4 million in its initial release.
Buoyed by the success of The Moon Is Blue, Preminger decided that he wanted to
adapt a hard-hitting novel by Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm, whose
antiheroic protagonist suffers from unchecked ambition and drug addiction. Although
Joseph Breen had by this time been replaced as head of the PCA by the more liberal
Geoffrey Shurlock, who understood the desire of Hollywood filmmakers to produce
edgier and more complex films, The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) seemed so far
beyond the Production Code pale that Shurlock advised Preminger not to go forward
with the project. Ignoring Shurlock’s warning, Preminger signed Frank Sinatra to play
the luckless protagonist Frankie Machine, and once again signed a distribution deal
with United Artists. The film went on to become a major box office hit, and Sinatra
earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his performance.
In addition to the adult-themed movies that were made at this time, the industry
also began to make what came to be known as “teen films,” which pushed against the
boundaries of the Production Code. Marketed to a newly minted group of consumers,
teen films exposed the troubled—and troubling—lifestyles of America’s disaffected
adolescents and young adults, who, much to the surprise of their parents and the
nation’s leaders, did not feel part of the postwar “affluent society.” The first financially
successful teen film, The Wild One (1953), starred Marlon Brando as the leader of a
motorcycle gang that terrifies the hapless citizens of a town in rural America. Directed
by László Benedek, the picture was part narrative film, part documentary, as it was
loosely based on the experience of townspeople in Hollister, California. Although the
picture seemed frightening to average, upright Americans who were terrified that their
ordinary, peaceful lives could be disrupted in this way, it was, in the end, Production

xlv
Introduction

Code friendly, as the motorcycle toughs, who were seen as wholly different from
typical teenagers, ultimately get what they deserve.
The same cannot be said of Richard Brooks’s cautionary 1955 tale The Blackboard
Jungle, which was banned in certain American cities—in Memphis it was characterized
as antisocial—and pulled from the Venice Film Festival by the State Department,
which described it as anti-American. What was, perhaps, most unsettling about the
film was that it was set in an American high school, the kind of place, parents had
always hoped, that could provide a safe and secure refuge for their adolescent children
while they learned how to be good citizens. In the “blackboard jungle,” however, typi-
cal teens turn out to be juvenile delinquents who terrorize their teacher and each other.
The teacher, Mr. Dadier (played by Glenn Ford), even after he is accosted by some of
his students, takes the side of the kids, hoping to guide them, in the manner of Sidney
Poitier in To Sir with Love, along the right path. The task proves a difficult one, and it
takes the actions of a marginalized student (Jamie Farr), who runs the class bully (Vic
Morrow) through with a flagpole, to set things right. Even though an American flag
hangs from the flagpole—a suitable postwar image of American virtue—and the film
ends with the progressive message that the nation’s educational system can, indeed,
be there for its kids, the picture proved disturbing to many.
Also appearing in 1955, Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause proved even less
comforting than The Blackboard Jungle (see: Rebel Without a Cause). Starring James
Dean, the picture follows teens who, it seems, live their lives devoid of parental super-
vision. Driven by the extraordinarily powerful performance of Dean, it may be argued
that the picture is framed by its most recognizable set piece, the so-called chicken run
where young men race their cars toward the edge of an abyss daring each other not to
turn “chicken” and jump from their vehicle before it plunges over the precipice. When
the Dean character Jim asks his antagonist Buzz (Corey Allen) why they do it, Buzz
gives expression to the alienation that all the teens in the film seem to experience when
he quickly responds: “You gotta do something, don’t you?” The film, still extremely
popular today, was seen by many as a “wake-up call, a warning to parents, even wealthy
white parents living in posh suburbs, to start listening to their kids, to start taking care
of them” (Lewis, 2008).

A New Production Code and the Rise of Contemporary Auteurs

Convinced that American audiences wanted more mature films, and that the stu-
dios were going to make them regardless of PCA objections, Shurlock, with the sup-
port of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Eric Johnson,
decided that the censorship code in Hollywood had to be changed. Realizing that the
1930s Production Code was prohibitive because it forced filmmakers to make motion
pictures that were effectively “one-size-fits-all” offerings, the MPAA sought to put in
place a code that would allow not only family-oriented films to be made, but also films
with mature themes, such as The Man with the Golden Arm and Rebel Without a Cause.
What can be considered the filmic test case came in 1966, when Warner Bros. decided

xlvi
 Introduction

to release Mike Nichols’s provocative adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of

Virginia Woolf? (see: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).
Nichols was among the second generation of American directors that were consid-
ered auteur filmmakers—“authors” of their films (see: Auteur Theory). Imported to
America by film scholar and critic Andrew Sarris (see: Sarris, Andrew), auteur theory
had been labeled La politique des auteurs in the 1950s by French film critics André
Bazin, Erich Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut—the
last four also directors—in the avant garde film journal Cahiers du cinéma. It was
adopted in the United States during the early 1960s. Although Sarris certainly under-
stood that filmmaking was a collaborative process, he argued that directors—at least
certain directors—were the figures who provided what the Cahiers critics understood
as cinematic authorship to motion pictures. In his article entitled “Notes on the Auteur
Theory in 1962,” Sarris identified directors such as D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin,
John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles as auteurs. Griffith and Chaplin had
emerged during the silent era and had crossed over into the sound era. The latter three
directors were still making important and entertaining films during the 1950s and 60s,
when things were changing so radically in Hollywood, and all continued to work into
the 1970s and later—Ford’s genre-breaking westerns The Searchers and The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance were released in 1956 and 1962, respectively (see: Searchers, The;
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The); Welles’s self-conscious noir thriller Touch of
Evil (see: Touch of Evil) in 1958; and Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho
in 1954, 1958, and 1960, respectively (see: Vertigo; Psycho).
Directors like Ford, Hitchcock, and Welles had a powerful effect on the next gener-
ation of American filmmakers, figures such as Nichols, Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick,
Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Robert Altman, and Woody
Allen. In regard to Nichols, by the time he made his film adaptation of Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf ?, the MPAA had chosen Jack Valenti as its next president, and it
would be Valenti who would have to deal with the question of whether or not this
explosive film would be released. Starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as
Martha and George, a bitter, spiteful husband and wife—Taylor and Burton were
real-life mates who shared their own tempestuous relationship—the film made Valenti
uncomfortable. Reluctant to censor the picture, however, Valenti compromised with
Warner Bros.—the word “screw” was removed from the dialogue, while “hump the
hostess” stayed in. Hired to rethink the Production Code such that some form of it
could be kept in place while still allowing for films such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf ? to be made, Valenti hit on an initial solution that moved things in the right
direction. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would be released with a PCA exemption if
Warner Bros. agreed to label it “For Mature Audiences Only,” leaving the decision to
exhibit it to the nation’s theater owners. Effectively creating a trial run for a multirating
coding system, Warner Bros., Nichols, and the rest of the industry waited anxiously to
see how the film would fare at the box office. They need not have worried, as Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? ended up grossing over $10 million by the end of 1966,
finishing third behind two other mature-themed pictures, the James Bond thriller
Thunderball and the historical epic Dr. Zhivago.

xlvii
Introduction

Although Valenti sought to calm fears that the PCA’s decision to give Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? an exemption was not the end of cinematic censorship altogether, for
all intents and purposes, at least as far as the old notion of the Production Code was
concerned, it was. In 1966 alone, six more films received the MPAA’s rating of For
Mature Audiences Only, with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? receiving its own special
designation: no person under 18 admitted unless accompanied by a parent. The flood-
gates had now been opened, and by 1967 the number of For Mature Audiences Only
pictures had increased to 67.
The possibility of making more mature films provided the opportunity for two of
America’s most important films to be made in 1967, Nichols’s follow-up to Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, The Graduate, and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Both
films shocked and moved audiences, the first with its unflinching examination of
upper-middle-class banality, alienation, and sexuality, the second with its exploration
of human degradation, fragility, and violence (see: Graduate, The; Bonnie and
Clyde). Reacting to what by now was understood to be inevitable, Valenti issued a
press release in October 1968 in which he announced that a new rating system for
motion pictures had been put in place: G, suggested for “General Audiences”; M, sug-
gested for “Mature” audiences; R, “Restricted,” no one under 16 admitted unless
accompanied by a parent or adult guardian; X, no one under 16 admitted. Pictures
that received a G, M, or R rating would be given MPAA seals; those that received X
ratings would not. Valenti’s rating system was quickly adopted, and a Code and Rating
Administration (CARA) was established to determine which pictures would receive
which rating. At this point, the question of whether or not what had once been consid-
ered pictures in violation of the Production Code would be made had been resolved—
they would. The only question now was whether or not directors wanted to risk having
their pictures labeled with a more restrictive rating by choosing to include scenes that
were considered too provocative by CARA.
Realizing that provocative—even pornographic—pictures could still make money,
most directors pushed the limits of the rating system, some almost to the breaking
point. Non-mainstream, pornographic films such as Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat
(1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), and Jim and Artie Mitchell’s Behind the
Green Door (1972), although they were rated X and were released without the MPAA
seal, proved remarkably popular, out-earning all but a few of the highest-grossing
mainstream pictures—they also made household names of “actors” such as Linda
Lovelace and Harry Reems. Most directors—along with their studios—were unwilling
to risk an X rating, however, and thus, they reluctantly pulled scenes whose language,
or depictions of sexuality and/or violence, would push them beyond the R rating. John
Schlesinger’s 1969 release Midnight Cowboy was an exception, becoming the first and
only X-rated film to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Another
startling 1969 offering was the Dennis Hopper/Peter Fonda picture Easy Rider. Pro-
duced independently, and made for just $375,000, it grossed an amazing $19 million
in its initial 1969 release, proving that there was a tremendously lucrative youth market
just waiting to be tapped—it also made clear that an influential counterculture had
developed in America during the tumultuous 1960s.

xlviii
 Introduction

Second-generation auteurs continued to make significant films throughout the

1960s and ’70s. Penn, for instance, followed Bonnie and Clyde with his own genre-
breaking western, Little Big Man (1970)—an anti-Vietnam War exposé that made its
point by way of an exploration of the tragic implications of nineteenth-century coloni-
alism and the ideology of manifest destiny—while Nichols continued to build his rep-
utation after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and The Graduate with Catch-22 (1970)
and Carnal Knowledge (1971)—the latter an R-rated film that flirted with an X rating.
Excited by the success of Easy Rider, studio heads at Warner Bros. gave Francis Ford
Coppola, a little-known figure in Hollywood at the time, $600,000 to develop
youth-oriented projects. Coppola set himself up in San Francisco, gathered around
him a group of young filmmakers, and got to work. A year later, he pitched four ideas
to Warner Bros., none of which sounded to studio heads remotely like Easy Rider. The
studio rejected all four ideas—much to their regret, as it turned out, as the four pro-
posed projects were ultimately developed into George Lucas’s dystopian sci-fi offering
THX 1138 and his teen hit American Graffiti and Coppola’s own Apocalypse Now and
The Conversation.
Supporting himself by making technical films and television commercials, Coppola
got the break for which he was waiting when he was brought on to help write the
screenplay for the big budget war film Patton (1970). The co-written script that
Coppola produced won him his first Oscar (shared with Edmund North); it also duly
impressed studio heads at Paramount, who turned to Coppola to direct their own big-
budget film, The Godfather (see: Godfather Trilogy, The). Although it seems an
extraordinary gamble to have placed such an important project in the hands of a neo-
phyte director like Coppola, in a certain sense the studio had little choice, as it had
been turned down by an exhaustive list of Hollywood’s best directors—Richard
Brooks, Kazan, Penn, and Fred Zinnemann among them. As it turned out, though,
Paramount could not have made a better choice, as Coppola produced a grand, glossy,
sweeping epic about gangsters in America. Powerfully acted and exquisitely shot, The
Godfather won numerous awards and broke records for box-office grosses that had
stood for three decades—on a budget of only $6 million it took in $80 million in its
initial release and has probably earned over $250 million if re-releases are included.
A nation away from the California-based Coppola, another Italian American direc-
tor, Martin Scorsese, was making a different kind of gangster film. Unlike The
Godfather, which relates the story of mobsters who are almost transcendentally power-
ful, Scorsese’s Mean Streets—released the year after Coppola’s picture—follows the lives
of a group of neighborhood gangsters in New York City who often seem befuddled by
the demands of their criminal careers. Compared with The Godfather, which co-starred
a young Al Pacino, Mean Streets, which co-starred a young Robert De Niro, is a small,
spare picture. Interestingly, De Niro would go on to co-star in The Godfather, Part II
and to make a series of pictures with Scorsese, including Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging
Bull (1980) and Scorsese’s own glossy gangster films, Goodfellas (1990) and Casino
(1995).
Oddly enough, Stanley Kubrick, who is most often included in the list of second-
generation auteur directors, had made nine feature films by the time The Godfather

xlix
Introduction

and Mean Streets were released in the early 1970s—among them, two antiwar films,
Paths of Glory (1957) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb (1964); a period epic, Spartacus (1960); the philosophically surreal sci-fi pic
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); and the ultraviolent exploration of societal control,
A Clockwork Orange (1971). Although he was only in his early forties, and one of the
most highly regarded American directors in the industry, he would only make four
more films after 1971: another period piece, Barry Lyndon (1975); the horror film
The Shining (1980); the post-Vietnam antiwar film Full Metal Jacket (1987); and the
erotic melodrama/thriller Eyes Wide Shut (1999), on which he was working at the time
of his death. Yet, even though his body of work is quite small compared to his much
more prolific colleagues, Kubrick demonstrated a certain filmmaking genius, produc-
ing what are considered some of the best films in a number of different genres.
Like Coppola and Kubrick, Oliver Stone and Robert Altman also produced antiwar
films. Stone would follow Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Hal Ashby’s Coming
Home, and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), with a Vietnam trilogy: Platoon
(1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Heaven and Earth (1993). He would
also become one of the nation’s most controversial directors as a result of the questions
he raised concerning historical veracity and poetic license in films such as JFK and
Nixon. For his part, Altman made his antiwar film, M*A*S*H* while Vietnam still
raged. Set in a mobile army surgical hospital in Korea, the film, with its ultrarealistic
depiction of the blood and guts of wartime medicine, was a thinly veiled statement
about the tragic loss of life and profound alienation caused by the Vietnam War. Alt-
man also added to the list of genre-breaking westerns—which would eventually
include not only Ford’s The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and
Penn’s Little Big Man, but also Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), George Roy
Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves
(1990), and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992)—with the ethereal McCabe and Mrs.
Miller (1971) (see: Wild Bunch, The; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid;
Dances with Wolves; Unforgiven; McCabe and Mrs. Miller).
Although the second-generation auteurs largely involved themselves in making dra-
matic films, Woody Allen (see: Allen, Woody) built his career writing, directing, and
usually starring in spoofs and mature-themed comedies. Much like Charlie Chaplin
literally turned himself into the antiheroic Little Tramp in numerous silent and early
sound era productions, during the second half of the twentieth century, Allen embod-
ied the figure of a quirky, hapless, lovable antihero in a series of contemporary films. In
the first of these, Take the Money and Run (1969), he plays the would-be crook Virgil
Starkwell—the name, it appears, a play on Charlie Starkweather, the notorious mass
murderer whose brutal crime spree, much of it carried out with his girlfriend Caril
Ann Fugate, inspired the films Badlands (1973) and Natural Born Killers (1994).
Unlike Starkweather, though, Virgil is a bumbling criminal who seems hardly able to
get out of his own way, a characterization that Allen would adopt and refine in cultural
spoofs such as Bananas (1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex
(1972), Sleeper (1973), and Love and Death (1975). In 1977, with Annie Hall, Allen
shifted his filmic emphasis from the realm of cultural satire to that of autobiographical

l
 Introduction

existential inquiry. Still playing an antiheroic lovable loser, Alvy Singer in this case,
Allen starred opposite Diane Keaton, who played the eponymous Annie. The film,
which garnered Oscars for Best Picture, Directing, Writing, and Best Actress for
Keaton, made Allen a household name; after the dark, brooding Interiors (1978), made
as an homage to director Ingmar Bergman, Allen again struck gold in 1979 with
Manhattan, another autobiographical comedy. He continues to make movies today,
occupying, along with certain of his filmmaking colleagues, the rarefied space of the
auteur.

The New Hollywood: Race and African Americans in Film

Although better known as a writer, another comedian who, like Allen, made the
transition to directing pictures for the big screen was Mel Brooks. After writing for
Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and other prime-time television shows during the
1950s, Brooks made The Producers in 1968 and Blazing Saddles in 1974. Both, and
especially the latter, were “crude, lewd, and outrageous,” and set the stage for other
prurient, lowbrow comedies—Animal House (1978), Dumb and Dumber (1994), and
There’s Something About Mary (1998) come to mind. The Producers, as it turned out,
would be adapted from the screen to the stage by Brooks and Thomas Meehan, and
would go on to have successful runs on Broadway. Blazing Saddles, a tasteless offering
that played to the basest instincts of adolescent males from 15 to 50, had little to rec-
ommend it—a farting contest among cowboys huddled around a campfire was touted
as a highlight—except for the fact that it teamed Brooks’s stalwart Gene Wilder with
African American co-star Cleavon Little and, at least on one level, attempted to speak
to serious questions concerning black/white race relations in America.
Depictions of people of color in American films have, unfortunately, overwhelm-
ingly reflected the racist attitudes that have haunted the nation since its beginnings
during the late eighteenth-century (see: African Americans in Film; Native Ameri-
cans in Film; Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema). In landmark American films
such as Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Victor Fleming’s Gone with the
Wind (1939) (see: Gone with the Wind), for instance, African Americans—who were
played by whites in blackface in Griffith’s picture—were portrayed on screen as
embodiments of nineteenth-century minstrel stereotypes: the “Mammy,” “Zipcoon,”
the “Uncle,” the “Sambo,” the “Pickaninny,” the “Black Buck.” These extraordinarily
destructive images of African Americans appeared in countless pictures throughout
the twentieth century—and, it may be argued, are still seen in twenty-first-century
pictures—influencing the way that hundreds of thousands of film viewers saw African
Americans. Beyond non-genre pictures such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the
Wind, genre westerns and war films were every bit as damaging, depicting Native
Americans, Mexicans—both of which, like African Americans in film, were often
played by whites—Cubans, Filipinos, Germans, the Japanese, Koreans, the Vietnam-
ese, and Arabs as nameless, faceless, savages who wanted nothing more than to kill
Americans and destroy the nation’s Christian-Democratic foundations (see: War Film,
The; Western, The; Native Americans in Film).

li
Introduction

In addition to starring with Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles, Gene Wilder would
also star in a number of pictures with the talented African American stand-up comic
Richard Pryor—Stir Crazy (1980) is an example. Although Pryor was really at his best
onstage—he made a string of acclaimed concert films, such as Richard Pryor: Live in
Concert (1979) and Richard Pryor: Live and Smokin’—he was nevertheless featured in
a number of film comedies—Uptown Saturday Night (1974), for instance, with fellow
African American comedians Flip Wilson and Bill Cosby, and Car Wash (1976); one of
his most poignant roles was as “Piano Man,” in the dramatic biopic Lady Sings the
Blues (1972), opposite Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams.
Significantly, Uptown Saturday Night and Stir Crazy were both directed by Sidney
Poitier, who had become one of America’s most well-known, highly regarded, and
bankable stars during the 1960s. Poitier had begun making motion pictures in the
1950s, but had broken through with his starring role as Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin
in the Sun in 1961. In 1967, he would make three powerful pictures, To Sir with Love,
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night—the latter two films were
both nominated for Best Picture Oscars in 1968, with In the Heat of the Night taking
the honor. While all three of these films raised important questions about black/white
race relations in America, some in the African American community criticized them—
and Poitier’s appearance in them—as accommodationist, all of them, it was argued,
depicting their protagonist as a black man who could be safely assimilated into the
white community. Given this criticism, it is interesting to note that Poitier would help
to initiate another movement in black cinema, “blaxploitation,” a “term that affirms
the anticipated (black American) audience and celebrates the genre’s production style
and marketing scheme (exploitation)” (Lewis, 2008).
Although he would act in blaxploitation pictures, Poitier’s role as an initiator of the
movement would come as a director, when he stepped behind the camera to helm Buck
and the Preacher in 1972. Black directors had largely been prevented from making
films during the early years of American cinema, although Oscar Micheaux distin-
guished himself as both a director and a producer during the silent and early sound
eras, making a series of what were called “race movies” in the 1920s and 1930s. Later,
African American filmmakers such as Melvin Van Peebles, Ossie Davis, and Ivan
Dixon would challenge audiences with 1970s blaxploitation offerings—Van Peebles’s
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and Watermelon Man (1971), for instance,
along with Davis’s Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), and Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat
by the Door (1973). Perhaps the two most important Blaxploitation pictures, though,
were Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971), which starred Richard Roundtree as the ultracool,
seemingly invincible detective John Shaft, and Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly, which
blended filmic images with the music of Curtis Mayfield to create an unsettling exami-
nation of drug lords and the degradation of lower-class black neighborhoods.
Besides being powerful tropological pieces in their own right, Shaft and Super Fly
also provided the prototypic framework for female blaxploitation pictures, such as
Cleopatra Jones (1973), Three the Hard Way (1974, directed by Parks Jr.), and Foxy
Brown (1974). The first of these starred Tamara Dobson as a secret agent, while the lat-
ter two featured Pam Grier playing ultraviolent populist saviors (see: Grier, Pam).

lii
 Introduction

Together with the other Blaxploitation pictures of the early 1970s, films like these
pointed the way toward latter-day comedy-dramas such as 48 Hours (1982) and Beverly
Hills Cop (1984), both of which starred notable stand-up comic Eddie Murphy.
Intriguingly, they would also influence white directors such as Quentin Tarantino,
who produced his self-proclaimed blaxploitation offering Jackie Brown—which
featured Grier—in 1997.
The directorial efforts of African American filmmakers like Micheaux, Poitier, Van
Peebles, Davis, and the Parks, laid the cinematic foundation for latter-day figures such
as Spike Lee. Lee became a popular and highly respected director—many have character-
ized him as an auteur—by making hard-hitting films that addressed black/white race rela-
tions in America and that were viewed by both black and white audiences. Although he
had already been working in the film industry, Lee first became recognizable to white
audiences by way of a series of innovative Nike ads—which featured the basketball super-
star Michael Jordan—in which he developed the enigmatic character of Mars Blackmon.
Lee had brought Mars Blackmon to life in his first feature film directorial effort,
She’s Gotta Have It (1986). Although the picture focused on the loves and losses of Nola
Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), Lee stole the show with his performance as Blackmon.
In his Nike commercials, Lee further satirized the self-consciously stereotypical
Blackmon—in a way that few whites, who unknowingly laughed at Lee’s buffoonish
actions, seemed to understand.
The Nike commercials made him famous, and the ambitious Lee made the most of it,
negotiating a deal with Universal to direct Do the Right Thing (1989), a “big studio film
that deals unflinchingly with racial conflict in urban America” (Lewis, 2008). Although
to some a problematic choice, after the success of Do the Right Thing Lee was tapped
to make the big-budget studio film Malcolm X (1992). Adapted from The Autobiography
of Malcolm X, the film starred Denzel Washington as the controversial civil rights leader
who was assassinated in 1965. Washington’s enormously powerful performance would
earn him his first Best Actor Academy Award nomination—although he lost for Malcolm
X, the gifted actor would become the first African American to win a Best Actor Oscar,
for his brutally intense performance as Detective Alonzo Harris in Training Day
(2001). Lee and Washington would go on to make a number of other films together after
Malcolm X, including He Got Game (1998) and Inside Man (2006). Lee’s work, although
not as popular as it once was, has influenced a host of talented African American direc-
tors, including Rusty Cundieff, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Carl Franklin, Albert and Allen
Hughes, David Johnson, Darnell Martin, and John Singleton.

The New Hollywood: The Question of Gender

While women have been prominent figures in the film industry since its inception,
they have consistently been restricted from filling positions of power in the field.
Forced to the cinematic margins by powerful men who have worked particularly hard
to put and to keep the industry’s patriarchal structure in place, women have been
objectified on-screen while being prevented from making decisions about how motion
pictures are made. As film historian Robert Sklar points out in his World History of

liii
Introduction

Film, “less than a handful of women directors who worked before the 1980s have been
talked about, even by specialists—Alice Guy-Blaché for the early years, Lois Weber
after World War I, Dorothy Arzner in the 1930s, Ida Lupino after World War II—
although there were considerably more.” While women screenwriters fared somewhat
better in the first few decades of American filmmaking, this only “makes more clear
the fate of women directors until recently: when a job took on prestige or became
high-paying, women were frequently shunted aside” (Sklar, 2002).
By the time she made her way to America, Alice Guy had made 180 films for the
Gaumont Company in France. Having been hired by Léon Gaumont as a secretary
for his fledgling film company, she was made head of production in 1896, making
scores of motion pictures over the next decade, culminating with The Life of Christ in
1906, a project on which as many as 300 extras worked. Guy married Herbert Blaché
in 1907, after which she was known as Guy-Blaché. When Herbert was appointed pro-
duction manager of Gaumont’s U.S. operations, he and Alice emigrated from France
and began work in America. By 1910, they had formed an independent film company,
Solax, which Alice headed until 1920.
Although most of the work that she produced in America has been destroyed, the
film for which Guy-Blaché is probably best known, The Making of an American Citi-
zen, is still available. Dealing with issues of immigration and domestic violence, it is
a surprisingly modern film. With films such as The Making of an American Citizen,
Guy-Blaché paved the way for women filmmakers in America during the 1910s, which
turned out to be a particularly fertile time for female directors. By 1916, for instance,
Universal had seven female directors under contract: Ruth Ann Baldwin, Grace
Cunard, Clio Madison, Ida May Park, Ruth Stonehouse, Elise Jane Weber, and Lois
Weber. Of these women, Lois Weber had the biggest impact on American filmmaking.
Interestingly Weber began her filmmaking career in 1905, when she went to work
for Gaumont (see: Weber, Lois). After marrying Phillip Smalley in 1906, she left
her public life to become a homemaker, returning to the industry in 1911 when she
and Smalley took over the Rex Film Company from Edwin S. Porter. Hired by Univer-
sal, she ultimately became the studio’s highest-paid director—a distinction she earned
by producing profitable films such as Where Are My Children? (1916). After establish-
ing her own production company in 1917, she signed a lucrative contract with Famous
Players-Lasky, earning a remarkable $50,000 per film.
Like Guy-Blaché, Weber made films that were socially relevant. The People vs. John
Doe (1916), for instance, dealt with capital punishment, while The Hand That Rocks
the Cradle (1917) explored the life of controversial birth control advocate Margaret
Sanger, and Shoes (1916) sought to expose the problematic issue of unequal pay for
women. Understanding herself as a political evangelist, and cinema as the tool by
which she could make her message heard, Weber made what many consider her
masterpiece in 1921, The Blot. A statement about what Weber felt were the disturbing
implications of capitalism, The Blot dealt with the struggles of a proud but poor family
that is desperately trying to avoid taking charity in order to survive.
While Weber’s pictures proved popular during the height of the Progressive Era,
they fell out of favor during the conservative 1920s—in 1923 she was forced to return

liv
 Introduction

to making films for Universal. This fall from grace, it seems, was connected to a general
backlash against women who, during the 1910s, were becoming increasingly vocal
advocates for women’s rights. Although unsettling, it is not surprising that in the very
moment that women like Guy-Blaché and Weber were making films that expressed
progressive sensibilities, the industry was literally creating the persona of Theda Bara
and casting her in “vamp” pictures like The Stain (1914), A Fool There Was (1915),
The Devil’s Daughter (1915), When a Woman Sins (1918), and The Siren’s Song
(1919). Ironically, although the women that Bara portrayed on screen possessed their
own forms of power—they were able to seduce men into doing anything they wanted
them to do—they actually seemed less menacing to the men who controlled the film
industry than did women like Guy-Blaché and Weber, who threatened to bring down
the entire patriarchal structure that had been so carefully erected (Lewis, 2008).
It is too neat an explanation to suggest that Dorothy Arzner was able to emerge on
the filmmaking scene during the 1930s because the decade represented a return to the
progressive ideals of the 1910s (see: Arzner, Dorothy). Indeed, although she did make
the majority of her films during the New Deal era of the 1930s, she honed her craft
during the 1920s, distinguishing herself by editing, writing, and ultimately directing
films during this conservative decade. In 1929, Arzner made The Wild Party, a film that
explored the decline and fall—and eventual redemption—of the college girl gone
wrong, Stella Ames (Clara Bow), who is rescued from her fate by her staid professor
(Fredric March). Although in many ways a formulaic melodrama, in Arzner’s hands
The Wild Party became more than that, raising questions about the implications of
overweening morality and making judgments about people based only on appearances.
Arzner would go on to direct pictures such as Sarah and Son (1930), Christopher Strong
(1933), Craig’s Wife (1936), and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), working with talented
actresses such as Ruth Chatterton, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Maureen
O’Hara.
Ida Lupino carved out a successful acting career during the 1930s and ’40s, first in B
pictures such as Peter Ibbetson (1935) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939),
and then in features such as High Sierra (1941) and The Sea Wolf (see: Lupino, Ida).
She eventually won the New York Film Critics award for her work in The Hard Way
(1942). Desiring to participate in other areas of filmmaking—she had a certain degree
of success as a composer—she began to express interest during the mid-1940s in
directing and producing motion pictures. In 1946, she worked behind the scenes as
an uncredited co-producer on War Widow, and in 1948 she co-produced the low-
budget thriller The Judge. In 1949, Lupino and television producer Anson Bond
formed Emerald Productions, which was later renamed Filmmakers. When the man
slated to direct Emerald’s Not Wanted suffered a heart attack, she stepped in to com-
plete the picture. Like the female directors who came before her, Lupino made socially
topical pictures: Not Wanted, for instance, addressed unwed motherhood, while Out-
rage (1950) focused on rape, Never Fear (1949) on the effects of polio, and Hard, Fast,
and Beautiful (1951) on the impact of a domineering mother on a young tennis player.
Although women continue to struggle to establish themselves as directors in Holly-
wood, figures such as Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, and Ida Lupino

lv
Introduction

opened doors—at least a crack—for the talented female filmmakers who have followed
them. Oddly, while the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s were helping
American women to break through the nation’s glass ceiling, in the film industry,
men continued largely to prevent this from happening. Even though gifted editors
such as Dede Allen and Thelma Schoonmaker (see: Allen, Dede; Schoonmaker,
Thelma) and screenwriters such as Nora Ephron (see: Ephron, Nora), have left their
very considerable marks on significant films—Allen, for example, edited The Hustler
(1961), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Little Big Man (1970), Serpico (1973), The Breakfast
Club (1985), Wonder Boys (2000), and John Q (2002) before her death in 2010; while
Schoonmaker has edited every one of Martin Scorsese’s films since she worked on Rag-
ing Bull (1980), including Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York,
(2002), The Departed (2006), and Shutter Island (2010); and Ephron wrote Silkwood
(1983), When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), You’ve Got Mail
(1998), and Julie and Julia (2009)—very few female directors have been given a chance
to work on feature films.
A number of female directors did revive the teen films that were so popular in the
1950s, although they gave them a comedic twist and articulated the teenage angst
expressed in them in very different ways. Amy Heckerling (see: Heckerling, Amy),
for instance, gave us Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Clueless (1995), while
Martha Coolidge provided Valley Girl (1983) and Real Genius (1985). Susan
Seidelman, whose Smithereens (1982) was the first American independent film to be
accepted in the prize competition at Cannes, made the adult-themed comedy Desper-
ately Seeking Susan in 1985—with a newly minted pop star named Madonna. The
multitalented Barbra Streisand (see: Streisand, Barbra) produced, co-wrote, starred
in, and directed Yentl (1983), about a Jewish girl who pretends to be a boy so that
she can get an education, and then produced, starred in, and directed The Prince of
Tides. Having starred in the hit television sitcom Laverne & Shirley in the 1970s, Penny
Marshall stepped behind the camera to stay in the 1980s, scoring a major hit with her
second feature, Big. A child star who grew into a major movie star, Jodie Foster made
the poignant Little Man Tate (1991) and the dystopian family comedy Home for the
Holidays (1995). In 1993, Jane Campion made The Piano, which was heralded as a
feminist anthem, and followed it with the controversial In the Cut in 2003, while
Sofia Coppola, the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, adapted Jeffrey Eugenides’s
novel The Virgin Suicides for the screen and went on to make the popular and critically
acclaimed Lost in Translation in 2003.
Not surprisingly, the work produced by these women raised the same kinds of ques-
tions that had been raised about the work of Guy-Blaché, Weber, Arzner, and Lupino;
most notably, were the films made by these directors simply “women’s films,” or were
they films that just happened to be made by women? Many men seemed unwilling
to consider the latter, arguing, at least implicitly, that women should not be allowed
behind the camera. Streisand, for instance, was accused of indulging her ego when
she made Yentl, although as many critics, both women and men, pointed out, if a
man had made the same kind of film, which a great many had, would he come under
the same kind of attack? Members of the male-dominated Academy seemed to make

lvi
 Introduction

their position clear by nominating The Prince of Tides for the Best Picture Oscar while
leaving Streisand off the list of those nominated for the award for Best Direction.
Although unfortunately things have not changed a great deal since the 1980s in
regard to the place of female directors in Hollywood, perhaps what occurred with
Kathryn Bigelow between 2008 and 2010 has at least begun to move things in the right
direction. Having gone against the grain by making a series of testosterone-fueled
action pictures early in her career—Blue Steel (1990), Point Break (1991), and Strange
Days (1995)—Bigelow turned her attention to the Iraq War in 2008, when she made
the character-driven indie film The Hurt Locker. Gaining an increasingly devoted fan
base by way of word of mouth, the picture was ultimately nominated for a Best Picture
Academy Award in 2010—and unlike Streisand, Bigelow was not left off the list of
Best Director nominees.
When the nominees were announced, it seemed that Bigelow would have to settle
for being honored that she and her picture had even been nominated. The Hurt Locker
faced stiff competition, after all, especially because for the first time in decades there
were ten films being considered for the Oscar instead of five, and because one of them
was Avatar, the most expensive motion picture ever made—and, of course, no woman
had ever been awarded the Oscar for Direction. Complicating matters even more was
the fact that Avatar had been directed by the award-winning James Cameron, who just
happened to be Bigelow’s former husband. When the smoke cleared on Oscar night,
however, not only had The Hurt Locker won for Best Picture, Bigelow had done the
unimaginable, walking away with the award for Best Director.

Hollywood in the Twenty-First Century

The prominence of the work of filmmakers such as the second-generation auteurs
during the 1960s and early 1970s made it seem as if Hollywood had changed forever.
Serious, socially relevant films were now the rule—filmmakers, and their studios, it
seemed, would continue to provide audiences with “thinking films.” Something began
to change in Hollywood in 1972, however, when Coppola’s first Godfather film grossed
an astonishing $80 million. The next year, George Lucas released American Graffiti—
one of the film ideas that Coppola had pitched to Warner Bros. in 1970 and that the
studio had rejected—which had been made for a mere $750,000 and that eventually
grossed over $21 million in its first run. Studio heads, who had become increasingly
concerned about their declining revenues, took notice, especially when two years later,
in 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws broke the box-office record that had been set by The
Godfather, becoming the first motion picture to earn over $100 million, and then
two years after that, Lucas’s Star Wars shattered the record that had been set by Jaws,
earning an astonishing $210 million in a first run that lasted from May 1977 to
April 1978.
Although both Spielberg and Lucas are gifted filmmakers—especially Spielberg,
who has crossed over genres from the family-oriented sci-fi adventure E.T. (1982) to
the adult-themed drama Schindler’s List (1993), and almost everything in between—
they have been roundly criticized for bringing about the demise of the auteur

lvii
Introduction

renaissance that directors like Coppola had initiated during the 1960s and early 1970s
(see: Lucas, George; Spielberg, Steven). Whatever the case may be in that regard, the
success of films like American Graffiti, Jaws, and Star Wars did change—irrevocably, it
seems—the way that Hollywood understands itself. Studio heads now look forward to
the so-called summer season, when they can release big budget, action-oriented “block-
busters,” which alone may make enough money to carry the studio through the year.
Lucas’s and Spielberg’s films have been particularly important in defining the block-
buster phenomenon: for Lucas, American Graffiti and the Star Wars films, and for
Spielberg, Jaws, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and his franchises—
why make one when you can make more?—the Raiders and Jurassic Park films. Franch-
ises have become vastly important in driving the success of the blockbuster, allowing
studios to create brand-name recognition, both in regard to their films and in regard
to offscreen promotions. The Bond films, Rambo, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Batman,
Star Trek, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spiderman, X-Men, Pirates of
the Caribbean, the Bourne films—the list seems inexhaustible.
As counterintuitive as it seems, though, it may be that the blockbuster is the very
thing that has created a space—by way of the revenues they produce—for the work
of established and newly minted auteurs, and of other filmmakers, to continue to be
made. Indeed, major studios such as Sony, Paramount, and Fox, seeking to capitalize
on the success of alternative filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soder-
bergh, Tim Burton, David Lynch, and Joel and Ethan Coen, have even created indie
labels—Fox’s Fox Searchlight and Time Warner’s Castle Rock, New Line, and Fine
Line, for instance. Even the best known of the indie labels, Miramax and Focus Fea-
tures, have “become ‘specialty units’ within their parent companies, Disney and Uni-
versal, respectively” (Lewis, 2008). Whatever the future holds for the American
cinema, however, it seems clear that movies will continue to be made, that they will
continue to reflect and shape the nation’s history, and that they will be viewed and
enjoyed by film audiences for years to come.

References
Abernethy, David B. The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires
1415–1980. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999.
Butler, Ivan. The War Film. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1974.
Carnes, Mark, C., ed. Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. New York: Henry Holt,
1995.
Cashman, Sean Dennis. America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of
Theodore Roosevelt, 3rd ed. New York: New York University Press, 1993.
Chandler, Alfred D. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 1990.
Cordery, Stacy A. Theodore Roosevelt: In the Vanguard of the Modern. Belmont, CA: Thomson/
Wadsworth, 2003.

lviii
 Introduction

Corkin, Stanley. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2004.
Dallek, Robert. The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
Davis, William C. The American Frontier: Pioneers, Settlers, and Cowboys, 1800-1899. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
Dinnerstein, Leonard, Roger L. Nichols, and David M. Reimers. Natives and Strangers: A Multi-
cultural History of Americans, 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Foner, Philip S. The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism 1895-
1902, Volume I: 1895-1898 and Volume II: 1898-1902. New York: Monthly Review Press,
1972.
Fry, Joseph A. Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations 1789-1973. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.
Grant, Barry Keith, ed. Film Genre Reader III. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Harvey, James. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1987.
Heilbroner, Robert and Singer, Aaron. The Economic Transformation of America: 1600 to the
Present. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.
Hietala, Thomas. Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism & Empire, rev. ed. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2003.
Horowitz, David A. and Peter N. Carroll. On the Edge: The United States in the Twentieth
Century. Belmont, CA: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2005.
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1987.
Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Klein, Kerwin Lee. Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of
Native America, 1890-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion 1860-1898. 35th
anniversary ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Lewis, Jon. American Film: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Litwack, Leon F. “The Birth of a Nation,” in Mark C. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect: History
According to the Movies. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. New York: Harper & Row, 1956.
Miller, Richard H., ed. American Imperialism in 1898: The Quest for National Fulfillment. New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1970.
Mintz, Steven, and Randy Roberts, eds. Hollywood’s America: United States History through Its
Films, 3rd ed. St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 2001.
Morris, Charles R. The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P.
Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy. New York: Henry Holt, 2006.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Sue Thornham, ed. Feminist Film
Theory. A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Myers, James M. The Bureau of Motion Pictures and Its Influence on Film Content During World
War II: The Reasons for Its Failure. Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998.

lix
Introduction

Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge, 2000.

Nichols, Bill. Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies. New York: W. W. Norton,
2010.
Paolino, Ernest N. The Foundations of the American Empire: William Henry Seward and U.S.
Foreign Policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Pramaggiore, Maria, and Tom Wallis. Film: A Critical Introduction. London: Laurence King,
2005.
Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expan-
sion, 1890-1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. Boston:
McGraw-Hill, 1981.
Shindler, Colin. Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American Society, 1929-1939. London and
New York: Routledge, 1996.
Sklar, Robert. A World History of Film. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.
Sklar, Robert. Movie Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Vintage
Books, 1994.
Strong, Josiah. Our Country. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1997.
Vaughan, Alden T., ed. The Puritan Tradition, 1620-1730, rev. ed. Hanover: University Press of
New England, 1972.
Weeks, William Earl. Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution
to the Civil War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997.
White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Williams, William Appleman. The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth
and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society. New York: Random House,
1969.
Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: W. W. Norton,
2009.
Wisan, Joseph E. “The Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press,” in Greene, Theodore
P., ed. American Imperialism in 1898. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1955.
Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Collins,
1999.

lx
FILMS

1
This page intentionally left blank
 v
A
ALI. Michael Mann’s 2001 filmic biography of boxing legend and cultural icon
Muhammad Ali (Will Smith) is book ended by Ali’s first and second heavyweight
championship fights, beginning during his preparations for the 1964 defeat of Sonny
Liston and ending immediately after his 1974 upset of George Foreman in Zaire
(“The Rumble in the Jungle”). The film dramatizes a politically turbulent decade when
Ali’s biggest controversies occurred, including his admission to the Nation of Islam, his
refusals of military induction for the Vietnam War, and his subsequent suspension
from boxing in 1967.
Ali is illustrative of Mann’s powerful cinematic technique. His complex narrative
approach invites viewers to use their powers of analysis and relies on stylized visuals
and musical choices to convey emotional depth. Mann sought to bring a sense of real-
ism to Ali that would make it stand out from what he saw as the theatrically staged
bouts in the Rocky series (1976–2006) and Martin Scorsese’s impressionistically con-
structed battles in Raging Bull (1981). Toward this end, he developed a small camera
that enabled him to shoot his rapidly moving actors at extremely close range. He also
cast real boxers to work with Smith in the fight scenes, which were meticulously cho-
reographed to mirror what actually transpires in the ring.
Ali’s opening montage encapsulates the film’s thesis: that Ali’s motivations and
worldview resulted from his personal experience of ’60s politics and culture. Mann
cuts between a live performance of “Bring It on Home to Me” by Sam Cooke (David
Elliott), shots of Ali’s training regimen, flashbacks to his childhood experience of seg-
regation and early awareness of the civil rights struggle, and sequences involving his
engagement with Malcolm X’s political ideas. The juxtapositions draw connections
between boxing and art, sports and celebrity, black culture and politics. As the song cli-
maxes, Ali—silent up to that point—bursts through double doors to begin a harangue
about rival Sonny Liston, signifying that his famous braggadocio was a product of
those formative experiences.
Interestingly, Mann was hired after Smith was attached to a screenplay for Ali,
which was unusual in that Mann normally plays a larger part in developing his films.
However, he radically revised the existing script with Eric Roth, his collaborator on

3
Ali

Actors Michael Bent and Will Smith film a scene in Ali shot in February 2001 in Los Angeles. Bent
portrays boxer Sonny Liston and Smith portrays boxer Muhammad Ali. In this scene the duo fights
for the title in 1964. (Peter Brandt/Getty Images)

The Insider (1999), making Ali aesthetically and thematically his own. Like many of
Mann’s other films, including Heat and Miami Vice, Ali weaves a preoccupation with
masculinity and work into a morality play. The film depicts Ali’s inner conflicts, which
seem to emerge out of his relationships with various paternal figures: his conformist
Christian father; the radical Muslim leader Malcolm X, seen advocating black self-
reliance and retaliation in contrast to the nonviolent civil rights establishment; trainer
Angelo Dundee, whose devotions appear completely professional; and iconic sports-
caster Howard Cosell, who may have understood and respected Ali more than anyone
else in his life.
The picture marks an important turning point in Smith’s dramatic film career. Not
only did the role earn him his first Academy Award nomination, it also changed how he
was perceived by many in Hollywood. Indeed, playing the young Muhammad Ali—
who, before he became a beloved elder statesman, was understood as radical, alien, and
unpatriotic—Smith altered his image in the eyes of many of his critics, who had accused
him of homophobia and immaturity because he had refused to perform a homosexual
kiss in Six Degrees of Separation (1993), and of allowing himself to be portrayed as a

4
 Alien

supplicant “negro” whose sole purpose is to serve affluent whites by accepting his role in
The Legend of Bagger Vance.
While Smith’s performance was applauded, critical response to the film itself was
mixed. Reviewers commonly complained that it painted an inadequate picture of Ali,
identifying that deficiency in various ways: the film’s limited coverage of his life; its fail-
ure to explore Ali’s impact on historical events outside of boxing; and its tendency to
dwell on scenes marked by a certain narrative vagueness, sparse dialogue, and ambigu-
ous characterization of Ali’s psychological motivations. Ironically, especially because
the film was directed by Mann, it seems that some critics saw Ali as flawed because it
failed to meet genre expectations of biopics, sports movies, or historical films; Ali, for
example, although he is the central character, does not have a clear and singular adver-
sary, nor does the film have distinguishable plot points.
See also: African Americans in Film; Mann, Michael

Reference
Gonzalez, Susan. “Director Spike Lee Slams ‘Same Old’ Black Stereotypes in Today’s Films.”
Yale Bulletin and Calendar 29(21), March 2, 2001. http://www.yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/
v29.n21/story3.html
—Gerald S. Sim

ALIEN. Ridley Scott’s 1979 picture Alien is a groundbreaking science fiction film.
Notable for its extraordinary special effects, it is also unusual in that it features a
woman, Sigourney Weaver, in the lead role. It was also the first of several major hits
for Scott, including Blade Runner (1982), Thelma and Louise (1991), Gladiator
(2000), and Black Hawk Down (2001).
Alien takes place on the Nostromo, a spaceship that transports mineral ore back to
Earth from mining operations on other planets. On its return, the ship receives a dis-
tress signal from a nearby planet. The crew is instructed to respond to the signal and
lands on the planet. Once they land, they find that the distress signal is coming from
an alien spaceship. They discover the corpse of an alien and a room full of eggs. One
of the eggs hatches and a small alien creature latches onto the face of Executive Officer
Kane (John Hurt). The crew returns to the Nostromo with Kane. Eventually, the alien
detaches itself from Kane’s face and dies on its own. Later, a seemingly healthy Kane
begins to choke during a meal, and in what has become an iconic film moment, an
alien being explodes from his chest.
From that point forward, the Alien begins to hunt and kill the seven-member crew
one by one. Because the spaceship is a civilian vessel, the crew has to improvise weap-
ons to use against what seems to be the unstoppable Alien. The film follows the crew
members, led by Warrant Officer Ripley (Weaver), in trying to track down and destroy
the Alien, which continues to grow, reaching its full size within hours.

5
Alien

Perhaps the most striking fea-

ture of the film is Weaver’s char-
acterization of Ripley as the
assertive, even aggressive leader
of the hunt for the Alien. While
female stars had been a mainstay
of Hollywood films for decades,
their roles usually involved glam-
orous portrayals. Weaver’s Ripley
is a strong, physical character,
one who uses both her intelli-
gence and physical abilities to
destroy the Alien. This turn as
the heroic Ripley launched Weav-
er’s career, making her one of the
hottest properties in Hollywood.
Unfortunately, even though the
Ripley character as a filmic pro-
tagonist was cheered by audi-
ences, and pointed the way
toward casting women as intellec-
tually and physically capable fig-
ures—such as Linda Hamilton
in the Terminator sequels and
Demi Moore in G. I. Jane—
Hollywood has resisted portray-
ing female characters in these tra-
ditionally male roles.
Sigourney Weaver in the role of Ripley in the 1979 film Alien. The production design of
(Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Alien is superb. Very few directors
demonstrate Scott’s attention to
detail in regard to set design, cos-
tumes, and makeup. While his follow-up, Blade Runner, is often considered to have
had more influence on subsequent science fiction films, Alien already displayed many
of the design elements that mark his later films. Thus, like Blade Runner, the future
in Alien is depicted as a grimy, decaying, postindustrial world. Interestingly, while dys-
topian themes had long been a feature of science fiction films, the narrative settings
were traditionally brighter and more efficient. In Alien, though, the ship, where almost
all the action takes place, is a clunking hulk, its corridors narrow and dark; and because
the story is set in space, there obviously is nowhere for the crew members to go.
Scott faced much the same problem that Steven Spielberg confronted when he
made Jaws in 1975: as with a 25-foot shark, even an alien with an elongated head
and long, razor sharp teeth dripping with toxic saliva becomes less frightening the
more audiences see it. Like Spielberg, Scott chose not to reveal too much too soon.

6
 All about Eve

Throughout the film, then, the true horror of the alien creature is revealed to us slowly,
part by part. Scott’s decision proved to be a good one, as keeping the alien hidden away
within the dark recesses of the ship, and not revealing exactly what it looks like, kept
audiences on the edge of their seats.
Alien was produced for $11 million and made $81 million domestically. It was
nominated for Best Set Design and took home the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. The
film spawned three sequels: Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), and Alien Resurrection
(1997). Although Weaver starred in all three sequels, Scott would not return to direct
any of them.
See also: Scott, Ridley; Science Fiction Film, The

References
McIntree, David. Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to the Alien and
Predator Movies. Prestatyn, UK: Telos, 2005.
Schwartz, Richard A. The Films of Ridley Scott. Westport: Praeger, 2001.

—Govind Shanadi

ALL ABOUT EVE. In the history of the American cinema, no other film has set
more records than All about Eve. Opening at New York’s Roxy Theatre on October 13,
1950, the picture was nominated for 14 Academy Awards (a record matched only by
James Cameron’s Titanic), including Best Actress nods for Bette Davis and Anne
Baxter. Joseph L. Mankiewicz won awards for Best Screenplay and Best Director, and
by the end of the evening, the film had captured six Oscars, including Best Picture.
Mankiewicz based his script on a short story/radio play by actress/playwright Mary Orr
that appeared in the May 1946 issue of International Cosmopolitan Magazine as “The
Wisdom of Eve.” He began work on Best Performance (as it was initially titled) in the fall
of 1949 and found his greatest challenge to be casting the lead roles. Although Darryl
Zanuck’s preference for the female lead was Marlene Dietrich, Mankiewicz prevailed
and he signed Claudette Colbert to play the part. Two weeks before filming was to begin,
however, Colbert was forced to withdraw because of an accident. Enter Bette Davis.
All about Eve is a classic tale of ambition and deception in that most sacrosanct of
institutions, the theatre. It is the story of Margo Channing (Davis), an aging actress
who, upon reaching the dreaded age of 40 is experiencing, in Mankiewicz’s words,
“a kind of professional menopause” and feels the dazzling light of her celebrity
beginning to fade (Mankiewicz and Carey, 1972). Perhaps that is why she is vulner-
able to the mawkish adoration lavished upon her by the young ingénue Eve Harring-
ton (Baxter), who is impatiently waiting in the wings to take Margo’s place. Eve is
ruthless, calculating, and thoroughly manipulative. From a very early age, she con-
structed a fantasy life for herself, and, by her own admission, “it got so that I
couldn’t tell the real from the unreal except that the unreal seemed more real to me . . . ”
(Mankiewicz and Carey).

7
All Quiet on the Western Front

Mankiewicz’s inspiration for the character of Margo Channing was Peg Woffington
of the Old Drury Lane, a formidable actress of eighteenth-century English theatre.
When All about Eve was released, however, it was rumored that Margo was modeled
on the life and career of Tallulah Bankhead. Davis did not have to borrow from anyone
else’s life, though, as she could well identify with the character of Margo. A celebrated
actress, Davis, who was 41 herself, was dropped by Warner Bros. and feared that her
career was over. But she was cheered by critics for her work in All about Eve—many
characterized it as her “signature performance”—and after the film was released, Davis
was back on top. In addition to her Oscar nomination, she won the prestigious New
York Critics Circle Award as well as the award for Best Female Performance at the
Cannes Film Festival.
Described as a brilliant “needle-sharp study of bitchery in the Broadway theater”
(Time, 1950) and as “the greatest woman’s picture of all time” (Geist, 164), All about
Eve explored the dilemma confronting the 1950s woman forced to choose between a
career and marriage. The nineteenth-century ideal of the “cult of domesticity,” it
may be argued, was reborn in post–World War II, suburban America, with hearth
and home once again marking out the proper domain for the 1950s woman. Faced
with mounting pressure to conform to society’s expectations, women were now marry-
ing earlier and forgoing careers. Indeed, even Margo Channing, the tough, fiercely in-
dependent, enormously successful actress, is given to self-doubt on this issue and fears
one day ending up an “old maid.” She even admits to Karen that she feels incomplete
without a man in her life. In the end, Margo—leading the way for her adoring female
fans—chooses wedded bliss over a career, literally falling into the strong, protective
arms of her lover who allays her fears: “Bill’s here, baby. Everything’s all right, now.”
The lion is tamed, then, and society can rest assured that gender balance has been
restored.
See also: Melodrama, The; Women in Film

References
Dick, Bernard F. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
Geist, Kenneth L. People Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. New York:
Scribners, 1978.
Mankiewicz, Joseph L., and Gary Carey, More about All about Eve. New York: Random House,
1972.
Staggs, Sam. All about All about Eve (The Complete Behind-the-Screens Story of the Bitchiest Film
Ever Made!). New York: St. Martin’s, 2001.
Time magazine, October 16, 1950.

—Lorraine Coons

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. Released in 1930, All Quiet on the
Western Front was directed by Lewis Milestone and starred Lew Ayres as the principal
character, Paul Baumer. Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel Im Westen

8
 All Quiet on the Western Front

Nichts Neues, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director. Since its
release, it has been cited on many lists as a classic American film. In 1990, it was
selected for preservation by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
Author Remarque was 18 years old when he volunteered for service in the German
army and was sent to the Western Front. He suffered a leg injury, was hospitalized,
and survived the war. After working as a school teacher for a time, he gained sudden
fame—and considerable notoriety—when Im Westen Nichts Neues was published. At
the time, National Socialism was becoming a powerful tool in promoting the militaris-
tic ambitions of the Vaterland. Although the novel was remarkably apolitical and dis-
passionate in its refusal to take sides in regard to the Great War, it was banned in
Germany. In a poignant passage near the end of the book, the narrator speaks rhetori-
cally to the enemy: “Why do they never tell us that you are just poor devils like us, that
your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and
the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my
enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother. . . .”
Still later, as he is dying, the soldier declares in his diary: “I am young, I am twenty years
old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality
cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . . Our knowledge of life is limited to death. . . .
What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and
proffered our account?” When Hitler and the Nazis burned Im Westen Nichts Neues
after they came to power in the 1930s, Remarque regarded the act as a badge
of honor.
Both book and film pick up the action in August 1914, when the German Schlief-
fen Plan was succeeding in carrying the Kaiser’s armies through Belgium and deep into
France. By early 1915, however, British and French resistance brought the advance to a
standstill. The war of maneuver was over; now the perversely stultifying fight on the
Western Front would be waged between opposing armies dug into trenches that
stretched for hundreds of miles while sometimes lying only yards apart.
The narrative is viewed through the eyes of a German infantryman. As opposed to
the book’s impressionistic scattering of sketches, episodes, and flashbacks to the prewar
days, Milestone’s adaptation rewrites the story into a chronological narrative, adding
many sequences of actual combat. We see the protagonist, Paul (Lew Ayres), leave
his school, slog through the trenches, endure the horrors of amputation and disease,
enjoy a brief respite with some German peasant girls, return home on leave to a home-
land that he neither recognizes nor understands, return to battle, and suffer a leg injury
that places him in the hands of surgeons all too eager to amputate and nuns blinded to
the war by an insular faith. In a climactic scene not included in the novel, while
trapped in a trench in “No-Man’s-Land,” Paul is shot dead while reaching up to touch
a butterfly.
If there is a villain here, it is the schoolmaster, Kantorek (Arnold Lucy), whose patri-
otic exhortations to his students conclude with the line, “Won’t you join up, com-
rades?” In a powerful scene that is not found in the book—it was conceived by
playwright Maxwell Anderson—Paul returns to his village after years of fighting.
When he visits his old teacher, he is shocked to hear him delivering the same patriotic

9
All the King’s Men

speech to the new students. Paul angrily turns on Kantorek and delivers a stern warn-
ing to him and the students about the brutality of war.
In his study of the film, Andrew Kelly (Kelly, 2005) sums up the qualities that
qualify it for inclusion in the company of other great World War I films: “It brings
together—indeed, helped establish—the classic themes of the antiwar film, book, play
and poem: the enemy as comrade, the brutality of militarism; the slaughter of trench
warfare; the betrayal of a nation’s youth by old men revelling in glory, the incompe-
tence of the High Command; the suffering at home . . . the dead; and the forgotten
men who survived.”
See also: War Film, The

References
Campbell, Craig W. Reel America and World War I. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1985.
Kelly, Andrew, “The Greatness and Continuing Significance of All Quiet on the Western Front.”
In Eberwein, Robert, ed. The War Film. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Tibbetts, John C., and James M. Welsh, eds. The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film. New York:
Facts on File, 2005.

—John C. Tibbetts

ALL THE KING’S MEN. Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men is a 1949 film version
of Robert Penn Warren’s novel by the same name. The novel appeared in 1947, and
Rossen’s picture was the first film version to appear. Steven Zaillian’s remake appeared
in 2006. The film presents the corrupting power of politics and the danger of dema-
goguery; the film and the novel also make claims about the pervasiveness of corruption
among all human beings.
The film contains all of the main characters of the novel, but it gives primary atten-
tion to Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), while it could be argued that Jack Burden
and Willie Stark are at least equally important in the novel. The later film version
comes closer to capturing the essence of the novel, focusing more on the Burden char-
acter and his philosophical ruminations.
Set in a southern state, Stark is first seen as a candidate for county treasurer who
draws attention to greed and malfeasance by some local elected officials. Although he
loses the election, he is successful at exposing a crooked arrangement between the
county government and the builder of the local school. He subsequently gains notori-
ety when faulty construction leads to the death of a number of schoolchildren. At this
point he is depicted as an honest politician possessing genuine care for the people.
Eventually, Stark is recruited to run for governor as a means of dividing the rural
vote and ensuring the victory of the candidate of the city-based political machine. In
the midst of the race, there is an abrupt transformation in Stark. He realizes that he
has been duped and instead of giving up, he becomes the voice of the people. He labels
himself a “hick,” just like the poor citizens of his state, and presents himself as their
advocate, running a tireless campaign against the machine. As a political figure, the

10
 All the King’s Men

Broderick Crawford addresses the crowd from the balcony of his campaign headquarters in the 1948
political drama All The King’s Men, based on the life of Louisiana governor Huey Long. The film was
directed by Robert Rossen for Columbia. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Stark character is patterned after Huey Long, the flamboyant Louisiana politician who
was elected governor in 1928 and assassinated in 1935, most probably because of his
support for policies such as transferring wealth from the rich to the poor.
While Stark loses his first campaign for governor, he develops a taste for politics and
wins an impressive victory in the next race. As governor, he breaks the law and runs
roughshod over the state legislature, ruling as a demagogue and a tyrant. There is
always a sense of mixed motives in Stark. He starts out as a faithful husband, a man
who is restrained in his appetites; but the seductive quality of political power seems
to unleash his desires. After becoming governor, he frequently imbibes and satisfies
his sexual urges with a string of mistresses. His relationship with his wife becomes a
formality, and in his relationships with his father and son he is cold and distant. Ironi-
cally, it seems that the more personally corrupt he becomes, the more he fights for his
dispossessed citizens.
Significantly, while most of the characters in All the King’s Men are portrayed as
politically corrupt, they are not all depicted in this way. Politics, then, according to
Warren and Rossen, is not necessarily an inherently corrupting practice; but it certainly
contributes to and encourages corruption. As was mentioned, the novel and the film
are not only about political corruption: they also suggest that all people tend toward

11
American Graffiti

the corrupt. With this in mind, the character of Jack Burden acts as the prophetic pres-
ence in both the novel and film, giving expression to this notion of the ubiquity of
human imperfection.
Cautionary tales, both the novel and the film still end on a redemptive note. In the
novel, Burden ultimately commits to do the good work of the populist politician; and
in the film, he and Sadie Burke, who had been Stark’s lover and political collaborator,
agree in a brief scene to carry on the good work that Stark had initiated.
See also: Politics and Film

References
Combs, James. American Political Movies. New York: Garland, 1990.
Lane, Joseph. “The Stark Regime and American Democracy: A Political Interpretation of Robert
Penn Warren’s ‘All the King’s Men.’ ” American Political Science Review 95(4), 2001: 811–28.

—Michael L. Coulter

AMERICAN GRAFFITI. Before Star Wars, before Indiana Jones, before critics such
as Peter Biskind and David Thomson blamed him for the “decline” of American cin-
ema, George Lucas made American Graffiti, a film about a land not so far away in a
time not so long ago. The film won rave reviews, spawned a hugely successful and
influential soundtrack, earned five Oscar nominations (including Best Picture, Best
Director, and Best Screenplay), and pulled in over $100 million at the box office—a
figure that, adjusted for inflation, places it among the top fifty grossing films in Ameri-
can history. Over 40 years later, the film retains its position within the popular pan-
theon—as evinced by its inclusion in the American Film Institute’s list of the 100
greatest American films in 1998 and 2007
Lucas could have scarcely imagined such success when he began the screenplay after
the failure of his debut film, THX 1138 (1971). He set his story in 1962, the year he
graduated high school, and based most of the exploits of the film’s main characters
on his own teenage experiences. Lucas wanted to document the world he once knew
and communicate that memory to Americans too young to have experienced it
firsthand.
The film unfolds over the course of one long summer night, centering on events in
the lives of John Milner (Paul Le Mat), Terry Fields (Charles Martin Smith), Steve
Bolander (Ron Howard), and Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss). John is a 22-
year-old drag racer who senses his own obsolescence, while Terry remains wedded to
the mythology surrounding John. If this duo is tethered to a dying world, Steve and
Curt are poised to break out of it. They are scheduled to depart the next day for col-
lege. Initially the most enthusiastic advocate of escaping their “turkey town,” Steve ulti-
mately cannot bear to leave his girlfriend, Laurie (Cindy Williams). The bright but
indecisive Curt reverses Steve’s trajectory. The night’s events compel him to reconsider
his reluctance to leave his hometown. As such, the next morning Curt leaves alone.

12
 American Graffiti

Mel’s drive-in from American Grafitti (1973), directed by George Lucas. (MCA/Universal Pictures/
Photofest)

Postscripts reveal their fates: John dies in an automobile accident; Terry is reported
missing-in- action in Vietnam; Steve sells insurance in Modesto; Curt lives and writes
in Canada.
American Graffiti rekindled a fascination for the “long ’50s,” that period extending
roughly from the end of World War II through our beginnings in Vietnam, 1945–
1965. It also inspired a wave of imitators—including the long running, immensely
popular sitcoms Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. These two shows underscored their
connection to American Graffiti by casting Ron Howard and Cindy Williams as leads.
While Happy Days would undertake some culturally dubious projects in sanitizing the
era, it would be a mistake to project its cultural sins back upon the film that inspired it.
American Graffiti does not posit the long ’50s as a better, simpler, more innocent time.
It endorses Curt’s decision to embrace the ’60s. He certainly fares better than those
who cannot, or will not, leave the ’50s behind. Steve retreats to the suburbs, choosing
a career, insurance, that by its very nature privileges safety and caution. John, the ’50s
greaser, dies a violent death, one that symbolizes the passing of the ’50s and its hot-rod
culture. Terry’s fate speaks to the cultural consequences of the Vietnam War, which left
the nation adrift, lost, its cultural narratives besieged, its sense of self embattled.
While Curt does not emerge from the ’60s unscathed, he is alive and pursuing a
career that allows for self-expression. Indeed, Curt’s fate is expressive of Lucas’s basic

13
American in Paris, An

maxim: we should embrace freedom while accepting the uncertainties our choices
entail. In that sense, Curt resembles THX, Lucas’s first hero, who, having been sen-
tenced to a prison with no restraints other than the fear of its inmates, escapes by simply
walking out. Like THX, Curt shuns the security of a constrained, regimented world for
a freer, more uncertain future. This message, and its encoding of the shift from the ’50s
to the ’60s as a moment of liberating possibilities, would also serve as the keynote for a
series of cinematic meditations on the transition from the ’50s to the ’60s, including
The Wanderers (1979), Dirty Dancing (1987), and Pleasantville (1998).
See also: Lucas, George

References
Kline, Sally, ed. George Lucas: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Marcus, Daniel A. Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary
Cultural Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Pollock, Dale. Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas. New York: Da Capo, 1999.
—Christopher D. Stone

AMERICAN IN PARIS, AN. Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly’s second collabora-
tion (following 1948’s The Pirate) was one of the most celebrated musicals of its time,
receiving six Academy Awards, including honors for screenplay, musical score, cinema-
tography, and as the best picture of 1951. It also provided the occasion for Gene Kelly’s
only Oscar, an honorary award bestowed “not only because of his extreme versatility as
an actor, singer, director, and dancer, but because of his specific and brilliant achieve-
ments in the art of choreography on film.”
Conceived as a platform for the music of the Gershwins, the plot is straightforward.
Jerry Mulligan (Kelly), a former GI, has remained in Paris to pursue the life of a painter.
Jerry lives in the same building as his friend Adam (Oscar Levant, a well-known Gersh-
win associate), a concert pianist who never performs. Jerry meets and falls in love with
Lise Bouvier (Leslie Caron), a young woman engaged to Henri Baurel, an entertainer
(Georges Guétary, in a part originally intended for Maurice Chevalier) who, it happens,
once employed Adam. Though Lise feels indebted to Henri for sheltering her during
the war, she cannot deny her connection with Jerry. Meanwhile, Jerry becomes involved
with a wealthy divorcée, Milo Roberts (Nina Foch), who routinely “sponsors” artists as
a way of picking them up. On the eve of Lise and Henri’s marriage, the major characters
attend a ball, where Henri overhears Lise telling Jerry that they cannot be together.
Broken-hearted, Jerry confesses his feelings for Lise to Milo, who is stung; a deleted
scene indicates that Milo will next sponsor Adam. Henri and Lise depart, and Jerry
re-imagines his pursuit of Lise in the form of a ballet. Following the ballet, Henri and
Lise return—apparently Henri has gallantly stepped aside so that Lise and Jerry can
be together. Lise and Jerry run toward each other and embrace on the steps.
Jerry’s reverie is the film’s climax, an extraordinarily ambitious 17-minute ballet set
to Gershwin’s tone poem “An American in Paris.” Virtually a separate production—

14
 Angels with Dirty Faces

Minnelli even employed a different cinematographer, John Alton—the initial budget

for the ballet added over $500,000 to the film’s cost of about $2 million, and it
required six more weeks of production time. Unsurprisingly, these plans met with re-
sistance, but Minnelli, Kelly, and producer Arthur Freed were adamant. Minnelli had
experimented with increasingly elaborate ballet sequences in Ziegfeld Follies (1946
[shot 1944]), Yolanda and the Thief (1945), and The Pirate; the milestone British film
The Red Shoes (1948), along with Kelly’s well-received ballet in On the Town (1949),
suggested to them that audiences were prepared for the complexity of the “American
in Paris Ballet.” The production depicts Parisian locales in the style of paintings associ-
ated with them: the Place de la Concorde fountain a la Dufy, a flower market a la
Manet, the Place de l’Opéra a la Van Gogh, and so on. The dancers form part of these
tableaux—for instance, Kelly dances in a Montmartre café while costumed as
Toulouse-Lautrec’s Chocolat—so that the ballet evokes a series of choreographed
three-dimensional paintings. Rather than transferring dance to the screen like The
Red Shoes, the film offers what Kelly termed a “cineballet,” an artform that truly merges
cinema with ballet.
During rehearsals, Kelly’s wife Betsy Blair was named in Red Channels, a publication
that allegedly identified subversives working in the entertainment industry. Blair’s poli-
tics were forthrightly leftist (she once attempted to join the Communist Party), and she
was soon blacklisted. Relatively more moderate, Kelly was still a progressive—for in-
stance, he was a member of the Committee for the First Amendment, formed in sup-
port of the Hollywood Ten. Though outwardly apolitical, An American in Paris’s
representation of the pitfalls of entangling “sponsorships”—whether Henri’s sponsor-
ship of Lise or Milo’s of Jerry—seems influenced by anxiety that even well-meaning
affiliations with the wrong people can have disastrous consequences. That the narrative
resorts to a fantasy ballet as the solution to this problem suggests that the filmmakers
believed that art could somehow transcend politics. Of course, reality is less forgiving:
partly because of the political climate, Kelly was not present to accept his honorary
Oscar—he and his family moved to Europe in late 1951.
See also: Kelly, Gene; Musical, The

References
Fordin, Hugh. M-G-M’s Greatest Musicals. New York: Da Capo, 1996.
Hirschhorn, Clive. Gene Kelly: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s, 1974.
Knox, Donald. The Magic Factory. New York: Praeger, 1973.
Minnelli, Vincente. I Remember It Well. Hollywood: Samuel French, 1990.
—Matthew Sewell

ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES. The gangster films of the 1930s provided the first
significant test of the new Production Code adopted by the board of directors of the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association in 1930. Although adherence
to the Code was voluntary until the formation of the Production Code Administration

15
Angels with Dirty Faces

James Cagney (left) stars as Rocky Sullivan and Pat O’Brien as Jerry Connolly in Angels with Dirty
Faces, 1938. (Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

(PCA) in 1934, films such as Little Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931)
attempted to mitigate objections that they glorified criminal behavior by claiming—
as did the title card of The Public Enemy—that they sought only “to honestly depict
an environment that exists today in a certain strata of American life.” Angels with Dirty
Faces (1938) was the first film of this genre to respond specifically to the provisions of
the Code by offering the “compensatory values” that PCA chair Joseph Breen
demanded.
In the film, boyhood friends Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney) and Jerry Connolly
(Pat O’Brien) attempt to commit a petty crime and are chased by the police. Jerry
escapes, but Rocky is caught and sent to reform school, beginning his descent into a
life of crime that is illustrated through a rapid montage of blazing guns, gangland
attacks, and blaring newspaper headlines. After a stint in prison, Rocky returns to his
old neighborhood where Jerry is now the pastor of the urban Catholic parish where
he and Rocky were once altar boys. Inadvertently, the two friends become locked in a
battle for the hearts and souls of a gang of delinquents (the Dead End Kids), and while
the earnest priest coaches their basketball team in a decrepit gym, Rocky’s charisma
and prosperous lifestyle prove more seductive. Jerry then spearheads a reform effort

16
 Angels with Dirty Faces

that leads to the arrest and conviction of Rocky, who is sentenced to death. In prison,
Jerry asks Rocky for a final sacrifice—to go to the chair a coward as an object lesson for
“the boys” he fears he has otherwise lost. Although Rocky initially refuses to surrender
his dignity in this way, he breaks down as he is led into the execution chamber and begs
not to die. In the final scene, Jerry confirms to the boys that Rocky indeed died a cow-
ard, and then leads them out of their basement hideout to “say a prayer for a boy who
couldn’t run as fast as I could.”
Counterpoising the criminal Rocky with the virtuous Jerry allowed the film to
exploit the explicit violence of the gangster movie genre—a formula that guaranteed
profit—while simultaneously responding to the concerns of Breen and the PCA. As a
devout Catholic, Breen not only controlled the imprimatur of the PCA, but he had
tremendous influence over the newly formed Legion of Decency, a public pressure
group that, perhaps even more than the PCA, gave teeth to the Code. Although the
Irish Catholic Rocky exemplified the ethnic stereotypes of urban violence to which
Breen and the Legion objected, the character of Jerry offered a compensatory figure
who, like Rocky, was also the product of an urban Catholic childhood. Not only did
the character provide the necessary moral recompense that ameliorated any opposition
the PCA or the Legion might retain toward the film, but O’Brien’s saintly depiction of
Fr. Jerry became the prototype of the courageous cinematic priest, who personified the
moral conscience of a nation at a time when Catholicism was still viewed with deep
suspicion by most Americans. From Spencer Tracy’s Fr. Flanagan in Boys Town
(1938) to Karl Malden’s Fr. Barry in On the Waterfront (1954), the tough-minded
Catholic priest—preferably one of Irish extraction who, like Fr. Jerry, could take down
an opponent with a single punch—became an unlikely American hero.
Despite Jerry’s impeccable virtue, however, the significance of Rocky’s final actions
(presented only in shadows) remains murky. Explicitly, the film resolves the question
of Rocky’s breakdown in favor of Jerry’s request, as Jerry tearfully gazes heavenward
while Rocky begs for mercy. Implicitly, however, the motivation for Rocky’s action
remains ambiguous, with the moralizing ending preferred by the PCA offering only
one possible interpretation. In popular culture, Cagney’s unrepentant Rocky became
the more enduring character.
See also: Gangster Film, The; Hays Office and Censorship, The

References
Keyser, Les, and Barbara Keyser. Hollywood and the Catholic Church: The Image of Roman
Catholicism in American Movies. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1984.
Maltby, Richard. “Why Boys Go Wrong: Gangsters, Hoodlums, and the Natural History of
Delinquent Careers.” In Grieveson, Lee, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield, eds. Mob Cul-
ture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2005: 41–66.
—Rodger M. Payne

17
Annie Hall

ANNIE HALL. Annie Hall (1977) is considered Woody Allen’s first masterpiece, a
film that redefined the romantic comedy. It is the story of the rise and fall of the
romantic relationship between Alvy Singer (Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton).
The film was a tour de force, employing numerous cinematic and narrative techniques,
including animation, visual effects, flashbacks, and breaking the fourth wall by having
the lead character directly address the audience. It also established Diane Keaton as a
star, and made the character of Annie Hall into a pop culture phenomenon, with thou-
sands of women adopting her quirky style of dress and favorite catch phrase: La-dee-
da, La-dee-da. The film opens with Singer, who is a stand-up comic, addressing the
audience directly. He relates two jokes that define his adult life as it pertains to relation-
ships with women, announces that he and Annie broke up, and then briefly describes
his childhood. The juxtaposition of these narrative elements serves to establish the con-
text for his character and how his childhood (which is examined later in the film)
played a key role in his relationship with women.
Annie Hall begins with a joke and ends with a joke. In framing this incredibly com-
plex, and oddly serious, film in this way, Allen may be turning our attention back to
Freud and his work, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. There, Freud described
the joke as a linguistic envelope containing sublimated desires and complex ideas.
Allen, it seems, agrees; and thus, with Annie Hall, he appears to be reminding the
viewer that while comedy shouldn’t be taken too seriously, for him it remains the best
way to explore the seriousness of life.

Actor Diane Keaton talks to actor and director Woody Allen on the roof of a building in a still from
Allen’s film Annie Hall. (United Artists/Getty Images)

18
 Apocalypse Now

In the opening monologue, Allen says of his breakup with Anne, “I just can’t get my
mind around it.” While at first this may seem to be merely another way of saying he’s hav-
ing a difficult time reconciling the situation, in the next scene we realize that the statement
has a deeper philosophical meaning. After Alvy returns from meeting Annie in California,
he is watching a rehearsal of his play. The stage scene being rehearsed is a reenactment of
the last meeting between Alvy and Annie, except that in the play, “Sally” agrees to return
to New York with “Alvy,” confessing her love for him. Once it is revealed to the (film) audi-
ence that Alvy has created a scene that alters the reality of his situation, he looks directly
into the camera and says: “What do you want? It was my first play. You know how you’re
always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life.” Here,
it seems, what Allen appears to be saying is that the struggle to get his “mind around” the
situation represents an attempt, both filmically and literally, to trope and redefine emo-
tional boundaries—again, the frivolity of comedy exposing the seriousness of life.
Allen originally envisioned this movie as a murder mystery, with a subplot about a
romance. During script revisions, he decided to drop the murder plot, which he and
Marshall Brickman later revisited in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). Interestingly,
the film’s working title was “Anhedonia”—the inability to feel pleasure. It could refer
to Annie’s incapacity to feel anything without the aid of marijuana—Alvy tries desper-
ately to convince her that she does not need to smoke in order to enjoy sex: isn’t he
enough?—but it also may refer to Alvy’s failure to enjoy life. Annie likens him to the
“dying city” of New York, an island incapable of feeling. Film critic Roger Ebert claims
that the film establishes its tone by constantly switching tones. This switching reflects
the restless mind of the filmmaker, but also implicates his surroundings, New York
City, which he and Alvy refuse to leave. As Allen demonstrates in the opening sequence
of Manhattan, the artist struggles to find his voice.
Annie Hall won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best
Screenplay, and Best Actress (Keaton). Annie Hall marks Allen’s transition away from
screwball comedy and toward the seriocomedy subgenre he would master in the
1980s. Annie Hall is also the first of three films that explore the relationship between
the artist and his art. The others are Manhattan and Stardust Memories.
See also: Allen, Woody

References
Brode, Douglas. The Films of Woody Allen. New York: Citadel, 1991.
Girgus, Sam B. The Films of Woody Allen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Pogel, Nancy. Woody Allen. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

—Dean R. Cooledge

APOCALYPSE NOW. Apocalypse Now (1979) was supposed to be the first major
studio film to address the Vietnam War since The Green Berets in 1968. Co-written
and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the film’s production was fraught with prob-
lems—a typhoon, political unrest, health emergencies, among others—that took it

19
Apocalypse Now

Actor Robert Duvall watches as bombs explode in the distance in a scene from Apocalypse Now shot
on May 15, 1976, in the Philippines. The movie was one of a number of anti-war films made from
1978 to 1989 that depicted the gruesome brutality of the conflict in Southeast Asia and that sug-
gested that the American presence in Vietnam had been tragically wrong. (Getty Images)

millions over budget and years past its planned release date. Eagerly awaited but
derided as “Apocalypse Never” in the press, it was preceded in 1978 by Michael Cimi-
no’s The Deer Hunter, which created a sensation that blunted the later film’s impact on
both critics and the public. Eventually grossing over $150 million worldwide,
Apocalypse Now garnered six Academy Award nominations but just two wins, for cin-
ematography and sound editing, the latter an acknowledgment of its pioneering use
of surround sound. The film did not inspire a national conversation about the Viet-
nam War, as Platoon would seven years later, but its disturbing collage of brilliant
imagery, hallucinatory music, and literary allusion established it as an iconic text of
the era and cemented Coppola’s reputation as a virtuoso filmmaker.
Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now also contains allu-
sions to The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno as it follows Captain Willard on his quest to
assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a rogue American officer who has formed a murderous war-
rior cult deep in the Cambodian jungle. Willard and his naval escort travel upriver, a
metaphorical journey that represents the United States’ descent into the Vietnam quag-
mire, humanity’s descent into the madness of war, and a mythic voyage away from civ-
ilization and into the primitive past. The film unfolds as a series of bizarre vignettes
that comment on the Vietnam War’s internal contradictions and the seductive nature
of violence: a devastating helicopter assault on a pastoral but well-armed Vietnamese

20
 Apocalypse Now

village so that American soldiers may surf the nearby waters; a USO show in which
pinups dressed as cowgirls and Indians invoke the link between sex and savagery as
they whip their GI audience into a riotous frenzy; and a bridge at the furthest reaches
of American influence, where soldiers rebuild every day only to be bombed every
night, and no one is in command. The little boat on which Willard and company
travel represents order and reason, but the jungle slowly encroaches: a tiger and later
spear-throwing natives attack them, the men use palm fronds to replace a damaged
canopy, and they coat their faces with the shadowy greens of camouflage paint. When
the survivors arrive in Kurtz’s realm, they find a wonderland of violence and despair.
Kurtz, filmed solely in silhouette and hatchet light, is an articulate but brutish giant
of martial authority who has clearly gone insane. Everywhere, the fruits of his madness
are realized as corpses dangling from the trees. And yet Kurtz’s assessment of the war
seems remarkably clear: “We train young men to drop fire on people, but their
commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene.”
In this irony, Apocalypse Now exposes the madness of war itself, and in some ways
the film offers an explicit critique of the Vietnam War, which did encompass elective
battles fought for dubious gain, the slaking of rapacious sexual appetites, and futile
campaigns to destroy bridges and other military objectives (in reality, Vietnamese
bridges, repeatedly targeted by American bombs). At the same time, the original cut
of the film makes no attempt to establish the postcolonial, political context of the
war, an omission the more didactic Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) amends with lengthy
scenes at a French plantation. Apocalypse Now treats the Vietnam War as myth, deper-
sonalizing its critique of American imperialism by rendering the war in grotesquely
broad strokes that preempt the audience’s emotional identification with the main char-
acters. While 1979 audiences may have read antiwar sentiment into the film—the title
is a twist on the slogan “Peace Now!”—their own memories of the conflict probably
informed that interpretation. Divorced from its post-Vietnam context, the film is
politically ambiguous, as it fetishizes violence by depicting helicopters and napalm
strikes in beautiful tableaux.
Apocalypse Now ends with the actual ritual slaughter of a water buffalo crosscut with
footage of Willard butchering Kurtz, suggesting sacrificial purification to serve the
greater good. For his actions, Kurtz’s followers seem to regard Willard as a god, and
when he drops his weapon, they drop theirs. Willard leads the sole survivor of his origi-
nal cohort back to the boat, and it heads downstream. Kurtz offers a final voice-over
benediction, “The horror, the horror,” borrowed directly from Heart of Darkness. Cop-
pola shot footage for months without an ending in mind, rendering the production of
the film as aimless as the war itself. The bizarre resolution Coppola stumbled upon left
audiences confused and failed to provoke a consistent emotional response that might
have coalesced into a cultural reevaluation of the Vietnam War and American soldiers’
role in it. By his own admission in the film’s printed program (there were no credits on-
screen), Coppola’s intent was not to tell a story, but rather to “create a film experience
that would give its audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the sensuousness, and
the moral dilemma of the Vietnam War.” Apocalypse Now placed ambivalence and
ambiguity at the center of the Vietnam narrative and, in so doing, approximated an

21
Apocalypse Now

essential truth of America’s Vietnam misadventure, which remains a heavily disputed

tangle of myth and memory.
See also: Coppola, Francis Ford; War Film, The

References
Bates, Milton J. The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996.
Hellmann, John. “Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film: Inversions of American Mythology
in The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.” In Anderegg, Michael, ed. Inventing Vietnam: The
War in Film and Television. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
Tomasulo, Frank P. “The Politics of American Ambivalence: Apocalypse Now as Prowar and
Antiwar Film.” In Dittmer, Linda, and Gene Michaud, eds. From Hanoi to Hollywood: The
Vietnam War in American Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
—Meredith H. Lair

22
 v
B
BADLANDS. Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) is representative of the kind of mov-
ies directed by a relatively small number of brilliant filmmakers—Arthur Penn, Roman
Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Altman come to mind—
whose work acted as a disruptive force in American cinema during the tumultuous decade
of the 1970s. Badlands was Malick’s second film, and in it, he began to knit together a the-
matic thread—the haunting, frightening experience of the fragile human being unceremo-
niously thrown into a capricious, indifferent state of nature—that would weave its way
through his subsequent works Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998). Fea-
turing two young actors making their feature film debuts—Martin Sheen as Kit and Sissy
Spacek as Holly—the film was loosely based on the real life story of Charles Starkweather
and Caril Ann Fugate, who went on a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1957.
After another stultifying day working as a garbage collector, 25-year-old Kit spies 15-
year-old Holly twirling a baton in her front yard. Holly is immediately drawn to the boy-
ishly charming Kit, and the two begin to spend more and more time together, much to
the consternation of Holly’s father (Warren Oates), who is disturbed not only by the dif-
ference in their ages, but also by Kit’s profession. An argument ensues between the two
men after Holly’s father returns home one night to find Kit and Holly together in his
house. When Holly’s father goes to the phone to call the police, Kit pulls out a gun and
casually asks him, “Suppose I shot you, how’d that be?” Startlingly, we have the sense that
Kit is posing some sort of depth-level existential question: How would it be if I shot some-
one? When he pulls the trigger a few seconds later, the moment seems both horrifying
and strangely inevitable—for Kit, there is no other choice, fate has determined that he
must have the answer to his question. (In a voice-over, Holly tells us that one of the things
that attracted her to Kit was the fact that to her, he looked like the actor James Dean.
Interestingly, this intertextual reference to James Dean, who had died tragically in a car
accident in 1955, links the angst-filled actor not only to the filmic character Kit, but also
to Sheen, who would go on to become a Vietnam-era filmic representative of dispossessed
American youth).
After her father is killed, Holly decides to flee with Kit in his car. The two survive by
living off the land until they are discovered by a group of bounty hunters. Kit manages

23
Bambi

to dispatch the entire group with rounds from a rifle, launching the couple’s killing
spree in earnest. Because Badlands followed what for its time was the hyperviolent Bon-
nie and Clyde, which had shocked, and thrilled, audiences when it was released in
1967, viewers had come to accept—and even to expect—big-screen carnage. Unlike
Bonnie and Clyde, however, who were depicted as tragic antiheroes, Kit and Holly were
deeply troubling characters—joyless, bored, anesthetized, they seem unredeemable. In
the end, Kit is thrilled by his celebrity, even offering the man who is guarding him after
the two are captured his comb as a souvenir.
The breathtaking cinematography and spare, unsettling narrative focus of Malick’s
film impressed critics, most of whom knew they were watching something special.
Although it was a critical success, however, audiences generally stayed away, and the
film proved a box-office disappointment. The picture made its mark on other film-
makers, though; indeed, Oliver Stone—who directed Sheen’s son, Charlie, himself a
late twentieth-century/new millennium-era filmic representative of dispossessed
American youth, in Platoon—would revisit this theme in his 1997 film Natural Born
Killers. Oddly, Malick has only directed three other films since he made Badlands:
the aforementioned Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, and most recently The
New World (2005), a period piece about the clash between John Smith and the native
peoples he encountered in colonial Virginia. Even with this limited output, however,
Malick has established himself as an important American filmmaker.

References
Morrison, James, and Thomas Schur. The Films of Terrence Malick. Westport, CT: Praeger,
2003.
Patterson, Hannah, ed. The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America. London:
Wallflower, 2007.
—Govind Shanadi

BAMBI. Walt Disney’s fifth animated feature film, Bambi (1942) is based on the 1923
book Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde (Bambi: A Life in the Woods) by the
Austrian-Hungarian Jewish writer Felix Salten. Although Salten’s book is an adult alle-
gory, showing the growing threats toward European Jews in the period between the
World Wars, Disney, who had started working on the movie in the 1930s when the num-
ber of whitetail deer in the United States had been severely reduced, turned it into a seri-
ous film about the mismanagement of the U.S. forests, sending a message to American
audiences to treat nature with care and to defend it against human incursion. Signifi-
cantly, while Salten’s book was banned by the Nazis in Austria in 1936, after the release
of the film in the United States, Disney confronted vehement protests from the American
Rifleman’s Association, which accused him of having an antihunter bias.
Bambi is a coming-of-age story of a whitetail deer. As a fawn, Bambi explores the
forest with his closest friends, the rabbit Thumper, the skunk Flower, and the

24
 Bambi

doe-fawn Faline, and is introduced to its dangers by his mother. During the winter,
his mother is killed by a hunter, and Bambi, the son of the Great Prince of the For-
est, has to learn to live without her. When spring returns, Bambi, now taller and
stronger, falls in love with Faline and is forced to fight a rival buck who wants her
for his own. One morning, a fire sweeps through the forest. Bambi saves Faline,
who is being chased by hunting dogs, but during the escape, a dog bites his leg.
Close to giving up, he is reminded by his father that he needs to be strong; summon-
ing his courage, Bambi makes good his escape. One year later, Faline gives birth to
twins, and Bambi, watching his father leave, takes over his role as the new Great
Prince of the Forest.
Bambi lost money at the box office when it was initially released—Disney failed to
duplicate the success of Snow White (1937)—although it did receive three Academy
Award nominations for Best Sound, Best Song, and Original Music Score. While to-
day the film is highly regarded—a sequel was made in 2006, and in 2008 the American
Film Institute included it on its list of the ten best animated movies—in 1942,
critics and audiences alike were deeply unsettled by the picture’s realism. War-weary
Americans, it seems, whose husbands and sons were dying in battle thousands of
miles from home, wanted to escape from reality rather than confront it in their local
movie theatres.
Bambi does indeed contain some of the most dramatic and frightening moments in
Disney animated film history: the forest fire; Faline’s desperate flight from fierce hunt-
ing dogs; Bambi’s clash with a rival buck; and especially the death of Bambi’s mother—
which still brings tears to the eyes of moviegoers and leaves many wondering if this
should even be considered a “children’s movie.” Interestingly, Disney’s own daughter
repeatedly reproached him for having Bambi’s mother die, but he argued that it was
part of the original novel.
Despite the criticism—and its lackluster commercial performance—Bambi proved
to be an important movie for Disney, particularly from a technical standpoint, as it
provided the special effects foundation for future animated feature films. Disney had
his artists carefully study the anatomy of real-life animals before they drew their filmic
characters, and this attention to detail showed in the strongly naturalized stylistics of
the picture, which captured even the smallest details of Bambi’s wildlife world.
See also: Animation; Coming-of-Age Film, The; Disney, Walt

References and Further Reading

Finch, Christopher. The Art of Walt Disney: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms. New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975.
Solomon, Charles. Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1989.
Thomas, Bob, and Don Graham. Walt Disney: The Art of Animation: The Story of the Disney Stu-
dio Contribution to a New Art. New York: Golden Press, 1958.
—Daniela Ribitsch

25
Batman

BATMAN. Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman brought the fictional hero to a post-
Reagan-era America. Originally created by Bob Kane for DC Comics in 1939 as part
of the burgeoning “superhero” genre, the character of The Batman had gone through
several incarnations prior to the release of the film. Inspired by Frank Miller’s critically
acclaimed 1985 graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Burton’s protagonist
was no longer merely a “do-gooder” or an example of “pop art camp,” but a dark,
avenging force working against the cabals of modern organized crime.
After the success of the 1978 film Superman, “Batfilms Productions” was launched
to bring Superman’s contemporary and longtime comic book partner to the big screen.
After several attempts, the production team that finally produced results was that of
Peter Guber and Jon Peters. With a script by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren, a score
by Danny Elfman—with additional songs by musical sensation Prince—and Burton,
hot off of his back-to-back successes as director of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1987) and
Beetlejuice (1988), the release date of the new Bat-film was slated for the 50th anniver-
sary of the character’s debut.
Starring Michael Keaton as Batman/Bruce Wayne, Kim Basinger as his love interest
and acclaimed reporter Vicky Vale, and film icon Jack Nicholson as the equally iconic
villain the Joker, the film presents a dark and dangerous futuristic Gotham City in the
clutches of organized crime, its police and politicians as corrupt as the villains they are
allegedly seeking to bring to justice. As the story begins, rumors abound among the
underground of Gotham that a creature known as “The Batman” prowls the night, pun-
ishing evildoers. The audience soon learns that this vigilante is actually multimillionaire
Bruce Wayne, whose parents were killed, when he was a boy, by a common street thug,
inspiring him to dedicate his life to fighting crime in all its macabre forms. Early in the
film, Bruce meets Vicky, who has come to Gotham to investigate The Batman.
The film’s primary antagonist is the Joker. Originally hired thug Jack Napier, he is
caught in a liaison with the girlfriend of his employer, Boss Carl Grissom. Grissom sets
up Jack, who, while evading the police—and The Batman—falls into a vat of acid, per-
manently altering his appearance, making his skin ghostly white and his hair bright
green. Looking much like a Joker from a deck of cards, the now-insane Napier pro-
ceeds to wage war on Gotham and Batman. Before the story reaches its climax, Batman
learns that the Joker is in fact the person who murdered his parents. As the film con-
cludes, Batman has made a truce with Gotham Police Commissioner Jim Gordon
and provided the police with the symbolic “Bat-Signal” that allows them to call him
should he once again be needed.
The release of Batman gave rise to a wave of “Bat-mania” around the country. Part of
what made the film so popular, it seems, was its reintroduction of a decades-old charac-
ter that was relevant for a new generation. This Batman fought against the greed and
corruption that had become commonplace in the “me decade” of the 1980s. For those
whose only memory of Batman was the 1960s television series figure played by Adam
West, or the 1970s Saturday morning cartoon Superfriends, Burton’s Batman seemed a
startling reimagining of the character. But for those who had followed the comic series
religiously—particularly the gritty Denny O’Neil/Neil Adams offerings of the 1970s
and early ’80s—the film captured the joyfully disturbing quality of the real Batman.

26
 Battleship Potemkin

Hoping to build on the positive audience reaction to the 1989 picture, filmmakers
produced a series of increasingly unsuccessful sequels throughout the 1990s: Batman
Returns (1992), also directed by Burton; Batman Forever (1995), directed by Joel Schu-
macher and starring Val Kilmer; and Batman and Robin (1997), also directed by Schu-
macher, and starring George Clooney. After the disappointing returns on Batman and
Robin, the franchise would take a long hiatus until finally returning to critical acclaim
in 2005 with the reboot film Batman Begins, directed by the very talented Christopher
Nolan. It is likely that this hero and Hollywood will remain partners for many years
to come.
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The

References
“Legends of the Dark Knight: The History of Batman.” Batman: Two-Disc Special Edition.
Warner Bros. DVD, 2005.
“Shadows of the Bat: The Cinematic Saga of the Dark Knight.” Batman: Two-Disc Special
Edition. Warner Bros. DVD, 2005.

—Richard A. Hall

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. It is nearly impossible to overstate the significance of

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) in the development of world cinema.
Simultaneously a government-sponsored ode to the anti-Tsarist revolutions of 1905
and a bravura experiment in the use of montage, Potemkin is the greatest product of
the Russian Kuleshov School and the best example of Eisenstein’s cinematic theories
in action. Potemkin is worthy of consideration as one of the greatest films of all time,
particularly given the tremendous influence it had on the development of film editing
and on the overall work of scores of filmmakers inspired by Eisenstein’s work. Devotees
of the film usually praise either its formal qualities as a work of art or its ideologically
subversive messages and its status as an artifact of revolutionary propaganda under the
Soviet regime.
The latter has helped to make Potemkin into a hugely contentious film in the
West, one that was frequently edited for presentation or banned outright by various
governments. In England, the film was banned until 1954 for fear it might incite a
working-class revolution; even then it was released only with the controversial “X”
rating. By then the film had been recognized by the film community as a classic,
and was voted as greatest film in the first-ever international poll of critics and film-
makers at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Today, Potemkin shows up in most univer-
sity film curriculums, and Eisenstein is mentioned with the great directors of the early
cinema.
Depictions of the revolutionary uprisings at the Black Sea port of Odessa were
originally meant to be a single episode in a larger film. Eisenstein had intended to
make an epic film to mark the 20th anniversary of the events of 1905, but found that

27
Battleship Potemkin

A group of sailors with animal carcasses in a scene from the film Battleship Potemkin, directed by
Eisenstein in 1925. (Picture Post/Getty Images)

the mutiny by the crew of the Potemkin contained enough drama to make it the focus
of a feature film. The film was based closely on the events of 1905, but as Roger Ebert
has noted, the film version of the story has become accepted as fact in some quarters.
After suffering a crushing naval defeat at Tsushima in May 1905 as part of the
Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Navy experienced a severe decline in morale, some-
thing that the Social Democratic Organization sought to exploit with anti-Tsarist
mutinies during the fall of 1905. Before this could happen, the crew of the Potemkin
spontaneously rebelled against poor shipboard conditions, killing seven officers and
creating chaotic conditions in Odessa.
In Eisenstein’s version of the events, the brutal and corrupt officers and an
Orthodox priest are shown to be complicit in their mistreatment of the crew, physically
abusing the sailors and feeding them maggot-infested meat that the chief medical offi-
cer deems edible. Using mostly nonprofessional actors to get the proper look for each
character, Eisenstein creates a collection of nefarious and authoritarian archetypal fig-
ures designed to elicit disgust for the Tsarist order and sympathy for the mutineers.
In protest of the rancid meat, the crew refuses to eat the soup provided for them.
The captain of the ship selects a group of men to be placed before a firing squad for
this transgression. It is here that the crew is inspired to revolt by the extremely

28
 Battleship Potemkin

Stalinesque Grigory Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov), a simple sailor who already has
some revolutionary inclinations. The uprising is successful, although Vakulinchuk is
killed.
Vakulinchuk’s body is then laid in state on the pier at Odessa, and his resting place
becomes a make-shift shrine and gathering place for revolutionary-minded citizens
who enthusiastically sail out to the ship with fresh supplies. The spectacle of the battle-
ship Potemkin and its surrounding supporters is enough to draw a large crowd to the
steps leading down toward the pier. Here begins what is arguably one of the most
famous sequences in the history of film, the Odessa Steps. Organized ranks of imperial
soldiers advance upon the terrified spectators, firing indiscriminately into the crowd,
causing a mass exodus of people from the steps. Men and women, the old and the
young, amputees, children, and babies all fall victim to the soldiers. The fleeing mob
is met below by Cossacks on horseback, who add to the carnage. The entire piece is
masterful, painting the Tsarists as bloodthirsty oppressors, and the masses as innocent
victims. By the end of the sequence, as the guns of the battleship Potemkin roar in
response to the massacre, the faceless inhumanity of the Tsarist regime vindicates all
revolutionary sentiments. The Odessa steps sequence has been sampled by filmmakers
ever since, with perhaps the most famous homage coming in Brian De Palma’s The
Untouchables (1987). Other notable films that feature versions of the Odessa steps
are The Godfather (1972), Brazil (1985), and The Naked Gun 331/3: The Final Insult
(1994), where both Potemkin and The Untouchables are spoofed.
Potemkin’s final reel concerns a squadron of ships that are dispatched to deal with
the wayward battleship, but in the end, they too are enticed to join the revolution.
Eisenstein’s film about the failed revolution of 1905 is therefore able to end on an opti-
mistic note, just as his government demanded. Battleship Potemkin was an effective
piece of propaganda for the Soviet state; but it is also a remarkable film, far outpacing
Eisenstein’s earlier effort from the same year, Strike. Jay Leyda notes how in watching
the two films in a single day, one can see the incredible speed with which Eisenstein
developed into a mature filmmaker. Potemkin was his first real artistic triumph, and
this film laid the groundwork for his later ones: October (1928), Alexander Nevsky
(1938), and Ivan the Terrible (1944).
See also: Eisenstein, Sergei; Intellectual Montage; Silent Era, The

References
Ebert, Roger. The Great Movies. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.
Fulton, A. R. “Montage in Potemkin.” In The Classic Cinema: Essays in Criticism. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973: 82–88.
Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. London: George Allen & Unwin,
1960.
Rollberg, Peter. Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2009.
—James M. Brandon

29
Best Years of Our Lives, The

BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, THE. A sensitive and realistic drama that reflects
the experiences shared by millions of Americans, The Best Years of Our Lives (MGM,
1946) is the seminal drama of post–World War II America. The sixth and last film
made by the producer/director team of Samuel Goldwyn and William Wyler, it fol-
lows the difficulties three servicemen face adjusting to life after the war.
The film begins with the three veterans, Army Air Force captain Fred Darrow
(Dana Andrews), Marine sergeant Al Stephenson (Fredric March), and Navy seaman
Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), flying home to fictional Boone City. The men are
equally apprehensive about reuniting with their loved ones, and each faces a particular
set of difficulties adjusting to his old life. Al finds that he will no longer be able to relate
to either his wife, Milly (Myrna Loy), or his children, and feels guilty about his finan-
cial success as a banker while other veterans are suffering. Homer, who lost both hands
in the war and now wears a set of hooks, rarely feels sorry for himself, but is constantly
faced with his family’s grief over his disfigurement. Moreover, he fears that Wilma
(Cathy O’Donnell), his high school sweetheart, will no longer love him. Fred married
a woman he barely knew as he went off to war, and now, discovering that she is shallow
and selfish, he is increasingly drawn to Peggy (Teresa Wright), Al’s caring daughter. A
decorated war hero, Fred is utterly without practical skills—his only work experience
is as a soda jerk and a bombardier. He struggles to find meaningful employment, even-
tually returning to the drugstore where he worked as a teenager, selling perfume to cor-
pulent housewives.

Dana Andrews speaks to Virginia Mayo in a still from the film The Best Years of Our Lives, directed
by William Wyler, 1946. (RKO Pictures/Courtesy of Getty Images)

30
 Best Years of Our Lives, The

While the film resolves each man’s difficulties, it does so without resorting to easy
solutions. Al vows to fight for veterans’ rights, particularly by securing loans from his
bank for needy ex-GIs, but becomes increasingly dependent upon alcohol in order
to mask the guilt he feels at his own prosperity. Homer, believing Wilma would be
unable or unwilling to care for him if they were married, tries to communicate to
her the difficulties they would face, but she proves strong and constant, and the pair
finally agrees to wed. Fred plans to leave town after being fired from his demeaning
job and discovering his wife’s adultery. While waiting for his flight, he wanders
through an airplane graveyard, passing endless rows of bombers discarded by the mili-
tary when it no longer needed them, just as Fred, and so many others, had been
thrown on the junk heap after the war. Rather than running from his problems, how-
ever, he decides to stay in Boone City, securing a job in construction and reuniting
with Peggy at Homer’s wedding.
The universal nature The Best Years of Our Lives was the key to its tremendous artis-
tic and commercial success. Based on MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Glory to Me, which
was commissioned by Goldwyn, it spoke to all those who had fought for their country
during the war and who had then returned home, and to the loved ones who had
awaited them. Al, Homer, and Fred served as a cross-section of American fighting
men, representing among them the various ages, classes, ranks, and branches of service
that comprised the nation’s military. Significantly, Wyler and Goldwyn produced the
film in the narrow window of opportunity prior to the Cold War, when American
self-analysis and criticism were still possible. By utilizing this critical eye, Wyler was
able to examine the human cost of the war, whether Homer’s disability or Fred’s strug-
gles to find work. The film avoided propaganda, sentimentality, and melodrama,
instead focusing on, in cinematographer Gregg Toland’s words, “a simple reproduction
of life.” Wyler and Toland rejected style in favor of realism, utilizing long, naturalistic
takes and deep-focus photography over the “glamour close-ups” and heavy makeup
that were popular at the time. This verisimilitude was enhanced by the casting of Rus-
sell, an actual double amputee who had lost both hands in an accident while training to
be a paratrooper.
The Best Years of Our Lives was a critical and commercial hit, not only in America
but around the globe. It dominated the 1947 Academy Awards, garnering eight nom-
inations and winning seven of them, including Best Picture, Director (Wyler), Actor
(March), and Supporting Actor (Russell). Russell received an additional special Oscar
for serving as an inspiration to disabled veterans, making him the only performer to
win two Academy Awards for the same performance.
See also: War Film, The; Wyler, William

References
Anderegg, Michael A. William Wyler. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
Madsen, Axel. William Wyler. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973.

—Bryan Kvet

31
Big

BIG. When we were young, and small, all of us, it seems, wished we could be Big.
Alas, in real life, we do not have the luxury of magically making our wishes come true.
As we enter adolescence, we are generally not allowed to drive, to do important work
that will bring us untold riches, to have sexual relationships, and to begin to fall in
love. Rather, we find ourselves struggling through one of the most painful stages of life,
where our dreams remain just out of reach. In the cinematic world, however, every-
thing can be gloriously transformed. Indeed, in the cinematic world, a young boy, with
the help of a Zoltar wish-granting machine and a strong wind, can get exactly what he
wants: he can be Big.
In Penny Marshall’s 1988 masterpiece, Josh Baskin is a typical 12-year-old: he toler-
ates his mom, he has a best friend for whom he cares deeply in an endearingly childish
way, he longs to be with the prettiest girl in school, he plays video games and adores
fascinating gadgets, and, of course, he wants to be Big. To accomplish the latter goal,
Josh, after getting frustrated by an amusement park carny who tells him he is too small
to ride the Ferris wheel, is drawn toward a mysterious Zoltar machine that tempts him
to pay his money and to make a wish. After some mechanical cajoling, Josh is able to
get the machine to work long enough to allow him to offer up his wish: I want to be
Big. “Your wish is granted,” replies the Zoltar gypsy; and ultimately Josh does become
big, at least physically.
Beyond Marshall’s adept direction, the fairytale narrative, and the coming-of-age
sensibilities of the film, perhaps what makes Big so wonderfully appealing is Tom
Hanks’s brilliant performance as the adult Josh. There have been any number of films
that have explored this same theme—Eighteen Again (1988), Vice Versa (1988), and
Thirteen Going on Thirty (2004) are examples—but no one has played the child-in-
the-adult body better than Hanks. In one of the most charming and memorable scenes
in the film, for instance, Hanks, as Big Josh, proudly walks about a swanky dinner
party in a stark white tuxedo and awkwardly eats baby corn as if it were corn-on-the-
cob. Later, during dinner, he takes a bite of caviar and spits it out; then, with disgust,
wipes the inside of his mouth with a paper napkin. This is exactly how one imagines
a 12-year-old boy would react in similar situations. Without question, Hanks is spot-
on as he skillfully articulates the frenetic physicality and painfully joyous yet tortured
emotionality of an adolescent boy.
Given all of this, however, it may be that what makes Hanks’s performance most
impressive is the poignancy that he brings to the scenes in which he is expressing the
moments of despair that are inevitably woven through every adult life. One thinks,
for example, of the heart-breaking scene where Josh curls into a fetal position on a dirty
hotel bed, crying for his mother, and wishing to go home. He is obviously nervous,
scared, and, although charming, basically alone in an often cruel and uncaring adult
world.
Big, like most great comedies—one thinks of the best of Charlie Chaplin and Buster
Keaton here—is filled with pathos. Adulthood, while certainly appealing when seen
through the eyes of a 12-year-old, is anything but idyllic once one really arrives there;
something that Josh learns in a distressing yet redemptive way. Being Big, Josh comes
to understand, does not resolve the problems of childhood; in fact, just like in

32
 Big Chill, The

the world of children, the adult world has its fill of bullies, backstabbing, and bad
behavior. Interestingly, it is all of this adult mess that pushes Josh to want to go home,
to be small again. Being Big, it seems, is not all it’s cracked up to be. And further, we
need our childhoods, if only to steel ourselves for the messiness that lies ahead.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The

References
Ames, Louise Bates, Frances L. Ilg, and Sidney M. Baker. Your Ten- to Fourteen-Year-Old. New
York: Delacorte, 1988.
Committee on Adolescence, Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. Normal Adolescence: Its
Dynamics and Impact. New York: Scribners, 1968.
Rosenberg, Morris. Society and the Adolescent Self-Image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1965.

—Douglas C. MacLeod Jr.

BIG CHILL, THE. With The Big Chill (1983), writer-director-producer Lawrence
Kasdan set out to explore what happened to “his generation” and their ideals once they
left the nurturing confines of college. His musings struck a chord with filmgoers who
made Kasdan’s second directorial effort one of the biggest hits of 1983. As impressive
as its theatrical run was, especially for a film that largely bypassed the youth market,
box-office figures alone do not capture the film’s cultural imprint. Its soundtrack went
multiplatinum and became even more influential than the film—as evinced by Vanity
Fair naming it as the tenth greatest soundtrack of all time in 2007. Beyond commercial
success, the film earned strong reviews and nabbed Oscar nominations for Best Picture,
Best Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress (Glenn Close). Finally, The Big Chill suc-
ceeded in generating discourse. Several commentators cited the film as a quintessential
example of Reaganite cinema and debated what that status said about the position of
the 1960s in American politics and memory. Certainly, the film’s pronouncements
on the “ ’60s generation” elicited a plethora of objections from individuals who either
participated in the movement or sympathized with its ideals and values.
Patterned after The Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), The Big Chill transpires over a
weekend as a group of friends who met at the University of Michigan, Kasdan’s alma
mater, reunite to bury Alex, the group’s lodestar. For Kasdan, an uncompromising
idealist, Alex’s suicide symbolized the passing of the ’60s and the folly of clinging to
its memory.
Alex’s death leads Sarah (Close), Karen (JoBeth Williams), Meg (Mary Kay Place),
Michael (Jeff Goldblum), and Sam (Tom Berenger) to decry the choices they have
made, the lives they have lived, and the people they have become since college. Kasdan
neither agrees with these lamentations nor works to privilege them. Indeed, he uses
four other characters to complicate or condemn this elegiac narrative.
Two of these characters are outsiders to the group. Coming of age after the ’60s,
Chloe (Meg Tilly), Alex’s last girlfriend, accuses his friends of romanticizing Alex.

33
Big Chill, The

Coming of age before the ’60s,

Richard (Don Galloway), Karen’s
husband, objects to their whini-
ness and self-absorption. Taken
together, Chloe and Richard
bracket the ’60s generation and
offer an unflattering commentary
on its allegedly defining charac-
teristics.
From within the group, Har-
old (Kevin Kline) and Nick (Wil-
liam Hurt) offer similarly caustic
assessments. Harold, a successful
entrepreneur who migrated from
rust belt to Sunbelt, finds the
self-flagellation tiresome. He even
questions the efficacy of ’60s
activism. Nick, a Vietnam veteran
rendered impotent by the war,
functions as Kasdan’s mouth-
piece. Significantly, Nick gets the
last word on their “activism” and
their “friendship.” For the latter,
he denies that they shared a pro-
Director Lawrence Kasdan (front) stands with the male cast found bond. As he reminds them,
of his film The Big Chill. Pictured are actors (left to right) they knew each other only for a
Tom Berenger, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and William short time and then grew
Hurt. (Columbia TriStar/Courtesy of Getty Images) estranged. In regard to their ideal-
ism and activism, he insists that
their true, authentic selves lie not
in the ideas they espoused in college but in the lives they lived afterwards. Nick then
concludes that the group mourns Alex not because he died, but because his suicide
forced them to acknowledge that, for most of them, the ideals he embodied died long
ago. Ironically, Nick’s prognosis sounds an even more reactionary note than the film’s
detractors generally discern. After all, Nick casts the ’60s generation not as sellouts,
but as poseurs who had no principles to betray, whose politics was just fashion, and
whose idealism was the painless, feckless posturing of affluent university students.
It is unclear whether these dreary pronouncements explain the film’s success or
whether other factors such as the excellent soundtrack, talented cast, or witty, albeit
somewhat superficial, script, were more responsible. What is clear, however, is that
The Big Chill remains a touchstone among mainstream films of the 1980s. It is also
clear that the film—despite its popularity—remains an anomaly among Hollywood
depictions of ’60s activism, which have tended to tell stories of activists remaining true

34
 Big Heat, The

to the spirit of the ’60s or reconnecting with their youthful idealism after a period of
apostasy.
See also: Kasdan, Lawrence

References
Klatch, Rebecca E. A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999.
Marcus, Daniel. Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural
Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Ventura, Michael. “The Big Chill Factor.” In Shadow Dancing in the USA. New York: Tarcher,
1985.
—Christopher D. Stone

BIG HEAT, THE. Democratic Senator Carey Estes Kefauver of Tennessee became
synonymous with the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate
Commerce that he convened in 1950. Kefauver’s interest in crime grew out of his con-
versations with mayors who suspected that the rackets had become so entrenched that
local authorities could make little headway against these criminals. The Kefauver hear-
ings took place over 92 days, in 14 cities, with over 600 witnesses testifying. Prominent
gangland figures, among them Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello,
appeared before the committee. Not only did these televised hearings wreck certain
political careers and advance others, they also revealed for the first time a criminal syn-
dicate referred to as the Mafia. Furthermore, Kefauver discovered that this Mafia was
entwined willingly or unwillingly with local governments. Revelations of organized
crime’s pervasive corruption of America’s justice system captivated American television
audiences. The Kefauver hearings garnered double the ratings of the previous year’s
World Series. Life magazine wrote: “Never before had the attention of the nation been
so completely riveted on a single matter. The Senate investigation into interstate crime
was almost the sole subject of national conversation.”
The Kefauver hearings also exerted considerable influence on Hollywood, playing a
part in the conception of a new sub-genre of films: crime movies about Mafia corrup-
tion in city administration. After the hearings, Hollywood studios began releasing pic-
tures such as The Enforcer (1951), which included a prefatory statement by Kefauver,
The Mob (1951), Kansas City Confidential (1952), Captive City (1952), and Hoodlum
Empire (1952). Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) belongs to this sub-genre. The Aus-
trian director, who eventually immigrated to America, was no stranger to the subject
of organized crime. Indeed, in one of his early European films, the classic Dr. Mabuse,
he created the prototypical character of the elite criminal mastermind. In addition to
making Mabuse sequels, Lang also went on to depict an underground crime organiza-
tion in M (1930), his brilliant thriller that dealt with the psychological perversity of the
criminal mind, and which began to define the look and feel of what would come to be
known as film noir.

35
Big Heat, The

After coming to America,

Lang began to pave the way for a
future generation of filmmakers
with pictures such as The Big
Heat. Extending the noir themes
that marked films such as Mabuse
and M, The Big Heat explored
police corruption and a metro-
politan crime syndicate operating
in the fictional town of Kenport.
David Bannion (Glenn Ford), a
tough-talking, two-fisted, homi-
cide police sergeant bent on
revenge, sets out to bring down a
violent crime ring. A corrupt
cop, Tom Duncan, commits sui-
cide and leaves a detailed letter
for the district attorney that
explains his relationship with
hoodlum chieftain Mike Lagana
(urbane Alexander Scourby).
Duncan’s greedy wife Bertha
(Jeanette Nolan) wants the pay-
offs to continue, so she hides the
Gloria Grahame as Debby Marsh and Glenn Ford as Dave
letter and blackmails Lagana for
Bannion from the 1953 film The Big Heat, directed by Fritz
Lang and produced by Columbia Pictures Corporation. $500 a week. Bannion appreci-
(Hulton Archive/Getty Images) ates the magnitude of his latest
case. “When a cop kills himself,
they want a full report,” he says
to a fellow police detective at the scene of the suicide. Bannion generates a lot of hos-
tility in compiling that “full report,” not only among the paranoid criminal figures
but also among his superiors—some of whom are on the take.
When the hero’s pretty wife Katie (Marlon’s older sister Jocelyn Brando) dies from a
car bomb meant for him, Bannion turns up the heat on the criminals and sends his
daughter off to live with some friends while he starts brutally tracking down the bad
guys. Eventually, since the police commissioner is on Lagana’s payroll, Bannion quits
the force and goes after the criminals on his own, before some of his honest colleagues
decide to support him. Bannion eventually turns into a rogue investigator who does
not seem much different from the thugs that he wants to arrest for the murder of his
innocent, defenseless wife.
In the end, Lang, harkening back to what he did in Mabuse and M, leaves viewers in
doubt at the end of The Big Heat by troping the customary noir model. Instead of
women destroying men in this unsettling film, just the opposite occurs: Bannion,
who is warned by a colleague about his “hate binge,” winds up destroying four women,

36
 Big Parade, The

including his own wife, in his crusade for justice. Lang, it seems, was seeking to provide
his American audiences with a cautionary tale about the dangers of overzealous inves-
tigation.
See also: Film Noir; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The; Lang, Fritz

References
Armour, Robert A. Fritz Lang. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Villard Books, 1993.
—Van Roberts

BIG PARADE, THE. For director King Vidor, The Big Parade (1925) was the first
“honest war picture.” Written in part by Laurence Stallings, co-author of the popular
play What Price Glory? and an ex-Marine who lost his leg in France, Vidor believed
the story cut through fantasies about courageous officers and glorious battles. In the
wake of World War I, Vidor sought to explore the question that was so often posed:
“Why do we have war?” The director approached this theme from “the soldier’s
viewpoint,” focusing on the common experiences of American “doughboys.” Viewed
by some as patriotic, and by others as an antiwar statement, the silent film resonated
with post-WWI audiences hoping to better understand their father’s, son’s and
brother’s war.
The film portrays the experiences of three young men from varying social classes,
who, for one reason or another, join the U.S. Army after President Woodrow Wilson
calls for a declaration of war against Germany. James Apperson (John Gilbert), the
son of a millionaire factory owner; Bull O’Hara (Tom O’Brien), a bartender; and
Slim Jensen (Karl Dane), a “blue-collar” steelworker, all follow the march to war in
Europe. The social differences that kept them apart in civilian life are overcome
when Jim, Slim, and Bull form intimate wartime bonds during their training and
in battle.
The idea that patriotic causes can unite men into a nationalistic brotherhood would
ultimately become a foundational notion of the World War II films that were made
during the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Unlike films about World War II, however, the vision
of war in The Big Parade is one that is devoid of heroes: it is purposeless and wasteful.
Though Slim proves himself skilled at killing, he quickly becomes someone else’s vic-
tim. When Bull and Jim attempt to rescue Slim, Bull is killed and Jim suffers a crip-
pling leg wound. Infuriated by the death of both of his friends, Jim shoots a German
sniper; poised to strike the final blow he cannot bring himself to finish off his enemy
with a bayonet. In a surprisingly compassionate moment of self-awareness, Jim instead
gives the dying man one last cigarette.
Although Vidor did not believe the film was necessarily an antiwar statement, he
thought it would elicit an “antiwar feeling” in audiences. Jim’s homecoming, for in-
stance, reinforced the reality that the physical and emotional scars of war last far

37
Big Sleep, The

beyond the “heroics” of the battlefield. He survives the war, but he does not return
home a hero. Instead, the war costs him his “brothers,” one of his legs, and the love
of his longtime girlfriend Justyn (Claire Adams). Jim’s love for Melisande (Renée
Adorée), a young Frenchwoman, is perhaps the only good that comes to him from
the war. In a sentimental turn at the end of the picture, Jim travels back to Europe
and reunites with Melisande.
While the film’s portrayal of lost youth certainly struck a chord with post-WWI
Americans, it is perhaps the epic scope of Vidor’s film and its realistic representation
of trench warfare that truly captivated audiences. Indeed, the director strove for
authenticity in every scene. In preparation for making the picture, he watched dozens
of hours of U.S. Army Signal Corps combat footage. He also hired two former soldiers
as technical advisors and asked the War Department for 200 trucks, 3,000 to
4,000 men, and 100 airplanes. Although Vidor did not always follow his advisors’ sug-
gestions, the combination of his ingenuity and the military’s resources allowed the
director to produce a film that depicted as closely as possible the actual experiences
of soldiers in combat.
Widely regarded as one of the finest war films of any era, The Big Parade was Vidor’s
first major picture, as well as MGM Studios’ first big box-office success. It played at the
Astor Theater on Broadway for two years and the Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in
Hollywood for six months. After a few years, the $245,000 production had grossed
more than $15 million. The picture had a profound influence on Lewis Milestone,
who would go on to make another iconic war film: All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930). Ultimately, The Big Parade was not only a soaring technical achievement, it
was one of the most important filmic representations of the horrors of war.
See also: War Film, The; Vidor, King

References
Durgnat, Raymond, and Scott Simmon. King Vidor, American. Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1988.
Isenberg, Michael T. “The Great War Viewed from the Twenties: The Big Parade.” In Rollins,
Peter C., and John E. O’Connor, eds. Hollywood’s World War I: Motion Picture Images. Bowl-
ing Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997.
Suid, Lawrence H. Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Lexing-
ton: University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
—Jeremy K. Saucier

BIG SLEEP, THE. Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) is remembered today
mainly for two things: its impossibly convoluted plot, and the offscreen romance
between its two principal actors, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Though often
subsumed under the film noir rubric, Hawks’s film in fact exhibits relatively few of that
genre’s distinctive characteristics, and it can best be studied as one of a number of off-
beat crime movies—along with the novels that inspired them—that achieved enor-
mous popularity during the ’40s.

38
 Big Sleep, The

Hawks’s screenwriters, William

Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and
Jules Furthman, stayed as close to
the twisty plot of Raymond Chan-
dler’s 1939 novel of the same
name as human ingenuity and
the Production Code would allow.
In both the original novel and the
film, Chandler’s iconic hero/anti-
hero, Philip Marlowe (Bogart), is
hired by a wheelchair-bound mil-
lionaire named General Stern-
wood (Charles Waldron) to settle
the gambling debts of his
nymphomaniacal younger daugh-
ter Carmen (Martha Vickers),
who is being blackmailed by
underworld figures, and whose
wild behavior poses a threat to
the entire family. In addition,
Marlowe is urged to find the
whereabouts of a Sean Regan—
the General’s assistant and pro-
tégé—who has gone missing under
mysterious circumstances. Before Promotional poster for the film The Big Sleep, starring mar-
long, these two plot lines converge ried actors Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, directed by
Howard Hawks, 1946. (Warner Bros./Getty Images)
as Marlowe discovers that Regan
is not missing but dead, and that
the gambler who is blackmailing Carmen—Eddie Mars (John Ridgely)—knows that it
was Carmen, in a jealous rage, who killed Regan, hence the blackmail. In the book, the
General’s older daughter Vivian (Bacall) is well aware of her sister’s crime and conspires
with Mars to cover it up, an unpleasant situation that Hollywood could not abide, so that
by film’s end, when Mars is mistakenly killed by his own men, Vivian promises Marlowe
that Carmen will be institutionalized, while the blame for Regan’s death will be pinned on
the now-deceased Mars.
Even in bare-bones summary, this story line sounds confusing, and to add to the
viewer’s perplexity, there is at least one murder that remains unaccounted for. As legend
has it, when Bogart innocently asked Hawks “Who pushed Taylor [a minor character
whom we never meet] off the pier?” Hawks turned to Faulkner, who had no idea.
The studio then telegrammed Chandler, hoping that at least the author would know
the answer, but even he was unable to resolve this mystery. Nor are the relationships
among the principal characters any clearer.
Fearing that the Hays Office would censor any faithful rendering of the literary
original, Hawks’s screenwriting team was forced merely to hint at Carmen’s

39
Big Sleep, The

drug-and-sex addiction while completely suppressing any suggestion of a conspiracy

engineered by her older sister. As for the assortment of gangsters and lowlife figures that
cluster around the sisters, we never really probe the extent of their intimacy with the
Sternwood girls, simply because they are conveniently dispatched in the course of the
movie by having them shoot each other in what sometimes seems like a particularly
deadly game of musical chairs. Marlowe, of course, survives largely unscathed, and by
the end of the film has both an alibi for the police and Vivian Sternwood well in hand.
Though movie critics have complained loudly and often about the sheer implau-
sibility of this film, contemporary audiences clearly enjoyed watching Bogart and
Bacall engage in verbal foreplay, and as the 1940s embodiment of cynical courage
and defiant wit, Bogart quickly became the moral and emotional focal point of this
film. In a sense, Bogart’s Marlowe is a reprise of his earlier portrayal of Sam Spade in
The Maltese Falcon (1941), where his detective-hero displays the same shrewd worldli-
ness and remarkable survival instincts in the face of violence and duplicity that
Marlowe is forced to rely on. This is, after all, the age of the “hard-boiled” private
eye—or “shamus” as Marlowe calls himself—and along with Dashiell Hammett and
James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler was responsible for elevating pulp fiction charac-
ters to a level of literary respectability that they had not hitherto enjoyed. Hawks
sensed that Bogart’s appeal to wartime moviegoers was in part his ability to project
coolness under fire, and even when no one is pointing a gun at him, Bogart’s demeanor
suggests that he knows his life is perpetually on the line.
There are two substantially different versions of The Big Sleep, and each version repre-
sents a different stage in the editing and distribution of this film. The first version was
released in 1945, to American soldiers stationed in the Philippines, and it contains a
somewhat lengthy scene in which Marlowe explains to a skeptical D.A. just what role
he has played in the Sternwood case, and all the killings that surround it. In the second
version, released commercially a year later, 18 minutes of the original print were edited
out, and 20 additional minutes of additional scenes, consisting largely of sexual banter
between Bogart and Bacall, were added in. It is this later version of the movie with which
most viewers and critics are familiar, and although the second edition of The Big Sleep
leaves audiences puzzled about who kills whom, its compensating virtue is that it leaves
no one in doubt about the romantic relationship of its high-profile protagonists.
See also: Film Noir; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The; Hawks, Howard; Hays
Office and Censorship, The

References and Further Reading

Ballinger, Alexander, and Danny Graydon. The Rough Guide to Film Noir. London: Penguin,
2007.
Hillier, Jim, and Peter Wollen, eds. Howard Hawks: American Artist. London: British Film Insti-
tute, 1997.
Silver, Alain, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini, and Robert Porfirio, eds. The Film Noir Encyclo-
pedia. London: Duckworth Overlook, 2010.

—Robert Platzner

40
 Birth of a Nation, The

BIRTH OF A NATION, THE. In 1915, D. W. Griffith released his artistically stun-

ning yet intensely disturbing film Birth of a Nation. Griffith’s picture was adapted from
the Thomas Dixon novel The Clansman, a work that depicted the post–Civil War Ku
Klux Klan as the last, best hope of Southern whites beset by emancipated, maniacal
blacks. A native of North Carolina and a popular Baptist minister, Dixon claimed that
he had written The Clansman in an attempt to “awaken the American people to the
Black Peril.” Giving expression to a divisive dogma built on a foundation of “fervent
racism and the fear of sexual relations between blacks and whites,” Dixon used his
novel to ridicule “Black Reconstruction and the desire of Negroes to attain political
rights” (Sklar, 1994).
Born in 1864, one year before the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the
conflict-ridden Reconstruction period that extended from 1865 through 1877, Dixon
was only eight years old when he reportedly accompanied his uncle to a session of the
South Carolina legislature. Growing up surrounded by whites who wanted nothing
more than to “redeem” the antebellum South, Dixon became increasingly upset by
what he believed to be the “false and biased” reports concerning the Civil War and
Reconstruction that were being circulated by northerners. Believing that he had an
obligation to “set the record straight” in regard to his beloved southern homeland,
Dixon committed himself to writing a Reconstruction trilogy, the first volume of
which would be entitled The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden
(Mintz and Roberts, 2001).
Originally published in 1903, The Leopard’s Spots was an immediate success, selling
100,000 copies in a few short months and eventually being translated into numerous
foreign languages. Dixon now became a highly sought-after lecturer and writer, whose
fame and fortune allowed him to begin the second volume of his trilogy, The Clans-
man: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, which he wrote in a scant 30 days.
Two years later, the three-book set would be completed when Dixon finished the final
volume, The Traitor: A Story of the Rise and Fall of the Invisible Empire.
Emboldened by the enormous success of The Clansman, Dixon began to think that
the novel might be turned into a drama that could be performed onstage. Working on
the project himself, Dixon was able, in a matter of months during 1905, to rewrite the
story of The Clansman as a dramatic play. When it eventually went on tour, the power-
ful production attracted what were large audiences for a stage production and was ulti-
mately heralded as “The Greatest Play of the South. . . . A Thrilling Romance of the Ku
Klux Klan.” Although Dixon was proud of what he had accomplished as a playwright,
he believed, correctly it seems, that the “endless repetition of plot and scene before rel-
atively small audiences was not a very effective medium for the dissemination of ideas”
(Franklin, 2001). Books, too, he felt, although a powerful tool for spreading one’s mes-
sage, and one that he would continue to use, were “limited in their appeal” in regard to
a national audience. There was, however, a new medium that was becoming more and
more popular, the motion picture, which Dixon believed would be perfect for deliver-
ing his message to the vast population of the United States.
The problem with converting The Clansman to film, however, as Dixon learned
when he shopped the novel to motion picture producers, was that the cinema to this

41
Birth of a Nation, The

point had been used mainly to communicate

short comedic or action sequences. The Clans-
man, said the producers whom Dixon
approached, was “too long, too serious, and
too controversial.” Dixon did not give up on
his dream, however, and at the end of 1913 he
was rewarded for his perseverance when he
was introduced by Harry E. Aitken to a bold,
young director named David Wark Griffith.
Griffith, who was from Kentucky and the son
of a Confederate officer, apparently swallowed
Dixon’s hateful message whole and agreed to
make the picture.
Significantly, where movies at this time were
generally 10- to 12-minute-long, one- or two-
reelers, Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was a
$100,000 12-reeler that ran over three hours
in length. A cinematic masterpiece, the film
used techniques such as irising, close-ups,
split-screen images, tracking shots, mood-
setting lighting, and cross-cutting to influence
the viewer’s experience. After a documentary-
style opening segment that instructed audiences
on the origins of slavery in America, the
abolitionist response to this “peculiar institu-
tion,” and the inexorable turn toward the “great
Civil War”—”The bringing of the African to
America planted the first seed of disunion,” we
are told on an intertitle card—the film follows
the story of two families, the Camerons and
the Stonemans, as they make their way from
the antebellum to postbellum periods of the
mid-nineteenth century.
The first half of Birth of a Nation focuses on
the antebellum lead-up to the war and the war
years themselves. Setting the scene for what is
to come, Griffith opens the narrative portion
of his film by introducing the two families.
D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a
Nation, a paean to the Civil War Ku Klux The Camerons—mother, father, two daugh-
Klan, sparked controversy throughout the ters, and three sons—are elite planters from
country and contributed to the emergence of Piedmont, South Carolina, who have carved
a second KKK. (Library of Congress) out an idyllic, genteel plantation existence.
Masters to a vast slave population, the
Cameron men see themselves as benevolent fathers to their loyal, childlike servants,

42
 Birth of a Nation, The

who happily labor in their “parents’ ” extensive cotton fields. The Stonemans are
northerners from Pennsylvania; they are led by their powerful and morally upright
patriarch Austin Stoneman, a United States senator—patterned after the Radical
Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Stevens—a staunch
abolitionist, and father to two sons and a beautiful daughter, Elsie (Lillian Gish).
The Cameron and Stoneman boys are boarding-school friends. Although worlds
apart ideologically, the families are linked by their elite cultural positions. Missing
the company of their friends, the Stoneman sons, Phil (Elmer Clifton) and Tod
(Robert Harron) travel to the Camerons’ Piedmont estate. While there, Phil falls in
love with the Camerons’ eldest daughter, Margaret (Miriam Cooper); and, shown a
picture of Elsie, Benjamin (Henry B. Walthall), the eldest Cameron son, realizes that
she will be the love of his life: “He finds the ideal of his dreams in the picture of Elsie
Stoneman, his friend’s sister, whom he has never seen.”
The war, of course, tears the families apart, as both pledge themselves to their
respective, “just” sides—“Conquer We Must for Our Cause is Just: Victory or Death,”
reads a flag carried by Southern troops. A microcosm of the masses who are involved
in the conflict, the Camerons and Stonemans experience the death, destruction,
and despair of the struggle. Representing the unity of the families, Benjamin—the
“Little Colonel”—and Elsie are finally joined together in an army hospital where
Elsie has volunteered and Ben languishes near death from wounds experienced on
the battlefield.
In the second half of The Birth of a Nation, Griffith made it clear that although the
war finally ended, the North’s victory in the conflict continued to have dire consequen-
ces for whites in the South. Returning home after his wounds are healed, Ben
finds the family estate, and the South in general, devastated by the war. Subject to
the Reconstruction policies of the Radical Republicans in Congress, southern whites
are now terrorized by the formerly docile slaves who are whipped into a frenzy by
Carpetbaggers and “uppity negroes” from the North. Allowed to run free, once loyal
servants are now used in an attempt to “crush the white South under the hell of the
Black South.”
Portrayed as vengeful, petulant, spoiled, even lustful children, blacks—played in the
film by whites in blackface—are shown pushing whites off of sidewalks into the streets,
taunting white families, and acting like imbeciles in the legislative halls of the South,
where they sneak drinks from hidden flasks of liquor, remove their shoes only to expose
their malodorous feet, and pass tyrannical laws that act to oppress what are now dis-
possessed whites. Griffith brings things to a disturbing, dramatic climax in what has
become one of the film’s most iconic scenes: the renegade Gus (Walter Long), unable
to control his insatiable desire for the youngest Cameron daughter, chases after her
until she finds herself forced to the edge of a towering cliff; terrified, and perhaps
deciding that death is preferable to being violated by an indomitable “black buck,”
she topples from the precipice.
It is at this point, when all hope seems lost, that the mighty, masked force of the Ku
Klux Klan rides to the rescue. Cross-cutting among four scenes in one of cinema’s most
memorable technological moments—Elsie Stoneman being symbolically raped by the

43
Birth of a Nation, The

mulatto Silas Lynch, members of the Stoneman and Cameron family besieged by
blacks in a tiny cabin on the edge of town, Piedmont overrun by a frenzied black
mob, and a glorious collection of elegantly attired Klansmen desperately riding in to
save the frightened victims from their horrendous fate—Griffith presented audiences
with a breathtaking, and stunningly modern, final sequence. Arriving just in the nick
of time, the rescue of all by the masked riders of the Klan provided viewers with a
happy and redemptive ending.
Once the film was finished, Griffith graced it with a new name, changing the picture’s
title from The Clansman to The Birth of a Nation. This was necessary, it seems, because
in Griffith’s mind, and certainly in Dixon’s, this was precisely what this vastly important
narrative was about: “the creation of a new nation after years of struggle and division, a
nation of Northern and Southern whites united ‘in common defence of their Aryan
birthright,’ with the vigilante riders of the Klan as their symbol” (Sklar, 1994).
Although the reaction to The Birth of a Nation was positive when it was initially
screened in New York in February 1915, resistance to the wide release of the film was
formidable. A large number of Americans thought that the film was “a travesty against
truth as well as an insult to an entire race of people,” and they were “determined to pre-
vent the showing of the film,” working tirelessly to “bring about its doom” (Franklin,
2001). Many underestimated the resourcefulness and unbounded energy of Dixon, how-
ever, who worked equally hard to ensure that this film would be seen by millions of
Americans. Amazingly, Dixon was able to turn to the president of the United States,
Woodrow Wilson, for assistance in accomplishing his goal, as he and Wilson had
become friends when they were both students at Johns Hopkins University. Dixon rea-
soned that if the president approved of the picture, this would go a long way toward
silencing those who were seeking to censor it. Dixon approached Wilson at the White
House and was warmly greeted by the president. When asked if he would attend a
screening of the film at a community theater, Wilson informed Dixon that although
he was interested in seeing the picture, he was still mourning the death of his wife and
thus it would be unseemly for him to be seen out in public for such an event. If Dixon
could arrange to have the film shown in the East Room of the White House, however,
the president, his family, and the members of the cabinet and their families would be
happy to view it. On February 18, The Birth of a Nation was screened in the White
House for the president and his guests. After watching the film, Wilson is purported
to have uttered, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it
is all so terribly true.”
Dixon did not stop at showing the film to the president; he went on to show it to
the members of the Supreme Court and many members of the Senate and the House
of Representatives at a formal gathering in the ballroom of the Raleigh Hotel in
Washington. The Chief Justice of the Court, Edward D. White, initially rejected Dix-
on’s offer to view the film, declaring that he was not interested in motion pictures and
that he and the other members of the court had far better things to do with their time.
But once Dixon explained to him that the film was the “true story of Reconstruction
and the redemption of the South by the Ku Klux Klan,” the Chief Justice, who
informed Dixon that he himself had been a member of the Klan, agreed to see the

44
 Birth of a Nation, The

picture. With the support of the president and members of both Congress and the
Supreme Court, much of the resistance to the film from censors was muted. Although
there continued to be a great deal of opposition to the film, and some cities still refused
to screen it, The Birth of a Nation ultimately opened in New York on March 3, 1915,
playing to huge audiences for 47 weeks at the Liberty Theater. Eventually, the film
played to audiences across the country, and although figures like Jane Addams, the
founder of Hull House in Chicago, and Booker T. Washington, the influential African
American leader, condemned the film, it received glowing reviews.
It was not a coincidence that the release of The Birth of a Nation coincided with the
rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had first emerged during the Reconstruction
period. Founded in 1866 as a sort of fraternal “social group” by a collection of
southern veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, the Klan soon became a “powerful and fright-
ening vehicle of vigilante violence and lawlessness.” By 1871, anti-Klan legislation and
congressional investigations into the group diminished the influence of the movement,
although its heritage remained a powerful force in American society throughout the
rest of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it was the legacy of the Reconstruction-period
Klan that moved historians, novelists, and filmmakers to produce their twentieth-
century paeans to the movement. This latter-day support for the ideology of the origi-
nal Klan gave rise to a second and perhaps even more troubling alliance, a so-called
“second Klan,” which was founded at Stone Mountain, Georgia, by William J. Sim-
mons and later taken over by the incredibly powerful, future Imperial Wizard of the
movement, Hiram W. Evans. Although still a violent organization, the twentieth-
century “Knights of the Invisible Empire” differed from the original, Reconstruction-
era Klan in that it attracted millions of men, and women, not just from the South
but from all over America (Boyer 2001).
While Birth of a Nation was clearly a cinematic celebration of the original Ku Klux
Klan and a filmic justification for the rise of the second Klan, perhaps what was even
more significant about the picture was how successful it was in helping to develop a
virulent twentieth-century antiblack sensibility in the United States. The film not only
reinforced antebellum and postbellum images of blacks—Sambo, Mammy, Uncle, Zip
Coon, Pickaninny, Black Buck—but recast them in what was an even more destructive
twentieth-century form. This was especially true in regard to the image of the young
black male, whose “vicious bestiality,” which had been depicted as frighteningly
obvious during the nineteenth century, Griffith now portrayed as being cunningly hid-
den behind the grotesque mask of the grinning, sycophantic “darkie.” For many,
including some of the most important people in the United States, Griffith’s picture
became the filmic representation of America’s struggle against insidious blacks, who,
argued Imperial Wizard Evans, were responsible for causing the first cracks in Ameri-
ca’s moral foundation during the tragic period of the nation’s late nineteenth-century
history. Even worse, suggested Evans, was that during the twentieth century, the
“sacredness of [America’s] sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and finally even of our
right to teach our children in our own schools . . . ” were being threatened not only
by blacks but by Catholics, Jews, Southern and Eastern European immigrants, civil
libertarians, and socialists (Carnes 1995).

45
Blade Runner

In the end, The Birth of a Nation was a vastly important film not only because it
acted as a panegyric to the rise of the first Klan and provided cinematic legitimation
for the explosive growth of the second Klan, but also because it helped to define the
destructive racial boundaries that were put in place during the first part of the twenti-
eth century. Indeed, the racist themes articulated in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation would
set the tone for the filmic depiction of the WWI combat “enemy” as a heartless and
debased threat to the civilized world, one that needed to be stopped at all costs.
See also: African Americans in Film; Griffith, D. W.; Silent Era, The

References
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in
American Films. New York: Continuum, 2007.
Franklin, John Hope. “Birth of a Nation—Propaganda as History.” In Mintz, Steven, and
Randy Roberts, eds. Hollywood’s America: United States History through Its Films. St. James,
NY: Brandywine Press, 2001.
Litwack, Leon F. “The Birth of a Nation.” In Carnes, Mark C., ed. Past Imperfect: History
According to the Movies. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
Moore, Leonard J. “Ku Klux Klan.” In Boyer, Paul S., ed. The Oxford Companion to United
States History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001: 425.
Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Vintage,
1994.
—Philip C. DiMare

BLADE RUNNER. Director Ridley Scott’s 1982 feature is still visually stunning,
even by contemporary standards. Combining the best of science fiction and film noir
by way of a novel by the ubiquitous Philip K. Dick, whose stories formed the basis
for numerous other films including Total Recall (1990) and Minority Report (2002),
Blade Runner is still the example by which all other films depicting a futuristic dysto-
pian society are judged. Scott’s vision of Los Angeles in 2019 is dark, gritty, dominated
by Asians, continually soaked by rain, and covered with clouds. Harrison Ford leads
the cast with his sardonic portrayal of Rick Deckard, a “blade runner” who is hired
to find and terminate some rogue replicants, service cyborgs who have turned on their
human masters. Since the replicants are nearly impossible to detect when mixed in
with the human population, Deckard is forced to do basic detective work in order to
find them. The four escapees are military model replicants who return to earth because
they are motivated by a desire to extend their purposefully limited four-year life span.
They are led by Roy, played with terrifying charm by Rutger Hauer, and they have
begun to develop human emotions they are not prepared to process. Further compli-
cating matters is the fact that Roy has developed a romantic relationship with Pris
(Daryl Hannah), a “pleasure model” replicant.
Blade Runner was one of the first features to have a “director’s cut,” and releases of
the various versions have forced fans and critics alike to reassess their perspectives on

46
 Blade Runner

the film. Critical responses to the film were mixed when it opened in 1982, but became
more positive with rereleases of the original film and releases of Scott’s different direc-
tor’s cuts. Early influential critics such as Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert derided the
inhumanity of the original film, with the former concluding that the picture had not
been “thought out in human terms” and the latter suggesting that Blade Runner is com-
prised of “dreams of mechanical men.” By the time the film was rereleased in 2007,
however, Ebert, buoyed by 25 years of Blade Runner-influenced cinema, embraced it
as part of the modern cinematic canon.
One of the disquieting paradoxes of the film, especially Scott’s first director’s cut,
concerns the question of whether or not Deckard is a replicant. A close viewing of this
version shows that Deckard may very well not be human, although we can never quite
be sure. Clues to the fact that he is, indeed, a replicant are scattered throughout the
film: the pictures in his apartment are evocative of a bygone era because they are
fabrications based on his implanted memories; the police suggest that Deckard is
needed to track down the replicants because he is undoubtedly the best “man” for
the job, but it is clear that he, like the replicants, is expendable; and the beautiful rep-
licant Rachel, who believes that she is human, questions Deckard as to whether or not
he has ever taken the replicant test or killed a human by mistake—all clearly signs that
the audience should question Deckard’s humanity. The film, it seems, continually
blurs the boundaries between what is human and what replicates humanity.
Blade Runner also functions, it may be argued, as a moral parable. The replicants, in
the metaphorical role of so many of America’s human Others, come to Earth precisely
because it is the only place where they stand a chance of extending their lives. Having
achieved a sense of self-awareness, they are desperate to escape their preordained fate.
In the end, however, they still must be eliminated. There is a climactic moment of
Christlike redemption, though. In an attempt to prevent his systems from shutting
down, Roy, representing the crucified Christ, pierces his palm with a nail and “for-
gives” Deckard before he expires. As Roy’s systems shut down, bringing on his own
nonhuman brand of death, his “soul” is symbolically released in the form of a dove
who floats upward, giving us a glimpse of the only patch of blue sky we have seen
during this entire dark film. Whether moving toward a sort of heaven, or merely
toward oblivion, we are left to decide.
See also: Action-Adventure, The; Film Noir; Science Fiction Film, The; Scott, Ridley

References
Ebert, Roger. “Blade Runner: The Final Cut.” Chicago Sun-Times, November 3, 2007. Available
at http://www.rogerebert.com.
Ebert, Roger. “Blade Runner.” Chicago Sun—Times, June 2, 1982. Available at http://
www.rogerebert.com.
Kael, Pauline. “Blade Runner: Baby, the Rain Must Fall.” In For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies.
New York: Penguin, 1994: 944–49.
—James M. Brandon

47
Blair Witch Project, The

BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THE. The Blair Witch Project (1999) is a horror film
with the look and feel of a documentary shot with a handycam. In this unique work,
three young filmmakers lose their way in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while
making a documentary about their search for the legendary Blair Witch. The Blair
Witch Project created a stir because of its alternative style, cult status, and small budget.
For movie audiences today, the shaky camera movement, extensive use of oblique
angles, and the self-conscious use of equipment are not quite as startling given that
more recent films, such as Cloverfield (2008) and District 9 (2009), make use of these
techniques as well. In contrast to similar mainstream movies, however, The Blair Witch
Project occupies a distinct place in American filmmaking not only because of the way it
was made and its budget, but because it generated a significant following by way of
some creative marketing. A website created by the movie’s producers, along with the
release of the mockumentary Curse of the Blair Witch (1999) (the latter was produced
by Haxan films—which released Blair Witch—for the Sci-Fi Channel before the
release of The Blair Witch Project) promoted not only the film but the entire Blair
Witch phenomenon. Indeed, by the time the actual film was released, there had already
been extensive Internet discussions about this highly anticipated movie (Higley and
Weinstock, 2003). The carefully crafted myth surrounding this independent film,
then, helped to establish it as a cult classic in American cinema.

Heather Donahue turns the camera on herself during a harrowing five-day journey through Maryland’s
Black Hills Forest in the 1999 low-budget thriller The Blair Witch Project. The film, a mock documen-
tary, is about three students who trek into the Black Hills Forest outside of Burkittsville, Maryland to
shoot a documentary about a local legend, “The Blair Witch.” (Artisan Entertainment/Getty Images)

48
 Blair Witch Project, The

Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez and produced by the independent
film company Haxan Films, The Blair Witch Project was released by Artisan Entertain-
ment in 1999. The most widely cited budget for The Blair Witch Project is $35,000;
amazingly, however, the film earned nearly $30 million in its first weekend (Harris,
2001). The production company consisted of five former graduates of the University
of Central Florida, who used documentary techniques to help create the “realistic”
look of the film. Significantly, it may be argued that the film was a precursor to a spate
of contemporary television series about the paranormal that make use of similar light-
ing, editing and camera techniques to create suspenseful supernatural dramas. The use
of overexposed lighting for faces and the shaky movement of the handycam are now
ubiquitous in paranormal television shows such as Most Haunted, Psychic Investigators,
and Rescue Mediums, all of which, like The Blair Witch Project, rely on the fusion of
documentary techniques and supernatural content.
It may be that the popularity of The Blair Witch Project was largely due to the pur-
ported “realism” of the picture. Interestingly, prior to the 1999 release, the producers
declared that the footage was indeed “real”; and they reiterated this in Curse of the
Blair Witch (1999). Further, the film itself projects at least a kind of pseudo-realism
by omitting the traditional opening credits of a narrative film and providing audi-
ences with an introductory statement in which it is claimed that the film consists of
footage found after three filmmakers disappeared in the woods around Burkittsville,
Maryland.
Arguably, the cult status of the film may be attributed to the self-reflexive creation
of a Blair Witch phenomenon through the use of various media. It would seem that
those familiar with the faked BBC documentary television drama Ghostwatch—
supposedly a live telecast from a haunted house in London with real television
journalists on hand—would have approached the claims that the events depicted
in Blair Witch were in fact real with more suspicion. Given that most Americans
were probably not aware of the controversy that surrounded Ghostwatch, however,
as well as the very different contexts within which these supernatural narratives were
consumed (United States versus United Kingdom), and the different modes of
audience response (Internet communities in the United States as opposed to letter
writing and telephone feedback in the United Kingdom), it is not surprising that
Ghostwatch was exposed as a fake, while The Blair Witch Project became the
phenomenon it became.
The sequel to The Blair Witch Project, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000),
directed by documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger did not enjoy the financial or critical
success of its predecessor. Oddly enough, the storyline focused on a group of people
examining the fandom surrounding The Blair Witch Project, and the widespread public
interest in the legend of a witch near Burkittsville. While the film’s premise of self-
consciously examining the concept of cult films in general is an interesting example
of intertextual play, the sequel lacked the aesthetic minimalism of the first film; instead
it tried to make the Blair witch more tangible and sensationalistic by including depic-
tions of violence and gore more commonly associated with the typical horror film. In
the end, then, it may be that the horror of Book of Shadows was just too imagistically

49
Blue Velvet

present; what was lacking, perhaps, was a space for what can only be imagined—
which, most would agree, is always far more frightening.
See also: Independent Film, The

References
Harris, Martin. “The ‘Witchcraft’ of Media Manipulation: Pamela and The Blair Witch Project.”
Journal of Popular Culture 34(4), Spring 2001: 75–107.
Higley, Sarah L., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, eds. Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and
the Blair Witch Controversies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.
Jancovich, Mark, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer, and Andrew Willis, eds. Defining Cult
Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste. Manchester, UK: Manchester University
Press, 2003.
Oliver, Mary Beth, and Meghan Sanders. “The Appeal of Horror and Suspense.” In Prince,
Stephen, ed. The Horror Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Roscoe, Jane. “The Blair Witch Project: Mock-documentary Goes Mainstream.” Jump Cut 43,
July 2000: 3–8.
—Karin Beeler

BLUE VELVET. Blue Velvet (1986), written and directed by David Lynch, is a mixed
genre offering, surrealistically amalgamating film noir and elements of mystery and art
films. The title of the picture is borrowed from Bobby Vinton’s 1963 song, which is
incorporated into the story when the mysterious Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini)
sings the tune in a bar while the creepy Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) holds in his
hand a piece of blue velvet he has cut from the singer’s robe. The film became notorious
for its perverse depiction of sexuality, and for the return of Lynch’s peculiar directorial
style, both in terms of cinematography and narrative, which some thought he had
abandoned in making such critical and commercial failures as Dune (1984).
The narrative of Blue Velvet revolves around a kidnapping case: Dorothy’s husband
and son are held captive by Frank. The plot is set in motion when Jeffrey Beaumont
(Kyle MacLachlan) arrives home from college to check on his father, who has suffered
a stroke. Leaving the hospital after visiting his father, Jeffrey discovers a severed ear in a
vacant lot. He picks up the ear, takes it to the police, and an investigation ensues.
Jeffrey meets Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of the detective assigned to the case,
and they decide to start a private investigation into the life of the enigmatic Dorothy.
As they delve deeper into the mystery, Jeffrey and Sandy find themselves embroiled
in an otherworldly case marked by sexual perversion, fear, aggression, and desire.
The story concludes with a somewhat uneasy “happy ending,” with Dorothy reunited
with her son, Sandy and Jeffrey together, and the problem of the ear resolved—it turns
out that it belonged to Dorothy’s deceased husband.
Blue Velvet is replete with psychoanalytic themes. Freud’s notion of the “primal
scene,” for instance—a foundational element of the Oedipal drama during which the
child witnesses a parental moment of copulation—is literally played out in a sequence

50
 Bond Films, The

in which Jeffery, hiding in a closet and peeping out through the lamellas of the door,
observes a particularly aggressive sexual encounter between Frank and Dorothy.
Abounding in disturbing expressions of sadism, masochism, and voyeurism, the film,
says film scholar Laura Mulvey, marks out a “site of the strange persistence of the Oedi-
pus myth [in] twentieth-century popular culture” (Mulvey, 1996). Beyond being
woven through with psychoanalytic themes, Blue Velvet is also characterized by numer-
ous noir elements. Jeffrey, for instance, whose own moral standards are seriously called
into question throughout the film, finds himself powerfully drawn to Dorothy, the
older woman representative of the dangerous, raven-haired femme fatale, while he is
also carrying on his relationship with the innocent, much younger, flaxen-haired
Sandy. Literally framing his characters—almost trapping them, one might say—within
a darkly lit, high-contrast cinematographic world, he gives them the eerily ambiguous
feel of classic film noir figures.
Several of what would become Lynch’s directorial trademarks are already present in
Blue Velvet: the presence of the mysterious Yellow Man, for instance, who is the fore-
runner of other enigmatic characters—dwarves, giants—scattered throughout both
subsequent movies (Lost Highway [1997] and Mulholland Drive [2001]) and episodes
of his widely acclaimed television series, Twin Peaks (1990–91). Although it is not
always clear what Lynch is attempting to do in this picture—a feature of all his work,
it seems—Blue Velvet nevertheless remains provocative filmmaking.
See also: Lynch, David

References
Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1994.
Mulvey, Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1996.
Pfeil, Fred. “Home Fires Burning: Family Noir in Blue Velvet and Terminator 2.” In Copjec,
Joan, ed. Shades of Noir: A Reader. London: Verso, 1993.

—Zoltán Dragon

BOND FILMS, THE. Before the advent of the James Bond film series, Hollywood
treated film franchises as second-class stepchildren. Virtually every film series with
recurring characters—Twentieth Century-Fox’s Charlie Chan or Universal’s Sherlock
Holmes, for example—was comprised of low-budget B-movie offerings. Hollywood
maintained this practice until 1962, when United Artists released the first Bond film
and changed the way cinematic franchises were made.
“My name is Bond. James Bond.” Sean Connery uttered those immortal words in
the first 007 extravaganza, 1962s Dr. No, and Her Majesty’s least anonymous secret
agent has since rarely been out of the limelight. Adapted by Albert R. Broccoli and
Harry Saltzman from novels written by former British navy intelligence officer Ian
Fleming, the Bond films were forged in the crucible of the Cold War. Interestingly,
though, Bond producers refused to demonize the Soviet Union. Indeed, the USSR

51
Bond Films, The

played only a minor role in the first seven Bond pictures, with the infamous Soviet
security agency KGB replaced by the criminal organization SPECTRE, the Special
Executive for Counterespionage, Terrorist, Revenge and Execution. In fact, although
the Soviets were visible in Bond movies, they were not villains. SPECTRE tried to
pit America against the Soviets in You Only Live Twice, while SPECTRE employed
Soviet defectors to dupe a KGB agent in From Russia with Love to kill 007. During
the Roger Moore era (1973–1985), the Bonds included more Soviet characters,
but they never qualified as mortal enemies. The KGB joined forces with British
Intelligence in The Spy Who Loved Me; exposed a renegade Kremlin general commit-
ted to trigger World War III in Octopussy; and tried to eliminate a villain who threat-
ened global security in A View to a Kill. One Bond villain actually snubbed the
communists—Dr. No turned his nose up at both factions: “East and west, merely
points on the compass.”
Although Saltzman sold his half of the franchise in the 1970s, the Broccoli family
has maintained its hold on James Bond. Since the series started, the producers have
shifted the emphasis rather haphazardly between gritty realism and science fiction fan-
tasy. Ironically, Bond was first incarnated as an American. An hour-long CBS-TV
adaptation of Casino Royale in 1956 as an episode in its anthology series Climax! cast
Broadway actor Barry Nelson as “Card Sense” Jimmy Bond. The Nelson Bond, how-
ever, made no impression. Aside from Fleming’s novels, Bond disappeared for eight
years. After several false starts, Fleming’s hero made his big-screen debut in director
Terence Young’s Dr. No. Saltzman and Broccoli had persuaded reluctant United
Artists’ executives to give them a million dollars. Scenarist Richard Maibaum, who
wrote 13 Bond movies, created the basic formula. Some act of violence is perpetrated
against a British subject or some mysterius entity threatens the integrity of Her
Majesty’s Government, and British Intelligence dispatches 007 to sort things out.
Although in today’s global cinematic marketplace it may seem odd, United Artists
worried that American audiences would snub a movie with “a Limey truck driver play-
ing the lead.” Peter Hunt, who edited the first five films in the series and then directed
the sixth Bond, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, remembered the studio’s contempt for
Dr. No: “United Artists didn’t like it at all, quite frankly. They thought it was a piece
of rubbish.” The studio held no premiere for Dr. No and distributed it without fanfare
to drive-in movie theaters and in second-run Midwestern cinemas. Dr. No’s success
surprised everybody, including UA studio heads and Saltzman and Broccoli. Hunt
elaborated, “We certainly didn’t think this was going to be a series—we thought it
was just a onetime thriller.” Sean Connery attributed the runaway success of Bond pic-
tures to “a lot of sex, a lot of color, but all tastefully done . . . sort of sadism for the
entire family” (Giammarco, 2002).
President John F. Kennedy bolstered Fleming’s book sales when he said he enjoyed
the novel From Russia with Love, and Saltzman and Broccoli adapted it as the second
007 caper. In 1963, From Russia with Love proved Fleming’s exotic mixture of “sex,
sadism, and snobbery” was no fluke. Goldfinger (1964) erased any trepidation about
the profitability of the Bond franchise. Moreover, Goldfinger triggered “Bondmania.”
James Bond amounted to “a truly international phenomenon.” Time magazine

52
 Bond Films, The

recognized 007 as “the biggest mass-cult hero of the decade.” Italians referred to him
colloquially as ‘Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Thunderball (1965) made even more money
than Goldfinger.
Competitors rushed to imitate these outrageous, fast-paced, gadget-riddled, global
spectacles featuring trendy violence, witty dialogue, voluptuous damsels, and megalo-
maniacal villains. ‘Bondmania’ peaked with Connery’s last Bond, You Only Live Twice
(1967). On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) introduced unknown Australian actor
George Lazenby as Connery’s replacement. Broccoli and Saltzman decided to curb
the science fiction technology and resume the realism of From Russia with Love, but
OHMSS performed poorly. Not only did Connery return for Diamonds Are Forever
(1971), but the producers reinstated science fiction technology. Roger Moore of TV’s
The Saint replaced Connery after the latter refused to star in Live and Let Die
(1973). Saltzman sold his interest in the Bonds and left Broccoli as sole producer after
The Man with the Golden Gun (1975). Roger Moore appropriated the Bond persona
with The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). The success of these Bonds
grew out of Broccoli’s love for science fiction technology. Indeed, the success of Star
Wars had prompted Broccoli to put Bond into orbit. Conversely, these excesses later
motivated Broccoli to swing from fantasy back to realism with the gadget-less For Your
Eyes Only (1981), the nuclear warhead-themed Octopussy (1983), and 1985’s A View to
a Kill. When A View to a Kill failed, Moore withdrew from the role.
Bond proved profitable enough with Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights
(1987), but the bottom fell out of 1989’s ultrarealistic License to Kill. Broccoli had
shoved the Bond formula about as far right as he could while embracing the current
antipathy for South American drug czars. After Broccoli’s death, his daughter Barbara
and his stepson Michael G. Wilson altered the Bond series irrevocably because of esca-
lating budgets. Like Moonraker, Die Another Day took the franchise in the direction of
sci-fi technology with an invisible car. Now, Broccoli and Wilson followed in the foot-
steps of George Lucas, who had rebooted his Star Wars franchise with a trilogy of pre-
quels. Similarly, Broccoli and Wilson rebooted Bond with Daniel Craig as 007 in the
prequel/sequel Casino Royale (2006), which contained a first-ever black-and-white pre-
credit sequence. Broccoli and Wilson showed how Bond obtained his license to kill.
Craig’s Bond differed from previous Bonds. Craig played Bond as a sinister, trigger-
happy thug who shot first and asked questions later. He still drank vodka martinis,
but the producers downplayed Bond’s traditional characteristics. Nevertheless, Casino
Royale and Craig won audiences over, and the success of Bond’s adaptability continued
with Quantum of Solace (2008). Critics, however, attacked Quantum of Solace for
relieving Bond of his identity, suggesting that the film’s producers had simply tried to
imitate the streamlined Bourne trilogy, in which Matt Damon stars as the laconic
everyman—albeit with almost superhuman, super-spy abilities—Jason Bourne. The
producers, critics lamented, suppressed everything that had made James Bond
revolutionary.
The Bond villains—and what would Bond be without his villains—were fit into
various molds. They could be megalomaniacal, like Dr. No in Dr. No; Ernst Stavro
Blofeld in Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and

53
Bonnie and Clyde

Diamonds Are Forever; and Eliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies—all of whom want to
initiate war between the East and West so that the superpowers will eventually destroy
each other. The incredibly ruthless Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me and
Hugo Drax in Moonraker are so bent on domination that they actually want to destroy
civilization and begin anew. The remaining villains—Mr. Big in Live and Let Die,
Goldfinger in Goldfinger, Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun,
Aristotle Kristatos in For Your Eyes Only, Max Zorin in A View to a Kill, General Georgi
Koskov in The Living Daylights, Franz Sanchez in License to Kill, and Alec Trevelyan in
GoldenEye—are coldblooded indeed, but showed no interest in global domination.
The World Is Not Enough was the first Bond to promote a female villain, Elektra King,
who proved more powerful than her co-villain, the anarchist Renard.
Fleming’s suave but indestructible protagonist remains the most popular super-spy
hero in cinematic history. The release of more than 20 films has kept Fleming’s best-
selling novels in print, and Bond has received a new lease on life with recently penned
action novels and the advent of increasingly sophisticated video games. The release of
each new 007 picture qualifies as a worldwide media event. Indeed, James Bond’s lon-
gevity—a Cold Warrior who still exists in the early twenty-first century—testifies to his
and his fans’ adaptability.
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The

References
Bennett, Tony, and Janet Woollacott. Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero.
New York: Methuen, 1987.
Chapman, James. License to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films. New York: I. B.
Tauris, 2007.
Cork, John, and Bruce Scivally. James Bond: The Legacy. New York: Harry N. Abrams 2002.
Giammarco, David. For Your Eyes Only: Behind the Scenes of the James Bond Films. Toronto:
ECW Press, 2002.
Rubin, Steven Jay. The Complete James Bond Movie Encyclopedia. Chicago: Contemporary
Books, 1990.

—Van Roberts

BONNIE AND CLYDE. Director Arthur Penn sets Bonnie and Clyde (1967) in
motion by flicking through—as if he were using a slide projector—a series of grainy,
sepia-toned photographs that are intercut with the picture’s opening credits, which
themselves turn from white to blood red as we read them on the screen. The rapidly
displayed snapshots purport to be family photos of the legendary outlaws, although
it is difficult to tell, especially because Penn offers us two final images in the series,
one each of Bonnie and Clyde, with informational captions, that are really pictures
of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty—the actors playing the film roles—dressed up
as Bonnie and Clyde. Penn, it seems, is teasing us a bit with this intriguing opening,

54
 Bonnie and Clyde

playing with the myth of the real

Bonnie and Clyde in the process
of creating his own fictional
account.
That Penn would choose to
introduce Bonnie and Clyde by
way of this cinematic sleight-of-
hand makes perfect sense if one
considers that the picture’s
screenwriters, Robert Benton
and David Newman, had origi-
nally taken their script to France
and shopped it to the avant-
garde filmmakers François Truf-
faut and Jean-Luc Godard.
Although both Truffaut and Go-
dard were intrigued, each finally
passed on the project due to com-
plications related to their respec-
tive shooting schedules. Instead,
Penn, a little-known American
director with only three films to
his credit, was tapped to make
the picture. Ironically, however,
Penn turned out to be an inspired Actors Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in a scene from the
choice for the project, even 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn. The
though his only cinematic success movie won two Academy Awards. (Michael Ochs Archives/
Getty Images)
to that point had come with the
very traditional 1962 offering
The Miracle Worker, which was nothing like the films being made in France by direc-
tors such as Truffaut and Godard. Oddly enough, though, his other two films—the
box-office failures The Left Handed Gun (1958) and Mickey One (1965)—had reso-
nances with the iconoclastic filmmaking of what was being called French New Wave
cinema. The Left Handed Gun, for instance—a biopic about Billy the Kid—although
technically traditional and released right at the beginning of the French New Wave
era, was still a revisionist western that sought to deconstruct the myth of the heroic—
or in this case, the antiheroic—westerner; while Mickey One, which most viewers—
the few that saw it—admittedly found incomprehensible, was characterized by a unique
use of camera, lighting, and mise-en-scène, albeit, for Penn, still in embryonic form
in 1965. Almost everything that ultimately made Bonnie and Clyde an example of
brilliant filmmaking, then—what made it so much like the best of French New Wave
filmmaking—was there in inchoate form in The Left Handed Gun and Mickey One,
waiting, as it were, to be drawn together by Penn into a cinematic whole.

55
Bonnie and Clyde

One notices from the very beginning of the narrative portion of Bonnie and Clyde
the influence of the work of Truffaut and Godard—in particular Truffaut’s Shoot the
Piano Player (1960) and Jules and Jim (1962) and Godard’s Breathless (1960). Penn,
for instance—working with, it must be noted, his gifted editor on this film, Dede
Allen—flaunts convention by providing his viewers with a nontraditional establishing
shot. Instead of the usual framing shot filmed from a distance, Penn opens the narra-
tive portion of Bonnie and Clyde with an extreme close-up of Bonnie—actually of just
her lips. When the camera pulls back, we realize that she is in a small, spare, bedroom.
Naked, save for her sheer panties, she moves about the room like a sexually charged,
caged animal. Flopping on the bed, she pounds at its metal frame, the bars of which
look very much like those of a prison cell. Penn makes the situation clear: Bonnie is
dying—literally in the end—to be free from her oppressive surroundings.
Wandering over to her second-floor window, she gazes out at the bucolic scene
unfolding below. Spying a strange man lurking around a car parked in front of the
building, she inquires, in a scolding tone, what he is doing around her mamma’s car.
Startled, the man—it turns out to be Clyde—looks up, and their eyes lock. As film
historian Robert Kolker points out, once Penn has connected the characters in these
opening scenes by way of their flirtatious gaze—for her part, Bonnie remains provoca-
tively bare during the exchange—they are never again apart throughout the rest of the
picture (Kolker, 2002). Clyde is rendered childishly silent as he stares up at Bonnie,
unsure of how to explain his actions. Bonnie orders him to stay where he is. Hastily
throwing a thin dress over herself, she storms down the stairs leading outside the
building. Interestingly, Penn shoots Bonnie’s mad dash down the stairs from an
extreme low angle, also canting the camera so that the frame is tilted, giving the shot
a strangely expressionist feel—almost as if Bonnie is hurrying into some chaotic, oddly
surreal world.
And so she is. Still buttoning her dress, she moves out onto the porch. “You want to
go into town with me? How’d that be?” says Clyde. “I’m going to work anyway,” Bon-
nie tells him, coquettishly. And so the scene is set for what is to come: two fragile peo-
ple, with few prospects, bound together by way of a profound sense of both desire and
despair. As they stroll together along an eerily empty small-town street—in West Dal-
las, it turns out—Bonnie is surprised, and a bit chagrined, when Clyde accurately iden-
tifies her as a waitress. She is even more surprised—and increasingly excited—when he
tells her that he has been in state prison for armed robbery, and eventually pulls out his
revolver to make his point. Bonnie strokes the hard barrel of the gun, uttering only a
throaty, “Yeah . . . ” as she looks down at the weapon. “But you wouldn’t have the
gumption to use it,” she says, with a note of challenge in her voice—and suddenly
we are unsure exactly to what Bonnie is referring—the gun or what it represents. Phal-
lic images abound in this sequence: the gun, of course, but also soda bottles, and even
the matchstick that Clyde flicks around in his mouth. As will become very clear, this
phallic doubling will function as one of the film’s central themes: repressed desire dis-
placed onto something or someone else, revealing itself in painful and often disturb-
ingly violent ways.

56
 Bonnie and Clyde

Penn provides immediate support for this suggestion, as Clyde takes up Bonnie’s
challenge, strolling into a grocery store after instructing Bonnie to keep her eyes open.
Backing out of the store moments later, he turns and flashes a wad of money at Bonnie.
As he runs across the street, he glances back and, seeing that the shopkeeper has fol-
lowed him out of the store, fires a shot—above the man’s head. Pushing Bonnie into
a car—not theirs obviously—he pops the bonnet, deftly starts the engine, and they
roar off. A master at allowing farce to unfold into tragedy, Penn brings us into the
car with the newly minted outlaws, as Bonnie literally throws herself on Clyde, all
her pent-up passions released by the excitement of armed robbery. Penn cross-cuts
from inside the car—where Bonnie continues to accost Clyde, who struggles to free
himself from her—to outside the car, providing us with exterior shots of the vehicle
careening from side to side, off the road and on again, forced to swerve crazily in order
to miss a slowly moving horse-drawn wagon. Finally pulling off into a grove of trees,
Clyde laughingly implores Bonnie to “slow down,” until, unable to control her desire,
he roughly pushes her away, the scene suddenly turning dark and embarrassingly tense.
Pushing his way out of the car, Clyde circles away from and then back to the vehicle, as
Bonnie, with shaking hands, anxiously lights a cigarette. “Alright now,” says Clyde,
thrusting his head back in the car, “I may’s well tell you right off, I ain’t much of a lover
boy.” “You’re advertising is just dandy,” an out-of-breath Bonnie tells Clyde, as she
straightens her clothes and aggressively combs out her tousled hair.
Trying to calm her, Clyde reaches into the car toward the disappointed Bonnie, who
now pushes out the other side of the vehicle. Clyde yells after her: “If all’s you want is a
stud service, than you get on back to West Dallas and you stay there the rest of your
life.” Lover boys, Clyde makes clear, can be found on every corner in any town; but
they won’t care about Bonnie, not the way that Clyde will. They only want to “get into
your pants,” warns Clyde, and thus, are not capable of seeing in her what he sees.
Moved to follow him to a diner, Bonnie listens as Clyde accurately describes her des-
perate life. “And you sit in your room,” he says, leaning toward her seductively, “and
you wonder when and how am I ever gonna get away from this . . . and now you
know.” Leaving the diner, Bonnie dutifully walks to the car in which they arrived;
but Clyde heads for a different vehicle. Scurrying across the parking lot, she jumps in
beside Clyde and they drive off together; and so their life of crime together begins.
That Penn weaves together so many of the film’s narrative threads in and around
cars is no coincidence. Bonnie and Clyde first encounter each other over her mother’s
car; and their first explosive moment of shared—and frustrated—desire is played out
in and near a car. Cars, after all, represent freedom, a way to move from place to place
quickly and easily; and so it is for Bonnie and Clyde. Cars whisk them away from West
Dallas, ferry them across the country, and allow them to escape their pursuers. But this
is all too simple, Penn seems to be saying, for as soon as Bonnie climbs in beside Clyde
in that first stolen car, their fate is sealed—they will die, bloody and alone, although
together, in and around yet another stolen car.
The second stolen car, we assume, brings them to a broken-down farmhouse, as
Penn cuts from the theft at the diner to a room in which Bonnie awakens—on the only
furniture available, a set of old car seats—to find Clyde gone. Frightened, she calls out

57
Bonnie and Clyde

for him; from outside, he walks toward the building. Talking to her through a broken
window—a first instance of their being together but just out of reach—he explains that
he slept out by the car. Looking around, she points out to him that “these accommoda-
tions ain’t particularly deluxe”—no grand hotel, and not even her man to keep her
warm. Clyde explains this away by stating simply that “if they’re after us,” he “wants
“the first shot.” Instructing her to come outside, Clyde demonstrates his prowess with
a gun by shooting bottles off a fence while standing on a porch some 20 feet away—
impressively, he does not miss. The process of phallic doubling is once again at work
in this scene—while one weapon does not work at all, the other, we are reminded,
works with deadly precision.
Significantly, Penn cuts from the couple’s point of view on the porch as Clyde
begins firing to a reverse shot that allows us to look back over the fence and the explod-
ing bottles at the couple in middle distance. Although the viewer may not notice it at
first, Penn’s intentions are more than just aesthetic here, as from the second perspective
we are provided with a quick glimpse of a sign that informs us that the property is
owned by “Midlothian Citizens Bank,” and that “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.”
Penn makes effective use of the sequence, linking together a number of important nar-
rative elements. Excited by watching Clyde shoot, Bonnie willingly takes another gun
that Clyde hands her, and with her second shot is able to start a tire swing spinning.
Joyous, she listens as Clyde explains that he will get her a Smith & Wesson—a gun that
will fit more comfortably in her hand. So enthralled are they by what they are doing,
that they do not notice a figure approaching from behind. When he calls out to them,
Clyde spins around, gun at the ready; but it is just a farmer—the man who used to own
the place until the bank took it away from him, making him merely a “trespasser.”
Penn allows the camera quietly to take in the scene, cutting and panning to reveal
the “dust bowl” family of the farmer, packed and waiting in the car, as well as his black
hired hand, who comes strolling into the scene from out of the distance. After shooting
a number of holes through another bank sign—this one bigger than the first—Clyde
hands the gun over to the two men, who not only shoot at the sign, but turn the
weapon on the windows of the farmhouse with a certain restrained enthusiasm. As
the farmer walks away, Clyde calls out after him, “We rob banks.” The farmer turns
back, his face revealing little; apparently he realizes, even if Bonnie and Clyde do
not, that the outlaws have nothing to offer—they are not heroes, and their actions
are not heroic. They are no more than common criminals whose notorious behavior
will not change anything, except for the lives of the family members of the innocent
people that Bonnie and Clyde gun down.
The real Bonnie and Clyde—Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow—were active
between 1931—Bonnie was 21 when they met, Clyde 22—and 1934, when they were
killed by police in a roadside ambush in Louisiana. Initiating their crime spree at the
end of Herbert Hoover’s single term in office, they continued it after Franklin Roose-
velt was inaugurated in the spring of 1933. By the time Roosevelt took office, the Great
Depression had devastated the nation; banks were failing at an alarming rate, unem-
ployment stood at 25 percent, and the economy was in crisis, with many Americans
losing everything they had. Within days after being sworn in, Roosevelt took steps to

58
 Bonnie and Clyde

save the banks and to put people back to work. The economy continued to struggle,
however, and outlaws such as Bonnie and Clyde, who robbed the banks that most
Americans believed bore a substantial responsibility for the economic crash, gained a
certain reputation as Robin Hood-like, savior figures.
Penn does not let Bonnie and Clyde descend into some sort of populist morality tale,
however, decrying the horrors of capitalism and celebrating the criminal activities of a
likable pair of outlaws. Preventing this from happening, one imagines, would have
been no easy task for this talented director, especially given that his Bonnie and Clyde
were played by the extraordinarily attractive Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Penn
succeeds, however, by keeping us painfully close to the couple as they accumulate their
partners in crime—C. W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) and Clyde’s brother and sister-in-
law, Buck Barrow (Gene Hackman) and Blanche Barrow (Estelle Parsons)—and live
out their stultifying, banal, increasingly desperate lives.
In the film, the crime spree of Bonnie and Clyde begins badly. Clyde sits nervously
in the passenger seat of a car, trying to reassure a much calmer Bonnie, who is driving
them to their first bank job, that everything will be alright. Penn again plays the scene
as farce, with Clyde bursting into an empty bank—it had failed three weeks before—
and demanding money that is no longer there. Embarrassed, he forces the sole bank
employee outside so that he might explain the situation to Bonnie. As Bonnie laughs
uproariously, Clyde fires bullets through the bank window, as if somehow this will
resolve his criminal impotence. True to form, Penn allows farce to unfold into tragedy
in the next scene. Broke, Clyde is forced to steal food from a small grocery store. Kid-
ding with the store owner about his lack of peach pies, Clyde is suddenly attacked from
behind by a beast of a man wielding a meat cleaver. A deadly struggle ensues, as the two
crash their way across the store, Clyde desperately trying to free himself from the man’s
grasp. Finally able to flee after brutally smashing his assailant in the head with the butt
of his gun, Clyde staggers to the car, entering as Bonnie roars away. Penn again takes us
into the car, allowing us to witness Clyde’s childish incomprehension, as he rails against
the man who he has left beaten and bloody back at the store: “He tried to kill me!” yells
Clyde. “Why’d he try to kill me? I didn’t want to hurt him. . . . I ain’t against him . . . I
ain’t against him.”
Of course, what Clyde doesn’t understand, what he will never understand, is that he
is very much against these honest, hard-working people—a point that will be expressed
with deadly consequences during their next bank job. Having enlisted the aid of C. W.
Moss as a getaway driver, Bonnie and Clyde successfully rob a bank, only to exit the
building and find that C. W. has parked the car. Finally able to extricate the car from
its parking space, C. W. must drive past the bank to make good their getaway. Caught
up in the moment, the bank manager jumps onto the vehicle’s running board, hanging
precariously to the side of the car with his face pressed up against the window. Penn
gives us the bank manager’s point of view, as we see Clyde raise his gun; quickly cutting
to a view from inside the car, we hear the gun go off and see the window shatter as a
bullet crashes through it into the instantly bloodied face of the bank manager, who,
dead, tumbles into the street.

59
Bonnie and Clyde

The scene is important for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it rep-
resented, for the period, one of the most shockingly violent moments in American cin-
ematic history. Unlike so much of today’s gratuitous, anesthetizing violence, however,
Penn does not simply allow the moment to pass casually by, as he follows the bank scene
with one which finds Bonnie, Clyde, and C. W. sitting in a darkened theatre distraught
over what has happened—at least Clyde and C. W. are distraught; Bonnie seems
unfazed by the awful moment, happily watching a Busby Berkeley-choreographed
song-and-dance number—“We’re in the Money” from Gold Diggers of 1933, although
in the film’s chronology it is only 1931—at one point shushing the boys so she will
not be disturbed. For his part, Clyde sits behind C. W. paternalistically berating him,
and informing the overwhelmed young man that they are all now wanted not only for
bank robbery but for murder, as well.
Penn follows the scene in the theater with what is arguably the most important
scene in the film. In yet another dark, spare room, Bonnie sings her version of “We’re
in the Money” while she prances before the mirror. Clyde nervously fiddles with his
revolver. Confronting Bonnie, he tells her that things have now changed, and that if
she wants to leave and go back home, now is the time. She refuses to go. They begin
to touch each other, hesitantly at first, but then with more passion. Penn does not clut-
ter the scene with dialogue; indeed, the two do not utter a word as they gently stroke
each other, softly touching their lips and bodies together. Their eagerness for each
other growing, they wrap their bodies together in a raw embrace—until it becomes ap-
parent that Clyde once again cannot perform. Bonnie sits up abruptly, gripping the
metal bed frame—reminding us of that opening scene in her own bedroom. Falling
back across the bed, her face literally comes to rest on Clyde’s hard unyielding gun.
Disgusted with himself, Clyde rolls off the bed; turning his back on Bonnie, he says
quietly, “At least I ain’t a liar. I told you I wasn’t no lover boy.” Bonnie has nothing to
say. Turning to him, she smiles sadly, shakes her head, and shrugs.
Although their relationship will, finally, be consummated, it is too little too late—
indeed, Penn juxtaposes the scene of their single successful act of lovemaking with a
scene in which they are betrayed by C. W.’s daddy, who sells out Bonnie and Clyde
to the “laws” in order to save his son. From that powerfully disturbing moment in
the rundown hotel bedroom, then, where their desires are once again frustrated, their
alienation from each other is finally made complete—all hope is lost, and they begin
spiraling downward toward their inevitable bloody deaths.
The specter of that death appears in the figure of Frank Hamer, a former Texas
Ranger who carries on an all-consuming crusade to track down Bonnie and Clyde.
Although the police are depicted as Keystone Kop buffoons throughout the first half
of the film, all of this changes dramatically once the character of Hamer is introduced.
The chain-smoking, six-foot-four-inch Hammer was actually a real-life Texas Ranger,
who left his position after suffering through a series of political disputes with his supe-
riors, and who then began to hire himself out as a bounty hunter. He gained a reputa-
tion as being fearless in the face of danger, purportedly gunning down some 80
criminals during his career as a lawman; he was the perfect choice, then, to hunt down
America’s most notorious outlaws.

60
 Bonnie and Clyde

Days after fighting their way out of an ambush at a motor hotel—during which
they kill three police officers—the “Barrow Gang,” as they are now being called, drive
along while Buck reads an account of the shootout. When they pull off the road beside
a lake for a bathroom break, another car glides silently to a halt just out of sight of the
gang. The man who emerges from the car turns out to be Hamer, and he advances on
their car. Before he can capture the gang, however, Clyde shoots the gun from his hand
and he is suddenly their captive, his hands secured with his own handcuffs. Unsure
what to do with the man—should they kill him?—Bonnie suggests they take his
picture—surrounded by the members of the Barrow Gang—and send it to the news-
papers, embarrassing the big, strong Texas Ranger. As they set up the shot, Clyde
chides Hamer, pointing out that the common people, in an expression of populist rage
that Clyde does not really seem to understand, are actually on their side. As it turns
out, they would have been better off killing Hamer, as, after this humiliating incident,
he pursues them with unrelenting determination.
The frivolity with Hamer ends abruptly after the gang kidnaps a staid couple in
their own car, taking them for a joyride. Velma (Evans Evans) and Eugene (Gene
Wilder) become increasingly comfortable with the gang members, even sharing a
fast-food meal with them. They laugh at the suggestion that they might join the
gang—what would the folks back home think of that! “Hey, what do you do anyhow?”
asks Bonnie. “I’m an undertaker,” says Eugene innocently. Once again Penn turns a far-
cical scene tragically dark. He gives us a close-up of Bonnie’s face: “Get them out of
here,” she says, now with fear in her voice. Of course, it is much too late to alter their
fate by turning this undertaker out of the car—another is waiting, just down the road.
Shaken by her experience of unwittingly sharing an intimate moment with an
undertaker, Bonnie begs Clyde to take her to see her mamma. Clyde agrees, but at
their family picnic, when he attempts to reassure Mrs. Parker that he will protect her
daughter, and that they might even settle down near her, Bonnie’s mamma pointedly
tells him that he “best keep on running.” Taking Mrs. Parker’s advice, they find their
way to yet another motor hotel. The walls seem to Bonnie to be closing in around
her, the other members of the gang, save Clyde, a cloying omnipresent force. “You
know,” she says to Clyde, “when we first started out, I thought we was really going
somewhere . . . and this is it.” Ambushed twice more, Buck is killed and Blanche taken
prisoner. Both Bonnie and Clyde are wounded, but along with C. W. they escape.
Stealing another car, they make their way to a makeshift campground filled with
“Okies,” farming families displaced by the Depression. Although Clyde has main-
tained his populist mythology about the status of the gang in the eyes of the common
people, their short visit at the camp proves otherwise. Too weak and hurt to get out of
the car—C. W. asks if they might get some drinking water—the outlaws are sur-
rounded by their campground hosts. Staring into the car—one man actually reaches
in and paws at Clyde, as if to see if he is real, it appears—the people treat them not
as heroes but as zoolike curiosities.
Finally tracked by Hamer to the home of C. W.’s daddy, Malcolm Moss (Dub Tay-
lor; Ivan Moss in the credits), Bonnie and Clyde are ambushed on the very back roads
they travelled with such carefree abandon. Penn ends things where they began, with

61
Bowling for Columbine

Bonnie and Clyde bound together by way of their gaze—just before the guns erupt and
their bodies are riddled with bullets, their bodies jumping and jerking uncontrollably,
Penn gives us a rapid series of reverse-cuts, close-ups of the eyes of each, locked on
those of the other. As the slow-motion death-scene sequence comes to a graceful,
dreamlike end, men, led by Hamer, walk from their hiding places behind a clump of
trees. Penn gives us one last shot—from inside the car, Hamer and the others framed
by the windows and the open door of the vehicle. The men say nothing as they stand
over the lifeless bodies of Bonnie and Clyde—grim, spent, they are silent witnesses
to the very worst that humans have to offer.
See also: Allen, Dede; Beatty, Warren; Film Editing; Gangster Film, The; Penn,
Arthur

References
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved
Hollywood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.
Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New
York: Penguin, 2009.
Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lewis, Jon. American Film: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

—Philip C. DiMare

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE. When Barack Obama was elected President of

the United States on November 4, 2008, gun sales skyrocketed. It was rumored that
once Congressional Democrats took office, they, with the support of the new
president, would restrict access to guns. Fearing this, many in America feverishly began
to build up their personal arsenals of weapons. Gun rights activists believed that they
were simply protecting their constitutional rights, while gun control advocates argued
that loosened gun laws had already placed weapons in the hands of some who went on
to commit unspeakable acts of violence. Interestingly, Michael Moore had opened
a window onto this critical, and often divisive debate, with his 2002 documentary,
Bowling for Columbine.
Moore’s cautionary examination of gun violence in America centers on the dis-
turbing events that occurred in 1999 when two boys at Columbine High School in Lit-
tleton, Colorado, opened fire on their teachers and fellow students, killing several of
them. The title of Moore’s film refers to the fact that the two Columbine shooters, Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold, had gone bowling on the morning of the day of the tragedy.
Moore took his cameras to this conservative, upper-middle-class community, where he
found that the memories of the horrific episode, and the outrage to which it gave rise,
had already begun to fade.
In a move that many found controversial, Moore at least implicitly draws a connec-
tion in Bowling for Columbine between certain members of the NRA and members of

62
 Bowling for Columbine

white supremacist groups, both of whom he claims seek to whip up support for loosen-
ing gun laws by claiming that gun ownership is a fundamental right of American citi-
zens. In making this connection, Moore, it seems, is suggesting that Columbine must
not be seen as merely an isolated incident when confused teenagers ran amok, but
rather, that this tragic event is representative of a deeply disturbing societal problem
that government, and particularly the administration of George W. Bush, failed to
address. Although Moore seems to favor very strict gun laws, he is actually, surprisingly
enough, a member of the NRA; and thus, he does not appear to be advocating that
guns should be banned altogether. Rather, in Bowling for Columbine he seems not to
be attacking guns or gun ownership in general, but what he understands to be the
perverse love of violence and idealization of gun ownership shared by far too many
Americans.
As he did after the release of Roger & Me and Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore was harshly
criticized after the release of Bowling for Columbine. Many argued that the film was
not really a documentary, as Moore, by way of his narration and intrusive presence as
a sort of on-screen investigative reporter, had deliberately manipulated the storyline
to discredit the people he depicted. Indeed, argues Bill Nichols, a leading scholar on
documentaries, in his films Moore “reduces most of the individuals he portrays to vic-
tims and dupes” (1991, 71). Many of the interviewees in Bowling for Columbine, for
instance, including the faded Hollywood star Charlton Heston, who agreed to be ques-
tioned in his own lavish Los Angeles home, seemed unaware of Moore’s political
agenda. Willing to share their nonconformist, and in some cases, violent beliefs with
the director, they appear confident that Moore has their best interests at heart and
would never use the information they give him to destroy their credibility. Speaking
to this issue, Christopher Sharett and William Luhr (2005) take Moore to task in their
review of Bowling for Columbine, claiming that the filmmaker “places himself at the
center of his work” (253) and masks social criticism with a goofball sense of humor.
They also direct attention to the common accusation that Moore has been violating the
“objective” documentary style by representing only one side of a topic. Although
the authors admit that the idea of objectivity in documentary filmmaking is a myth, they
still find Moore’s haphazard way of editing and assembling his footage problematic,
especially because it has inspired other filmmakers to attempt to replicate his “irreverent
door-stepping techniques” (80). Despite this criticism, Bowling for Columbine won the
2002 Academy Award for Documentary Feature; and it brought in record revenues for
a documentary film, topped only by Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2005.
See also: Documentary, The; Moore, Michael

References
Sharrett, Christopher, and William Luhr. “Bowling for Columbine: A Review.” In Rosenthal,
Alan, and John Corner. New Challenges for Documentary. New York: Manchester University
Press, 2005: 253–59.
Ward, Paul. Documentary: The Margins of Reality. London: Wallflower, 2005.

—Karen A. Ritzenhoff

63
Boys in the Band, The

BOYS IN THE BAND, THE. The Boys in the Band was a landmark 1970 film
depicting a slice of contemporary gay male life. Directed by William Friedkin and pro-
duced by Mart Crowley, it was adapted by Crowley from his Off-Broadway play that
ran for 1,001 performances beginning in 1968. The play, though a hit, received mixed
responses, and the film was no different. While critics and viewers alike applauded the
first mainstream film depicting an “insider’s” view of gay attitudes and relationships,
the picture was, and has remained, controversial. Significantly, despite the film’s sub-
ject, the MPAA rated it R rather than branding it with the X that soon was associated
with pornography.
Set in Manhattan, the story revolves around six gay men—Michael, Emory,
Donald, Bernard, Hank, and Larry—throwing a birthday party for their friend
Harold. Complicating the festivities is a phone call from Alan, a college friend of
Michael’s, who wants to see him and then shows up at the apartment. Rounding out
the cast is “Cowboy,” a young hustler who is Emory’s gift to Harold, and Harold him-
self (Leonard Frey). Before Harold’s arrival, Alan had reacted strongly to Emory’s
effeminacy, calling Emory a “faggot,” a “fairy,” and assaulting him, yet staying on at
the party. Michael suspects Alan is also gay but in denial, and the evening turns
darker, both literally with a rainstorm that drives everyone inside, and psychologi-
cally with a telephone game that renders the atmosphere increasingly claustrophobic.
The object, insists Michael, is for each man to gain points by calling the one person
he has truly loved, and what unfolds are the sometimes wrenching experiences of
growing up gay in America. Meanwhile Hank and Larry, a couple, are working
out Hank’s impending divorce and Larry’s unwillingness to be monogamous.
Although Alan calls his wife when his turn comes, his sexuality remains ambiguous
in the wake of his departure.
Not surprisingly, the film is less cinematic than theatrical: most of the action is con-
fined to the apartment’s living room and the plot is driven by dialogue and character.
Also, at Crowley’s urging, all of the play’s Off-Broadway cast reprised their roles in
the film, exposing a much broader audience to the notable performances of Kenneth
Nelson as Michael and Cliff Gorman as a wonderfully campy Emory, as well as Frey’s
finely tuned Harold. The stagy feel is enhanced by the screenplay, which Crowley left
with “almost every line of bitchy, fake-elegant dialogue, intact” (Canby, 1970).
It is these same performances and words that have generated hot debate among
queer viewers and critics. To many, The Boys in the Band was dated even as it pre-
miered: only nine months had passed since the 1969 Stonewall riots rocked Greenwich
Village and drew national attention to a more visible, militant, and proud gay libera-
tion movement that had been brewing for years. The 1968 slogan “Gay is Good”
was a direct attack on the kind of self-loathing many see in Michael’s breakdown at
the end of the film, and possibly in Alan’s aversion to all things queer. At the same
time, internalized homophobia is hardly outdated, and fans remind us that finally here
was a film in which gays outnumbered straights, none of them is a murderer, and no
one dies, by his own or another’s hand. As Michael says, “It’s not always like it happens
in plays. Not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the story.”

64
 Boyz N’ the Hood

The film was released on DVD in 2008, marking the 40th anniversary of the play’s
opening. Present and future generations may find it difficult to identify with types that
can slip into stereotypes or tokens (flaming decorator, athlete, Jew, African American),
the semi-hidden and insular gay world, and some characters’ ambivalence about their
sexuality, but that, too, may be valuable. In showing us where some Americans were,
The Boys in the Band also demonstrates how far attitudes have come.
See also: Friedkin, William

References
Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in
America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
Canby, Vincent, “Screen: ‘Boys in the Band’: Crowley Study of Male Homosexuality Opens.”
New York Times, March 18, 1970. Available at http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review.
Guthmann, Edward, “ ’70s Gay Film Has Low Esteem: ‘Boys’ Attitude Seems Dated.” San
Francisco Chronicle, January 15, 1999: D-4. Available at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/
article.cgi.
Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York: Harper & Row, 1981,
1987.

—Vicki L. Eaklor

BOYZ N’ THE HOOD. In the early 1990s, an increasing number of African

American filmmakers and actors were beginning to give narrative expression to the
“black experience.” One example of such a filmmaker is the director John Singleton,
whose 1991 Boyz N’ the Hood had a powerful commercial and critical impact on
American viewers.
Singleton began writing the story of Boyz N’ the Hood while enrolled in the USC
School of Cinema-Television’s Film Writing Program. According to the director, it
was extremely important to him that his film communicate to audiences, both black
and white, the essential relationship between Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne)
and his son, Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.). With this in mind, Singleton went to great pains
to portray Furious not only as an educated, financially successful homeowner, but also
as a stern and loving father to his son, one who understands the many pitfalls that
threaten Tre (Donaldson, 2003). Realizing that Tre seems destined either to break free
from his South Central, L.A., community or die on its streets, Furious is committed to
teaching his son the hard lessons of life (Doherty, 1991).
Tre’s family life is juxtaposed to that of two of his friends, Ricky (Morris Chestnut)
and Doughboy (Ice Cube). Ricky and Doughboy are brothers who share the same
mother, Ms. Baker (Tyra Ferrell), but who have different fathers. Ricky, his mother’s
darling, is provided with bountiful support from Ms. Baker, and with his tremendous
athletic talents is poised to enter college on a sports scholarship. Doughboy, however,
who is ultimately rejected by his mother, has been defined by the violence and crime
that have infected his South Central neighborhood. Tre’s future is thrown into doubt

65
Breakfast Club, The

when Ricky is murdered in a drive-by shooting. Tre and his friends bring Ricky’s blood-
ied body home but leave immediately, seeking revenge. Tre, with gun in hand, goes with
Doughboy and three other friends to find and kill those responsible for Ricky’s murder.
While in the car, waves of emotion overcome Tre, and he decides he must flee. Moments
later, Doughboy and the others find the murderous crew and kill them. The fateful deci-
sions made by Tre and Doughboy propel us toward the point of the film’s narrative res-
olution: Tre heads off to college, while Doughboy is killed by a rival gang.
When Boyz N’ the Hood premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of
1991, audiences sensed that they were viewing something unique. When the film
was received with raucous applause and critical praise, TriStar Pictures readied it for
a summer release in the United States. When Boyz N’ the Hood opened nationwide
in over 900 theaters on July 2, 1991, it gave rise to violence in cities across America.
Reports surfaced that a man was fatally shot at a showing near Chicago, and at least
31 people were wounded in incidents from Seattle to Minneapolis (Stevenson,
1991). Although TriStar knew that there were certain risks associated with releasing
the film, Boyz N’ the Hood was a financial success for the studio, becoming the
highest-grossing film of 1991 and earning a total of $60 million domestically.
The film garnered 13 major award nominations, including Oscar nominations for
Singleton for Best Director and Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. While
he did not win either award, Singleton’s nominations were still significant. He was
the first African American director to be nominated for Best Director, and at 23, the
youngest, besting Orson Welles by almost a year. In 2002, the film received the presti-
gious honor of being entered into the National Film Registry. The legacy of Boyz N’ the
Hood remains strong today. Singleton’s writing and direction and the powerful perfor-
mances he was able to pull from his actors demonstrated that African American film-
makers could be a force in Hollywood.
See also: African Americans in Film; Singleton, John

References
Doherty, Thomas. “Two Takes on Boyz N’ the Hood.” Cineaste, December 1991.
Donaldson, Melvin. Black Directors in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Singleton, John. Boyz N’ the Hood. Columbia TriStar special ed. DVD, 2003.
Stevenson, Richard W. “An Anti-Gang Movie Opens to Violence.” New York Times, July 14,
1991.
—Lucas Calhoun

BREAKFAST CLUB, THE. Often referred to as the quintessential coming-of-age

film of the 1980s, The Breakfast Club, written and directed by John Hughes (a driving
force in the genre—he also wrote and directed Sixteen Candles [1984], Pretty in Pink
[1986], and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off [1986]), is a commentary on stereotypical American
social groups. It is widely considered to be one of the defining films of Gen X, though
its influence extends well beyond this generation.

66
 Breakfast Club, The

In the film, five high school stu-

dents—played by members of
what came to be known as the
“Brat Pack”—are required to serve
weekend detention for various
infractions they have committed.
Significantly, each student is a
microcosmic representative of a
1980s high school subculture:
Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald),
the pretty, popular prom queen;
Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy);
the dark, strangely attractive mis-
fit; Brian Johnson (Anthony
Michael Hall), the nerdy, likable
smart kid; John Bender (Judd Nel-
son), the misunderstood, scary
druggie; and Andrew Clark
(Emilio Estevez), the straitlaced,
obsessively driven uber-jock. Dis-
gruntled all, they are joined
together in common cause: to
thwart the efforts of Principal
Richard Vernon (played superbly
with over-the-top delight by Paul
Gleason) to force them to write a
life-lesson essay.
Though at first the five stu-
dents cannot believe they could
possibly have anything in Movie poster for John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985).
common, after smoking a bit of Starring members of the so-called “Brat Pack,” like many of
marijuana and having a series of Hughes’s other films, The Breakfast Club attempted to break
heart-to-hearts, they begin to down teen stereotypes. (Photofest)
understand that in many ways
they are, in fact, very much alike:
often scared and lonely, in need of attention from family and friends, and desperate
to fit in. In the span of a single day—obviously a much too short coming-of-age
moment, but one forgives Hughes this slight violation of poetic license boundaries
simply because he sets the scene so well—they are able to break down many of the
social barriers that divided them in the past. The dialogue is quick and authentic,
and the relationships that develop between and among these five figures drive the nar-
rative forward. Questions concerning teen angst, self-doubt, familial and communal
discord, discrimination, bias, and social hierarchy abound, and Hughes is able to open
up a forum for discussion—both on the screen and off. Indeed, since its release, The

67
Breaking Away

Breakfast Club has done more than just entertain audiences; it has been used in training
programs and as a tool for those carrying out studies in fields such as counseling, ado-
lescent development, psychology, and sociology. Educators have also found the film
useful for opening up dialogue among members of different social groups who must
negotiate the perpetually troubled waters of the high school experience.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The

References
Barber, Bonnie L., Jacquelynne S. Eccles, and Margaret Stone, “Whatever Happened to the
Jock, the Brain, and the Princess? Young Adult Pathways Linked to Adolescent Activity
Involvement and Social Identity.” Journal of Adolescent Research 16(5), 2001: 429–55.
Kaye, David L., MD, and Emily Ets-Hokin, PhD. “The Breakfast Club: Utilizing Popular Film
to Teach Adolescent Development.” Academic Psychiatry 24, June 2000: 110–16. http://
ap.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/24/2/110.

—Jen Westmoreland Bouchard

BREAKING AWAY. Deindustrialization and economic recession are not the kind
of topics to which Hollywood is usually drawn. Although the Great Depression
did generate some social realist cinema and a few Hollywood classics like The Grapes
of Wrath (1940), the economic downturn of the 1970s inspired filmmakers about as
much as Jimmy Carter’s infamous 1979 “malaise speech” generated public sympathy
for the president. One exception is Breaking Away (1978), which succeeded in part
because it is a drama about American deindustrialization and global economic
change wearing the guise of a more market-friendly genre: the comedic, inspirational
sports film.
Filmed on location in Bloomington, Indiana, Breaking Away focuses on four local
high school graduates and the volatile combination of envy and resentment they feel
toward their more privileged peers who come from all over the state and beyond to
attend Indiana University. All of the boys’ fathers were or are stonecutters in Bloom-
ington rock quarries, a declining industry that provides little new employment. The
college students disdainfully refer to all locals as “cutters,” but as townie Mike (Dennis
Quaid) laments while planning to leave Indiana for Wyoming, “To them it’s a dirty
word, to me it’s just another thing I’ll never have a chance to be.” Industrial decline
in Breaking Away, then, does not just bring economic hardship, but also identity crisis
to Bloomington’s working class. The younger generation’s predicament even has a
powerful visual symbol in the film: they hang out at water-filled, abandoned rock quar-
ries, where they can either swim or flounder.
Although town-grown conflict drives the film’s narrative, including its climactic
bicycle race, Steve Tesich’s Academy Award-winning script achieves much of its reso-
nance in its portraits of generational change. Breaking Away centers on the family of
cyclist Dave Stoller (Dennis Christopher), whose father (Paul Dooley) enjoyed stone-
cutting when he was “young and slim and strong,” but has since suffered myriad health

68
 Breathless

problems and traded his dusty overalls for a white shirt and clip-on tie that he wears to
sell used cars. At dinnertime, he spends several moments staring dolefully at the zuc-
chini and lettuce on his plate that his wife serves before he forces himself to eat them.
He tells Dave that he was proud of his role in building the university, but when con-
struction ended, “the damndest thing happened. It’s like the buildings were too good
for us. Nobody told us that, it just felt uncomfortable, that’s all.” The father is a figure
from a time when working-class men in the Midwest had few choices yet shared in
postwar prosperity and enjoyed the certainty of a meat-and-potatoes understanding
not just of diet but also of what it meant to be an American. Their sons, in contrast,
faced confusing choices between menial service jobs, college, and posthippie utopias
out West, and saw how Vietnam and global economic competition produced anxiety
about their country’s role in the world.
While much of the literature on deindustrialization bemoans these changes, Break-
ing Away, as its title indicates, ultimately finds reason for optimism in a situation in
which the guys do not have the choice of following in their father’s footsteps. Whereas
Mike is the dejected dreamer, Dave is the optimistic schemer who eventually figures it
all out. At first, in a comedic reversal of the assimilationist American Dream, Dave
embraces globalization by “becoming” Italian. He worships Italian bike racers, listens
to opera, and temporarily wins the affections of a coed by masquerading as an Italian
exchange student. Dave eventually drops the Italian shtick and finds a more permanent
solution to the question of who he is by biking for the “Cutters” team and, urged by his
father, by taking an Indiana University entrance exam.
Among the first to appear in a major Hollywood feature film, the bicycling scenes
in Breaking Away are beautifully shot. The depiction of the sport, then not one of the
United States’ most popular, in a Middle America setting is anything but incidental to
the film’s themes. The focus on an up-and-coming international sport in College
Town U.S.A. is central to one of Breaking Away’s most impressive accomplishments:
It is an entertaining genre picture that provides an insightful on-screen portrait of
an America adjusting apprehensively to the changing world of the late 1970s.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The

References
Berkowitz, Edward D. Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Cowie, Jefferson, and Joseph Heathcott, eds. Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrializa-
tion. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2003.
—Kenneth F. Maffitt

BREATHLESS. Before directing Breathless (1960), Jean-Luc Godard announced his

presence to the world of cinema in bold reviews for the Paris-based film journal Cahiers
du cinéma. His first feature nevertheless caught audiences by surprise. Breathless
remains a landmark of the French New Wave, the revolution in film production and

69
Breathless

cinematic treatment that captivated audiences in France and the United States in the
late 1950s and early 1960s. Preceded by the directorial efforts of fellow Cahiers critics
Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, Breathless was notable for its innovations in
cinematography, sound, and editing, and for its play with the signs and dreams of a
youth culture burgeoning on both sides of the Atlantic.
The plot, based on a sketch treatment by Truffaut, reads as if ripped from one of the
American noir films beloved by its antihero. A young thief, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul
Belmondo), steals a U.S. military officer’s car in Marseilles and drives northward to
Paris with a few tasks to accomplish: retrieve money that is owed to him and convince
Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), the young American for whom he has fallen, to escape
with him to Italy. He runs into trouble en route and ends up shooting a cop with a gun
from the glove compartment. In Paris, Michel shuttles between amorous encounters
with Patricia and attempts to secure the money. Meanwhile, news of the crime pulsates
throughout the city in photographs blanketing the daily papers and police updates
flashing on a news marquee.
Media are everywhere in Breathless, signifying the fast-paced urban society that the
New Wave would make the backdrop of many of its modestly budgeted productions,
and also framing Michel’s and Patricia’s comings and goings. A darkened cinema shel-
ters the couple from a detective, but Michel’s newfound fame speeds his eventual cap-
ture when a man on the street (Godard, in a cameo) recognizes him from the papers
and points him out to the police. “To live dangerously until the end!” reads a movie
poster that Michel passes by early in the film. Breathless captures Michel’s attempt to
live out this catchphrase. The rest remains a mystery. The rakish thief ’s attachment
to Patricia is no more explained than his admiration for Humphrey Bogart, whose
thumb-to-lip gesture he imitates throughout the film. Breathless is likewise uninter-
ested in discovering why the young American agrees to abandon her Sorbonne studies
and her work at the New York Herald Tribune. After telling Michel she may be preg-
nant with his child, Patricia puts on a record and grooms in her bathroom, where the
camera dwells on her mugging in front of a mirror. The film shuns tidy resolution:
Michel abruptly chooses not to flee after Patricia reneges and calls the police, who
shoot him down in the street.
The technical innovations of Breathless contributed as much to its freshness as its
insouciant mood. Critics have enshrined the film’s frequent jump cuts in the canon
of New Wave technique, yet Godard’s daring long takes were equally a part of the film’s
narrative deviousness. We cannot tell when important action will unfold, or whether
important action is what we are following in the first place: the film cuts from Michel
fleeing the crime on foot to him riding around Paris in a different car, while a scene of
the couple idling in Patricia’s room lasts for over 20 minutes. Cinematographer Raoul
Coutard’s purposefully unsteady camerawork gives Breathless a documentary
immediacy. Meanwhile, the overlay of uncharacteristically loud recorded music atop
dialogue contributes to the picture’s radical departure from the conventions of norma-
tive cinematic soundtracks.
Godard celebrated the genius of the director in his auteur-centered reviews, but
Breathless benefited from an unusual conjuncture of cultural and economic factors.

70
 Bridge on the River Kwai, The

During the 1950s, both the French and American film industries grappled with declin-
ing audiences drawn to competing forms of leisure, like television and the automobile
getaway (the legal obverse of Michel’s hot-wirings). In France, one solution of André
Malraux’s Ministry of Culture was to increase government subsidies for experimental
projects. Low-budget was the order of the day. Breathless profited as well from
demand-side factors. Declining domestic production rendered the American market
unusually open to European imports during the Wave’s peak. It was a new kind of
moviegoer—new in that the mass-market strategies of old were re-forming during
the postwar period around segmented audience demographics—that helped to elevate
Breathless to the status of an instant classic: the young cinephile delighted by the char-
acters’ casual banter and hungry for the film’s brash treatment of taboo subjects like
sex. Yet, in the end, five decades have not spent the film’s hurtling modernist energies.
See also: French New Wave

References
Lev, Peter. The Euro-American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema, 2nd ed. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2007.
—Diana Lemberg

BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, THE. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
begins with British troops trudging through the jungles of South Asia toward the
prison camp that will be their new home. On the surface, the film is about these sol-
diers’ commander, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), and his near obsession to build
a proper bridge in order to revive morale and discipline among his battalion. The film
is really an affirmation of the West’s role in the postcolonial world following the fall of
the British Empire. Toward the end, Nicholson reminisces about his time in the service
and concludes that his life spent in India was worth the sacrifices of being away from
home. As he stands on the completed bridge that his men designed and built, he
expresses his conviction that this project brought a measure of progress to a small
corner of South Asia.
Nicholson’s entry into the camp begins with a quarrel with Saito that establishes for
the viewer the significance of the West’s position in South Asia. Saito tells the new pris-
oners that all of them, including officers, will do manual labor in order to complete the
bridge before the May deadline from Japanese command. The Geneva Convention,
Nicholson maintains, explicitly forbids manual labor for officers. The colonel later
states, “without law . . . there is no civilization.” He refuses to work and is threatened
with mass execution. The ensuing scenes see Nicholson and his officers tortured as
Nicholson’s Western rule of law is juxtaposed to Saito’s Japanese code.
The blundering bridgework continues and Saito falls far behind schedule. Eventu-
ally, he concedes to Nicholson’s will and allows the British officers to command their

71
Bridge on the River Kwai, The

(Left to right) British actor Alec Guinness, William Holden, and Jack Hawkins on the set of the film
The Bridge on the River Kwai, directed by David Lean. (Columbia TriStar/Getty Images)

men rather than work alongside them as originally ordered. This change, Saito states, is
due in part to the celebration of that day: the Japanese victory over the Russians in
1905. Ironically, many historians have described this victory as one deriving, in part,
from the Japanese ability to learn and use Western tactics against the West. This irony
becomes all too clear as Nicholson’s tour of the bridgework raises concern among the
officers. Not only has the discipline and morale of the battalion eroded, but the archi-
tecture, engineering, and construction of the bridge are found to be severely lacking.
These problems can be remedied, we learn in a meeting with Saito that evening, which
sets the stage for the import of Western-styled modernization. As Nicholson remarks,
he plans “to teach these heathens a lesson” about what Western science, technology,
and knowledge can achieve.
Nicholson’s officers, engineers with experience on major building projects in India,
begin to recite pressure and tonnage figures, a new time study of the project, and new
efficiency predictions. Western knowledge not only brings a modicum of freedom for
him and his officers, but also instantly confers privileges on them. Saito watches with
embarrassment as Nicholson takes control of his project. One officer reports that trees
in the area might allow the bridge to stand over 600 years, a monument to Western
achievement.

72
 Brokeback Mountain

As work begins, enlisted men rally behind their colonel, but plans are also in the
works to destroy the bridge. The British build a newer, stronger, better bridge across
the River Kwai, but Shears (William Holden), who had earlier escaped the prison,
returns with British commandos to blow up the new strategic expanse that would allow
the Japanese improved access to India and the West. Newly invented plastic explosives
are wired to the pylons and strung downriver, awaiting the arrival of Japanese troops
on the first train to cross the Kwai. But as they open the bridge, Nicholson notices wires;
the water level has dropped overnight. An inspection takes him to the plunger and the
commando preparing to destroy the colonel’s creation. The ensuing struggle almost
saves the bridge. However, Nicholson, at last realizing his mistake, makes his way to
the plunger himself, only to be struck lethally on his way. As he perishes, he falls forward,
depresses the detonator, and destroys the bridge. Not only does the West have the power
and knowledge to bring progress to South Asia, but as the viewer witnesses, it also has
the power to take that very progress away. A critical and box-office success, the movie
establishes modernization as the proper role of the West in postcolonial South Asia.
See also: War Film, The

References
Davies, Peter N. The Man behind the Bridge: Colonel Toosey and the River Kwai. London: Ath-
lone Press, 1991.
Sragow, Michael. “David Lean’s Magnificent Kwai.” Atlantic Monthly, February 1994: 104–09.
—Chad H. Parker

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. Brokeback Mountain (2005) is a tragic gay love story

and one of the most culturally significant movies in recent memory. Known far too
pithily as “the gay cowboy movie,” the film is actually a tragic romance that subverts
many assumptions of the western genre as it presents the lifetime love of Ennis del
Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and the “destructive rural homo-
phobia,” in author Annie Proulx’s words, that keeps them apart.
The story’s journey to the screen was long, despite the remarkable pedigree of its
screenplay. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx’s short story, first published in
the New Yorker in 1997 and the winner of prestigious awards itself, was the basis for the
screenplay written by Pulitzer Prize–winner Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. The
screenplay was legendary in Hollywood as a great unproduced work, even as it bounced
around for years. Finally, director Ang Lee, best known for the multiple Oscar-winning
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), became attached, and production moved for-
ward with the respected young actors Ledger and Gyllenhaal cast to play the gay lovers.
Both the short story and the film, though released eight years apart, emerged in an
historical period when gays and lesbians were gaining more, if contested, acceptance
and were increasingly visible in American culture. In the years of Bill Clinton’s
presidency (1993–2001) and beyond, gays and lesbians had more support and many

73
Brokeback Mountain

more came out, resulting in more Americans knowing gay and lesbian people. In
popular culture, from situation comedies like Ellen and Will and Grace to reality shows
like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, gays and lesbians, even if they were often presented
in stereotypes, were more visible, too. With increasing visibility came civil rights gains,
as when Vermont became the first state to recognize gay civil unions (2000); the
Supreme Court ruled sodomy laws unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas (2003); and
gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts (2004).
At the same time, of course, acceptance was far from universal. For example, in
1998, Matthew Shepherd, a gay college student in Wyoming, the state where Broke-
back Mountain is set, was tortured and killed; and in 2004, in response to gay marriage
legalization in Massachusetts and as part of a strategy to rally conservative voters,
eleven states voted on and approved bans on gay marriage. Thus, as gay and lesbian vis-
ibility increased, there was surely cultural space available to produce a film like Broke-
back Mountain; by the same token, continued discomfort with homosexuality ensured
controversy, as well as the film’s continued relevance to American life.
The film debuted in December 2005 to strong reviews and good business, filling the-
aters in conservative “red state” cities, as well as places like San Francisco and New York.
In particular, the late Heath Ledger’s performance as the stoic, mumbling, and emotion-
ally tortured Ennis drew rave reviews. Some negative criticism came predictably from
conservatives, who proceeded to offer examples of the very homophobia that the film
addresses, but it also came from some on the left, including gays, who felt that the sex
in the film was presented as a heterosexual’s idea of what the “rough love” between
men must be like and wondered why all gay stories told in the mainstream seemingly
had to end in tragedy. Overall, however, the film was recognized as beautiful and mov-
ing as it effectively makes clear the costs of denying something as basic as sexuality, both
for gay people and for those who surround them, such as spouses and family members.
In particular, Michelle Williams’s performance as Ennis’s wife, Alma, is devastating.
Of the eight Academy Awards for which it was nominated, the film won three, includ-
ing Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director. However, it was denied the big prize of
Best Picture, which, somewhat surprisingly, was won by Crash (2005). Critics such as
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times viewed this as clear evidence of lingering discom-
fort with gay sexuality, even in liberal Hollywood. Given the lack of additional main-
stream films centered on gay characters since the box-office success of Brokeback
Mountain, it is in fact unclear how much the movie industry has been changed by the film
and it may well remain singular, and thus historically significant, for many years to come.

References
Patterson, Eric. On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the
Story and the Film. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.
Proulx, Annie, Larry McMurtry, and Diana Ossana. Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay.
New York: Scribners, 2005.

—Derek N. Buckaloo

74
 Bulworth

BULWORTH. The 1998 picture Bulworth provided Warren Beatty, a longtime

member of the Democratic Party and liberal activist, an opportunity to express his
political and societal views to film audiences. Beatty directed, co-wrote, co-produced,
and starred in the film. Interestingly, the picture was largely financed by Fox Studios,
which provided Beatty with $30 million to resolve an earlier contract dispute. Bul-
worth depicts politicians as being completely controlled by their desire to collect cam-
paign contributions and as being totally unconcerned with the plight of racial
minorities and the poor.
Beatty plays Jay Billington Bulworth, a California Senator seeking reelection in the
Democratic primary in 1996. Realizing that he is going to lose to a moderate chal-
lenger, and having grown tired of politics, he contemplates suicide. Instead of killing
himself, however, he arranges for his own assassination so that the proceeds from a
large insurance policy can go to his daughter; part of the arrangement is that he will
make a vote that will benefit the insurance industry. Knowing that his days are num-
bered, and that he does not have to worry about being reelected, Bulworth stops giving
the clichéd speeches that have been prepared for him by his campaign and begins
instead to speak his mind. In one scene, for instance, he tells a large crowd of African
American voters gathered at a church that they have been ignored by the white estab-
lishment, both because they have supported O. J. Simpson and because they have
not given enough in the way of campaign contributions. Speaking at a high-priced
fundraiser, attended by wealthy constituents, he jokes about Jewish dominance in
Hollywood; and at a staid political dinner, he actually begins rapping to the audience
members, providing them with his uncensored opinions on the state of things in
America: “One man, one vote/now is that really real? /The name of our game is let’s
make a deal. . . .” “The people got their problems/The haves and the have-nots/but
the ones who make me listen/pay for 30-second spots.”
Discovering meaning in his newfound voice, Bulworth begins to expand his cultural
boundaries. He meets and is immediately drawn to a young, extraordinarily attractive
African American woman, Nina (Halle Berry). Accepting her invitation to learn about
her world, he soon adopts the outward appearance of a young urban African American
male. Free from the constraints of his high-priced, button-down white world, and fall-
ing in love with Nina, Bulworth begins to regret his decision to hire a hit man to assas-
sinate him. Attempting to cancel the lethal contract, and frustrated that he cannot,
Bulworth is shocked to discover that Nina is actually the assassin. In the end, Nina
does not kill Bulworth; ironically, he is gunned down by an assassin hired by the very
insurance industry with whom he has colluded—the industry, it seems, fears America’s
turn toward socialized medicine.
The issues of corporate special interests and political corruption are of central con-
cern in Beatty’s film; indeed, what Beatty seems to be suggesting in Bulworth is that
many of the ills that plague America arise as a result of the actions of crooked politi-
cians who are beholden to corporate interests. Jay Bulworth, for instance, has been
forced to abandon his progressive political ideals in order to attract the monies he
needs to be elected to office—and to stay there. Interestingly, Bulworth was released
at a point when campaign expenditures were skyrocketing and many people—both

75
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

inside and outside of government—were demanding that the influence of “soft-

money” donors on political parties and other governmental organizations be reined
in by limiting how much these donors could contribute. In 2002, the McCain-
Feingold bill was passed and signed into law as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform
Act. As the McCain-Obama election cycle proved, however, the problem of campaign
funding is still an extremely divisive political issue in America.
In addition to taking on campaign financing, Beatty used his film to draw attention
to what he deems the nation’s health care crisis. Speaking (literally rapping) through
Jay Bulworth, Beatty makes his point that the health care industry is more interested
in its profits than it is in taking care of the people it insures—or refuses to insure. Only
by way of shifting toward some form of socialized medicine, Beatty argues, can the
health of all Americans be protected.
Although generally praised, Beatty’s film was not without controversy, as many in
the African American community were harshly critical of what they saw as his unflat-
tering depiction of blacks in Bulworth. Although many agreed with Beatty’s call for
average African Americans to lead the way in breaking down existing political arrange-
ments and pushing for a radically reimagined America, some resented Beatty’s implica-
tion that black leaders had failed their communities.
See also: African Americans in Film; Beatty, Warren; Politics and Film

References
Gates, Henry Lewis. “Cultural Politics, ‘The White Negro.’ ” New Yorker, May 11, 1998: 62–65.
Grummel, J. “Congress, Culture and Political Corruption.” In Foy, Joseph J. Homer Simpson
Goes to Washington. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008: 63–79.
King, Donna Lee. “Using Videos to Teach Mass Media and Society from a Critical Perspective.”
Teaching Sociology 28(3), 2000: 232–40.

—Michael L. Coulter

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. The screen flickers to life in
George Roy Hill’s 1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with scenes from a “silent
movie.” Presented as genuine documentary footage of Butch Cassidy’s “Hole in Wall
Gang” robbing the Union Pacific Railroad’s Overland Flyer sometime during the early
twentieth century, this silent movie is meant to frame the legendary story that is told in
Hill’s late twentieth-century picture. A title card inserted between the close of the silent
movie sequence and the opening of the film itself suggests that “Most of what follows is
true.” It is difficult to know exactly which parts of Hill’s film actually are true, however.
Some of this has to do with the poetic license taken by Hill and screenwriter William
Goldman in developing their filmic narrative; but much of it results from the fact that
the biographical details of the lives of the real Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid are
obscure. Indeed, making reference to a “real” Butch and Sundance complicates things
even more, as these are actually the pseudonymous identities adopted by Robert Leroy
Parker and Harry Longbaugh. Born sometime during the second half of the nineteenth

76
 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Robert Redford (left) as the Sundance Kid and Paul Newman (right) as Butch Cassidy in a scene
from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was released on October 24, 1969.
(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

century, Parker and Longbaugh were united during the 1890s when Parker decided to
create what was effectively a crime syndicate and took on Longbaugh as his partner. By
this time, Parker had changed his family name to Cassidy and had begun to be called
Butch after a stint as a butcher; Longbaugh had acquired his nickname of the Sun-
dance Kid after serving time in a Sundance, Wyoming, jail. Successful outlaws who
preyed upon largely unprotected banks and trains, the members of the gang became
the stuff of legend while still alive; this was especially true of Butch, who garnered a
reputation as a latter-day Robin Hood who willingly shared his loot with friends and
acquaintances.
After a number of daring train robberies—in particular, robberies of trains belong-
ing to the Union Pacific Railroad, which was then under the direction of E. H.
Harriman—the Pinkerton Agency was hired to track down the members of the gang.
Fearing for their lives, Butch and Sundance, along with Sundance’s companion, Etta
Place, fled to South America, by way of New York City, during the early twentieth cen-
tury. As the story goes, Etta eventually returned to the United States, while Butch and
Sundance made their way from Argentina to Bolivia. During an early morning shoot-
out with Bolivian police and soldiers in November 1908, both men were badly
wounded; unwilling to be taken alive, Butch purportedly killed Sundance and then

77
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

turned the gun on himself. The legend did not end there, however, as numerous people
claimed to have seen both outlaws in the United States long after they supposedly died
in Bolivia. In fact, in her biographical work, Butch Cassidy, My Brother, Lula Parker
Betenson maintained that Butch not only made his way back to the United States,
but lived there in anonymity for many years, even attending a family reunion in 1925.
Whatever the historical case may be, when we first meet Butch and Sundance in
Hill’s film, they have already sealed their partnership and Butch has formed the Hole
in the Wall Gang. After robbing the Union Pacific’s Overland Flyer, the gang splits
up and Butch and Sundance head to a brothel run by Fannie Porter—an actual stop-
over point for the real outlaws. Relaxing on the brothel’s balcony, the men look on
as, down below, the town’s hapless sheriff (Kenneth Mars) attempts to form a posse
to chase down the Hole in the Wall Gang. Hill uses this pivotal sequence to great
effect, cross-cutting between the scene on the ground and that on the balcony not only
to locate his characters along the film’s historical timeline, but also to begin to reveal
the despair that marks the lives of these fragile, dispossessed men. Initially, Butch and
Sundance seem in control of their situation, as they share beers and chuckle at the sher-
iff as his exhortations fall on deaf ears—the townspeople are civilized folk, after all,
who lack the horses, guns, and will that are required to chase down armed bandits.
In the middle of their revelry, however, Fannie appears on the balcony and invites them
inside to join a going-away party for her piano player who is heading off to war.
“Which war?” asks Sundance. “The war with the Spanish,” responds Fannie. “Remem-
ber the Maine,” says Butch.
The Spanish-American War occurred over a matter of weeks during the spring and
summer of 1898, resulting in a decisive U.S. victory, with Spain ceding colonial con-
trol of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to America by way of the Treaty
of Paris, which was signed in December of that year. Interestingly, Hill gives us the
impression that we are witnessing the record of the last months of the lives of Butch
and Sundance, although they did not have their infamous shootout in Bolivia until a
decade after the war ended in 1898. Rewriting the legend of Butch and Sundance,
however, such that it entails the outlaws living out their last frantic months during
the Spanish-American War—at the very end of the nineteenth century, then—is
important to the narrative flow of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Returning to
the balcony scene, we find that Butch and Sundance linger for a bit after Fannie deliv-
ers her invitation and goes back inside. Butch wanders over to the doorway and gazes at
the partygoers; turning back to Sundance, he makes the following poignant revelation:
“You know when I was a kid, I always thought I was gonna grow up to be a hero.”
“Well, it’s too late now,” says Sundance, turning away from him. Wounded, Butch
reacts much like a child would: “What’d you say something like that for . . . you didn’t
have to say something like that.”
Of course, Sundance is right, it is too late for Butch to become a hero. Indeed, the
days of the western outlaw—the days of the Wild West—are over. Increasingly indus-
trialized as the nineteenth century comes to a close, America has left men like Butch
and Sundance behind; a fact given expression in the same sequence when the sheriff
is nudged aside by a pushy salesman: “Meet the future,” says the salesman, displaying

78
 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

a shiny new bicycle. “The horse is dead,” he declares—and so too men like Butch and
Sundance. On the run after once again robbing the Overland Flyer—E. H.
Harriman is tired of them picking on his Union Pacific Railroad and outfits a special,
relentless law enforcement crew to track them down—Butch and Sundance make their
way to the office of Sheriff Ray Bledsoe (Jeff Corey), who is partial to them. They seek
to make a deal with Ray: they will enlist and go fight the Spanish, and the government
will drop all the charges against them. “You’re crazy,” says Ray, “they’d throw you in jail
for a thousand years each.” When he notices Sundance looking out the window, he says
softly, “There’s something out there that scares you, huh?” And so there is; not just the
deadly crew on their trail, but a new, twentieth-century America. “It’s too late,” says
Ray, “you should have let yourself get killed a long time ago while you still had the
chance.” “It’s over . . . don’t you get that? Your times is over; and you’re gonna die
bloody . . . and all you can do is choose where . . . ”
See also: Hill, George Roy; Newman, Paul; Western, The

References
O’Neal, Bill. Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1979.
Rollins, Philip Ashton. The Cowboy: An Unconventional History of Civilization on the Old-Time
Cattle Range. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
Simmon, Scott. The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-
Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization,
1800–1890. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
White, Richard. A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1991.

—Philip C. DiMare

79
This page intentionally left blank
 v
C
CADDYSHACK. Following on the heels of the successful Animal House (1978),
another bawdy comedy hit theaters in the summer of 1980. Caddyshack is a film that
mirrors the irreverent, antielitist attitude of its fraternity-house predecessor, moving
the setting from the hallowed halls of academe to the confines of a high society country
club. Writers Harold Ramis (who also directed), Douglas Kenney, and Brian Doyle-
Murray construct a biting, timeless farce about social status that is more a series of
vignettes than a linear, coherent narrative.
What began as a comedy about the life and times of a young caddy is now remem-
bered for its cast of comedy heavyweights Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted
Knight, and Bill Murray. It is their performances that elevated Caddyshack above its
contemporaries, and made bona fide stars out of both Dangerfield and Murray, who
went on to even greater successes.
The plot follows the challenges facing a caddy at Bushwood Country Club, Danny
Noonan (Michael O’Keefe), who dreams of going to college and breaking free from his
blue-collar, Irish-Catholic status. Although his character serves as the film’s centerpiece,
he is overshadowed by his more outrageous companions. The presentation of Bush-
wood itself bears all the conventional marks of an antielitist view of a country club,
with its mocking tone toward aspects like its exclusive membership requirements and
its hierarchy based on social position and influence.
The head of the club is Judge Elihu Smails (Ted Knight), who views Bushwood as
his personal fiefdom, which he must defend from those persons he deems unworthy
of membership. Smails personifies stereotypical “old money” snobbery at its finest, sur-
rounded by his intellectually vacuous wife, his spoiled grandson, and his rebellious
niece, the daftly named Lacy Underall (Cindy Morgan). Smails’s ire escalates with
the arrival of construction mogul Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield), whose boorish
manners and sarcastic attitude undercut the values that Smails embodies. Smails and
Czervik are polar opposites, and their interaction provides Caddyshack with its primary
comedic tension.
Between these two extremes is eccentric playboy Ty Webb (Chevy Chase), whose
privileged background does not hide his disdain for high society. Although his father

81
Carnal Knowledge

helped found the country club with Smails, Webb’s attitudes are more in line with
those of Czervik. This mixed background puts Webb in the middle of the battles
between Smails and Czervik, with often hilarious results. Greenskeeper Carl Spackler
(Bill Murray) is the film’s most outlandish personality. A disturbed Vietnam veteran
with a penchant for marijuana and tall tales, Spackler spends his time attempting to
subdue a gopher that is wreaking havoc on the golf course. This amicable rodent, with
its cheap hand-puppet charm, remains one of Caddyshack’s most enduring icons.
Although released in 1980, Caddyshack reflects the sociopolitical tensions of late
1970s America, a time when the mainstreaming of 1960s countercultural values
clashed with the worldviews of “the greatest generation.” Likewise, the film’s mockery
of social elitism parallels a general populist antagonism toward influence derived from
wealth and family name, a characteristic typical of the inflation-strapped, high unem-
ployment malaise of late 1970s popular culture. The antielitism of Caddyshack resem-
bles the anarchic sarcasm of the Marx Brothers of the Depression-era 1930s, another
time when Hollywood used archetypes of moneyed wealth as comedic targets.
The friction between Smails and Czervik recalls the disdain of high society toward
the new industrialists during the industrializing age of late nineteenth century
America. While the wealth of upstarts (whether “robber barons” or “yuppies”) may
give them access to social and political institutions, they are not deemed worthy of
such a position by their elitist forebears. Caddyshack is classic Hollywood social com-
mentary, almost vaudevillian in its approach, albeit sprinkled with the more liberal
societal attitudes toward sex and drug use popular with younger audiences of the time.
Audiences disagreed with the derisive film critics, making Caddyshack one of the
top-grossing comedies of 1980. It maintains a cult following thanks to its quotable
one-liners and outrageous characters, and earned its place at number 71 on the list of
“America’s 100 Funniest Movies” by the American Film Institute. While it is unlikely
that viewers care about Danny Noonan’s existential dilemma or catch the film’s socio-
political underpinnings, Caddyshack remains an iconoclastic comedy classic.

References
Martin, Scott. The Book of Caddyshack: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Greatest
Movie Ever Made. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2007.
Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics.
Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2001.
—Brad L. Duren

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE. Premiering in 1971, Carnal Knowledge was director

Mike Nichols’s fourth feature film. He had already gathered a huge following by
directing both the torturous Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor vehicle Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf (1966) and the landmark offering The Graduate (1968). Catch-22
(1970), however, his third feature, although a critical success, had failed miserably at

82
 Carnal Knowledge

the box office, and Carnal Knowledge welcomed Nichols back to the ranks of successful
directors. A darkly comedic picture, Carnal Knowledge examines the “sexual revolu-
tion” of the 1960s, and more particularly the impact of what can be understood as
the “second-wave feminism” that focused on issues such as equality in the workplace
and reproductive rights. The screenplay was written by the celebrated Jules Feiffer,
whose leftist political cartoons in the Village Voice had earned him notoriety in the late
1950s.
The story follows friends Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel)
from their college years at Amherst in the late 1940s to their embittered and mature
present (which is also the film’s contemporary present). Jonathan is an unrepentant
sexist, and encourages the impressionable Sandy, through thought and deed, to be
exactly the same. When the film begins, the men tacitly compete to see who can be
the first to lose his virginity. When Sandy begins dating Susan (Candace Bergen), Jon-
athan—who fancies himself the wise, big man on campus—also pursues her, and a love
triangle develops. Susan, to the men’s chagrin, is determined to be “a lady lawyer.” Jon-
athan, confused by her unwillingness to bend to his wishes, berates her until she
chooses Sandy.
After the men graduate college, Susan and Sandy wed, while Jonathan lives on as a
bachelor—bemoaning the advances in women’s liberation. He meets Bobbi (Ann-
Margret), an actress and model with a figure that Jonathan believes will cure his strug-
gles with impotency (which, he is convinced, are linked to changing sexual mores).
Jonathan’s relationship with Bobbi is a tormented one, and their union finally ends
after his controlling behavior forces her into a suicidal depression. Jonathan and
Sandy’s friendship also ends; this, when Jonathan refuses to accept what he believes is
Sandy’s middle-aged delusion that he has found his “love guru” in an 18-year-old hip-
pie. In the film’s final, quite unsettling scene, Jonathan visits a prostitute, and must
summon up an erection that will allow him to achieve sexual satisfaction by reciting
a self-abnegating speech that in reality acts to indulge his sexism.
Carnal Knowledge became a source of public controversy due to its graphic discus-
sions of sexuality and—for the time—shocking scenes of (brief ) nudity. It was also
the first Hollywood picture to exhibit a condom, and the film sported the newly
minted X-rating. Despite the fact that the film did not actually show any explicit sexual
acts, it inaugurated a new attitude toward the depiction of sex in the American cinema
of the 1970s. In January 1972, the film was seized from an exhibitor in Georgia who
was later convicted of distributing obscene material (in a decision later upheld by the
state’s Supreme Court). In light of the landmark 1973 case Miller v. California, which
established the “community standards” test for determining obscenity regarding por-
nographic material, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision in June 1974.
The Supreme Court ruled in the film’s favor because, although “ultimate sexual acts”
were understood to occur, “the camera does not focus on the bodies of the actors at
such times. There is no exhibition whatever of the actors’ genitals, lewd or otherwise,
during these scenes.”
While the picture was critically well received when it was released, some feminist
scholars who went on to explore portrayals of women in film found it troubling. Molly

83
Casablanca

Haskell, for instance, suggested that it was simply another example of a film that rep-
resented Hollywood’s patriarchal sensibilities. The picture, argued Haskell, rather than
acting as an indictment of Hollywood’s patriarchal values, actually succeeded in fixing
those values more firmly in place (Haskell, 1987). Capitalizing on the growing popu-
larity of Nicholson, Bergen, Garfunkel, and Ann-Margret, however, Carnal Knowledge
neverthelessdid well at the box office. Nicholson’s portrayal of Jonathan would begin to
define him as a Hollywood superstar, and a superstar womanizer—both on-screen and
off; while Ann-Margret’s performance as Bobbi would earn her an Academy Award
nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. And though he was known pri-
marily for his musical partnership with Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel would garner praise
for his co-starring turn as Sandy (actually his third collaboration with Nichols—they
had worked together on the soundtrack for The Graduate, and Garfunkel had featured
prominently in Catch-22). Although most critics do not include it among Nichol’s very
best films—how does one compete with Virginia Woolf and The Graduate?—and
although it would not be considered scandalous by today’s standards, Carnal Knowl-
edge still broke new ground in the history of American filmmaking.
See also: Nichols, Mike; Nicholson, Jack

References
Babington, Bruce, and Peter William Evans. Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the
Sexes. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989.
Cook, David. History of the American Cinema, Vol. 9: Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the
Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002.
Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, 2nd ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
—Kyle Stevens

CASABLANCA. Taking its cues from the real-life drama of World War II, Casa-
blanca is a melodramatic tale of romance, international intrigue, and personal sacrifice
in a time of war, set in the exotic global mélange of the title city. Directed by Michael
Curtiz, and distributed by Warner Bros., the film ushers audiences into the world of
Rick’s Café Américain—a neutral meeting ground for those on all sides of the war: ref-
ugees seeking passage to safety, black marketers who prey on them, French officials rep-
resenting the collaborationist Vichy regime that controls Morocco, and their German
overlords.
Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), owner of the café, is a bitter American expatriate
torn between his lost ideals and his cynical determination to remain politically neutral
and thus stay in business. Louis Renault (Claude Rains), the corrupt prefect of police
who Rick befriends but also bribes, “blows with the political wind,” and counsels Rick
to do the same; but Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), a former lover who reenters his life,
stirs the passion and idealism that lay beneath his armor of cynicism. Married to Victor

84
 Casablanca

Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a leader in the

Czech Resistance, she needs travel
passes—which only Rick can supply—
to get him safely out of Casablanca
and the reach of the Nazis. Rick’s
involvement with the pair draws him
back into the political turmoil he had
forsaken. By facilitating Ilsa and Victor’s
escape from Morocco, Rick is trans-
formed from a cynical and disinterested
bystander to an active opponent of the
Nazi occupation, thereby fulfilling his
destiny.
The film’s long-standing popularity
has led to numerous interpretations,
ranging from the semiotic to the
Freudian. The most common, how-
ever, is that of political allegory. A
battered idealist, hardened through
years of disillusionment, Rick stands
as a thinly veiled metaphor for Ameri-
can isolationism. Caught in the midst
of a struggle for freedom, he is forced
to come to terms with the consequen-
ces of inaction, and take up his role in
support of the struggle for freedom
against the Nazis. In his book Casa-
blanca: Script and Legend (1973), one
of the film’s screenwriters, Howard
Koch, also directly compared Rick’s
transition to a stance against Nazism
to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s similar
shift in perspective during World
War II.
For American audiences, this, and
other ties to the political realities of
the era, gave the film a dual role, as
both entertainment and wartime
propaganda. An international cast,
many of whom had, in reality, been
made refugees and exiles by the con-
flict, brought the full emotional force Poster for the classic American dramatic film Casablanca,
of occupation and resistance to the starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and directed
screen. In one of the film’s best-known by Michael Curtiz, 1942. (Warner Bros./Getty Images)

85
Casablanca

scenes, Victor leads the multinational patrons of Rick’s in a proud and heartfelt rendi-
tion of La Marseillaise in an effort to drown out an equally determined Nazi chorus of
“Die Wacht Am Rhein,” shifting the conflict from the battlefield to the tenuous space
of their everyday world, and focusing the viewer’s attention on issues of freedom, loy-
alty, and national pride.
These emotional strategies were not lost on American audiences, who had been
anxiously watching developments in Europe. At the time of the film’s production, the
power of the Axis nations (Germany, Italy, and Japan) weighed heavily on the minds
of American moviegoers. German troops were threatening Russia; Rommel and his
Afrika Korps were making bold moves in North Africa; and Japanese forces, already
occupying Singapore, Burma, and French Indochina, had drawn the United States into
the war by attacking Pearl Harbor. In France, the Vichy regime had collaborated with
the country’s Nazi occupiers and mimicked the policies of the Third Reich, including
the internment of “undesirables” both at home and in its North African territories,
including Morocco. Casablanca’s premiere, originally scheduled for the spring of
1943, was pushed forward to coincide with the Allied invasion of the French colonies
in North Africa, taking advantage of publicity and enthusiasm associated with the
military operation.
Consistently ranked near the top of the American Film Institute’s “100 Best” film
lists, Casablanca has also been cited by Time magazine and the Writers’ Guild of
America as among the top films ever produced. Although considered a dark horse
nominee with little chance of winning, the film was honored with three Academy
Awards in 1943: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay),
surpassing such acclaimed films as Heaven Can Wait and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Over
45 years later, in 1989, Casablanca was among the first films of “cultural, historical, or
aesthetic significance” to be selected for preservation by the National Film Registry.
The film’s iconic status has consistently inhibited attempts to remake it, and films
that have substantially reprised the story—Cabo Blanco in 1980 and Havana in
1990, for instance—have changed settings and character names to avoid direct com-
parisons. Two short-lived television series based on the characters—one in 1955–56
and one in 1983—were set in the years before the events in the film occurred, for sim-
ilar reasons. When broadcast mogul Ted Turner paid $450,000 to have the film color-
ized in 1988, ratings for its initial television broadcast were lackluster and home video
sales were limited. Critics of Turner’s efforts, meanwhile, used terms like “mutilation,”
“desecration,” and “vandalism” to describe the process.
Traces of the film, however, can be found throughout popular culture, from the
continued popularity of its signature song, “As Time Goes By,” to a steady stream of
references to its scenes, characters, and dialogue. Its influences are seen across enter-
tainment genres: in the comedy of films like the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca
(1946) and Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam (1972), the caustic commentary of tele-
vision’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the adventure of the “Great Movie Ride” at
Disney’s Hollywood Theme Park. The film’s dialogue has been continually reused and
recontextualized, becoming a taken-for-granted part of American culture, and the
bonds between countless pairs of fictional characters alternately mocked and celebrated

86
 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

with lines such as “Here’s looking at you, kid,” “We’ll always have Paris,” and the film’s
oft-quoted final line: “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
See also: War Film, The

References
Harmetz, Aljean. The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II. New York:
Hyperion, 2002.
Koch, Howard. Casablanca: Script and Legend. New York: Overlook, 1973.
Lebo, Harlan. Casablanca: Behind the Scenes. New York: Fireside, 1992.
—Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof focuses on one day in the life
of the Pollitt family. They have come to the Mississippi plantation of their father, Big
Daddy, to welcome him back from the hospital and celebrate his 65th birthday. The
older son’s family spends most of the first two acts cheering his return, while the father,
sensing a certain degree of what he calls “mendacity” in their motives, focuses on the
more genuine, sexually appealing Maggie, wife of younger son Brick. As the events
unfold, divisive topics such as terminal disease, alcoholism, sexual hunger, money,
and nihilism are examined; the theme of homosexuality, however, central to Tennessee
Williams’s play, is hidden away in the film.
Tennessee Williams wrote his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1954. In 1955, Elia
Kazan, in collaboration with Williams, brought it to Broadway. In 1958, Richard
Brooks, with James Poe, adapted it for the screen, with Brooks directing. The film fea-
tured Paul Newman as Brick, Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie, and Burl Ives as Big Daddy.
The screen adaptation transformed the play in two ways. The first came at the sugges-
tion of Kazan, who wanted a more sympathetic Maggie and an ending that would see
Brick restored to physical and emotional health. The second change came at the insist-
ence of MGM studio heads, who demanded that any hint that Brick was gay (and may
have carried on a covert sexual affair with high school friend Skipper) be removed from
the script. Debate continues over Williams’s original characterization of Brick: was the
young man struggling with his own sexuality and finally unable to admit he is gay; was
he a closeted homosexual—still all too common in the 1950s; or perhaps, a homopho-
bic homosexual? By the time the character made it to the screen, however, the point
was moot, as Brick is portrayed in the film as a rather stereotypical emotionally arrested
son and husband, fixating on his high school glory days and carefree life with sports
buddy Skipper. At the heart of the filmic Brick’s nihilistic descent into alcohol and
lethargy, then, is simply heterosexual, macho angst, a much different descent, it seems,
than Williams had in mind when he wrote the play.
Despite what turned out to be somewhat confusing narrative changes, the film
proved to be a huge box-office and critical success, garnering six Academy Award nom-
inations. It would not be until 1959, however, with the release of Suddenly, Last

87
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Summer, another picture adapted

from a Williams’s play, that a
homosexual character, already
dead as the film begins and only
seen in flashbacks, would finally
appear on the big screen. It would
be three more years before the
release of Touch of Pink, in which
Gig Young’s psychiatrist thinks
his patient is having an affair with
the character played by Cary
Grant, and Walk on the Wild Side,
in which a New Orleans madam
is suspected of having an affair
with one of her girls. It would
not be until 1970, when The Boys
in the Band was released, that gays
would be depicted as real people,
not simply—and disturbingly—
as child predators, mama’s boys,
or prostitutes.
Although it left aside the issue
of homosexuality in America,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was notable
for its focus on a dysfunctional
family ruled with an iron fist by
an oppressive patriarch, a theme
also explored in the lesser-known
Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor have a conversation in a 1958 releases God´s Little Acre
still from the film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Richard and Hot Spell. These films, some-
Brooks, 1958. (MGM Studios/Courtesy of Getty Images) times called dynastic or male-
oriented melodramas, pushed
against restrictions by depicting
adultery, out-of-wedlock desire, and other taboos of American culture in the 1950s.
See also: Kazan, Elia; Newman, Paul; Taylor, Elizabeth

References
Arrell, Douglas. “Homosexual Panic in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Modern Drama 51(1), 2008:
60–72.
Byers, Jackie. All That Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Kerkhoffs, Lydia. “An Analysis of ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ ” Go Inside, 2000.

88
 Chinatown

Pomerance, Murray, ed. American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

—Rick Lilla

CHINATOWN. When Roman Polanski’s Chinatown opened in the summer of

1974, America was at a crossroads. As the long and ultimately disastrous war in Viet-
nam wound down, an energy crisis shook the national economy, the revelations of
the presidential scandal known as Watergate accelerated, and the country’s exalted
position as a world power seemed surprisingly uncertain. Significantly, although set
in mid-1930s Los Angeles, Chinatown can properly be described as a cautionary tale
about the fragile state of the American psyche during the 1970s. Lushly filmed, with
great attention to period architecture and fashion, the picture featured an Oscar-
winning screenplay by Robert Towne and a soundtrack that evoked in audiences a
sense of both mystery and alarm. Polanski’s brilliant direction gave the film an uncanny
feel, a sense that, instead of being locked safely away, the unspeakable evils of the world
were frighteningly close to hand. Interestingly, the chilling cinematic perspective that
Polanski brought to bear in making Chinatown may, in large part, have been shaped
by his experience of the brutal murder of three family friends and his pregnant wife,

Director and actor John Huston (1906-1987) speaks to actor Jack Nicholson, wearing a bandage
over his nose, in a still from the film Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski. (Paramount Pic-
tures/Getty Images)

89
Chinatown

the actress Sharon Tate, by members of the Manson Family in 1969. Wrapping his
own personal tragedy within the disquieting social context of 1970s America, Polanski
created a cinematic gem. Heralded by critics and viewers alike, Chinatown was ulti-
mately nominated for 11 Academy Awards, and remains, decades after its initial
release, a classic of the American cinema.
A tale of parallel stories of political and moral corruption, the narrative structure of
Chinatown is built on a series of revelatory moments during which the film’s main
characters confess to crimes committed. The elegantly dressed private investigator
J. J. (Jake) Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a former Los Angeles police officer assigned to the
city’s Chinatown district, has made a good life for himself in Depression-era America,
specializing in “matrimonial work,” uncovering cheating spouses for suspicious clients.
One such client soon presents herself to Gittes. Claiming to be Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray
(Diane Ladd), she tells Jake that she suspects her husband of having an affair. That
her husband, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), is the Los Angeles Water and Power
chief engineer is duly noted by Gittes and his two operatives (Joe Mantell and Bruce
Glover). Following Mulwray’s movements, Gittes and his assistants appear to hit a dead
end as the chief engineer seems interested only in tracking the condition of the city’s
ever-dwindling water supply. Finally, however, Mulwray is seen with a lovely young
woman, and Gittes takes incriminating photographs, which are soon front page news.
Only then does the real Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) appear in Gittes’s office,
announcing her intentions to sue the private investigator. When Mulwray dies in what
is reported to be a drowning accident, Evelyn hires Gittes herself, as she is convinced
that her husband was murdered because of his reluctance to support a suspicious dam
project. Water plays a key role in the film, as Gittes proceeds, rather unwittingly, to
uncover a plot to divert the city’s water supply that has been orchestrated by the rich
and powerful Noah Cross (John Huston). Cross, Mulwray’s former business partner
and also Evelyn’s father, is seeking to use his considerable political connections
to reroute water to the distant Los Angeles valley in order to cash in on the lucrative
housing construction boom.
Loosely based on the career of William Mullholland and the events surrounding the
rapid, and some would say corrupt, development of Los Angeles during the early twen-
tieth century, Chinatown spoke to America’s growing sense of cultural insecurity
during the 1970s. The film’s labyrinthine narrative ultimately leads its viewers to a
stunning conclusion: Noah Cross is not only guilty of figuratively raping the citizens
of Los Angeles, he is also guilty of literally raping, and impregnating, his daughter Eve-
lyn when she was a teenager. In one of the film’s most powerful and disturbing scenes,
Gittes forces Evelyn to admit that Evelyn’s sister, Katherine, is also her daughter. In the
end, Gittes is incapable of saving either Evelyn or her sister/daughter, much less the
city of Los Angeles, from the Noah Crosses of the world. “Forget it Jake,” he is told,
“it’s just Chinatown.”
See also: Film Noir; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The; Nicholson, Jack; Polanski,
Roman

90
 Cinderella

References
Eaton, Michael. Chinatown. London: British Film Institute, 1997.
Novak, Philip. “The Chinatown Syndrome.” Criticism 49(3), Summer 2007: 255–83.
Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. New
York: Da Capo, 2001.
—Kathleen Banks Nutter

CINDERELLA. The idea of a young, friendly woman who is treated like a slave by
her cruel stepmother and wicked stepsisters, who, through hard work and a morally
superior character, attracts a prince, escapes her miserable life, becomes a princess,
and thus elevates all other women in the kingdom, has been attracting audiences for
centuries. Based on the 1697 French fairy tale “Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de
verre” by Charles Perrault, Disney Studios released its feature film Cinderella in
1950. It was at the height of the Cold War, when Walt Disney himself found that fairy
tales were a good way to calm the American psyche, especially in regard to the per-
ceived threat of Communism.
In this very colorful animation, Cinderella is abused by her stepmother and two
stepsisters. Despite her misery, she sings and dances with animals that are her friends,
especially two mice called Jaq and Gus. When the king arranges a Royal Ball, her ani-
mal friends make a dress for Cinderella that her stepsisters destroy. A fairy godmother
appears before weeping Cinderella, and with her magic wand and some “Bibbidi-
Bobbidi-Boo,” she turns Cinderella into a beautiful young lady. At the ball, Cinderella
immediately wins the prince’s heart. When the clock strikes midnight, however, she has
to escape before her true identity is revealed, as the magic is gone. Rushing away, she
loses one of her glass slippers, which the prince uses to search for her. He travels the
kingdom, finally arriving at Cinderella’s house. Hoping the shoe will fit one of her
daughters, Cinderella’s stepmother locks her in her room. Resourceful mice steal the
stepmother’s key, however, unlocking the door and allowing Cinderella to be reunited
with her prince. Kneeling before her, the prince gently slides the slipper onto Cinder-
ella’s foot—a perfect fit, and he knows he has found his true love.
In urgent need of a hit in order to win back audiences, Disney risked animating the
film. Though he also had Alice in Wonderland (1951) in production, he concentrated on
Cinderella, hoping that this picture would recapture the magic of earlier animated films
such as Snow White (1937). He reimagined whole scenes of Cinderella, which allowed
him to reduce the cost of animation. Initially shot with actors, Disney used these images
to create his first fully animated film since Bambi in 1942. With the release of Cinder-
ella, Disney became synonymous with family entertainment. Loved by audiences and
critics alike, the film received three Academy Award nominations for Best Sound, Origi-
nal Music Score, and Best Song for “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.” Due to its popularity, the
story of Cinderella has been adapted for the screen and performed onstage numerous
times. In addition, Disney Studios produced two more sequels: Cinderella II: Dreams
Come True (2002) and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time (2007).

91
Citizen Kane

While reminiscent of Snow White, it may be argued that Cinderella presents us with
a more culturally complex protagonist. On the one hand, this character was stereotypi-
cally representative of what was then understood as the ideal American woman: desper-
ately seeking a way out of her dreadful situation, and assisted by a fairy godmother and
a host of helpful animals, she is rescued by a husband/prince who enables her to live
“happily ever after.” On the other hand, although beautiful, the narrative at least sug-
gests that what makes Cinderella so very attractive are her tenacity, optimism, and
kindness. Indeed, in what may be understood as both a violation of postwar gender
standards and an indictment of upper-class privilege, the film depicts Cinderella as
rejecting her domesticity and ultimately realizing her dreams despite her lower-class
status. Interestingly, after the film was released, Disney officially conducted a series of
contests across the United States, looking for local Cinderellas with personality, charm,
and good natures—not just physical beauty. Today, then, the story of Cinderella pro-
vides us with a cautionary tale: although all too often we still teach young women that
they should rely on their beauty to attract a princely savior, what we should be teaching
them is that their beauty lies within their strength of character and soaring spirits.
See also: Animation; Color; Disney, Walt; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

References
Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Biography. London: Aurum Press, 2008.
Thomas, Bob, and Don Graham. Walt Disney: The Art of Animation: The Story of the Disney Stu-
dio Contribution to a New Art. New York: Golden Press, 1958.
Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

—Daniela Ribitsch

CITIZEN KANE. Though it is one of the most acclaimed films ever to come out of
Hollywood, Citizen Kane was as much an object of controversy as of praise, even
before its theatrical release in 1941. Film historians have debated endlessly over the
authorship of its screenplay as well as over the precise role played by its omnitalented
director, Orson Welles, in the conception and execution of this work, but no one today
doubts its stature, or the influence it cast upon filmmakers in the decades that fol-
lowed. If Citizen Kane is not, as some have insisted, the “greatest” film ever made, it
was certainly Orson Welles’s most important contribution to the art of filmmaking
and the work by which he is best remembered today.
The circumstances surrounding the making of Citizen Kane were almost as improb-
able as those of a stereotypic Hollywood melodrama. After a brief but wildly successful
career on the stage and in radio, Welles was signed to a multipicture deal by RKO in
1939, in the hope that he could work some of his wunderkind magic on an ailing stu-
dio. The terms of his contract were unprecedented for its time: Welles was given a free
hand to choose his cast, write his own script, select whichever cinematographer he fan-
cied, and most important of all, he was given the right of final cut. For a young man

92
 Citizen Kane

Orson Welles wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane. In this movie still “Kane” is
shown with a billboard of himself in the background. (Underwood & Underwood/Corbis)

(Welles was all of 25) who had no prior experience directing a feature film, this was an
extraordinary gesture of faith on the part of RKO, and one that George Schaefer (the
studio head) later had reason to regret. However, Welles and his Mercury Theater play-
ers had electrified the country a year before with their broadcast of a dramatic version
of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, and RKO obviously thought that if Welles could
startle and delight millions on radio, he was sure to do even more on the silver screen.

93
Citizen Kane

Welles’s initial plan was to adapt Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but he scrapped
that idea and a second “literary” subject in favor of an original screenplay about a news-
paper tycoon whose life could be seen as emblematic of both the transformative and
corruptive power of money and fame. The original working title of this film was either
The American or John Citizen USA, from which we can surely deduce that Welles
thought of his protagonist, Charles Foster Kane, as a representative American hero/
antihero, and one whose life would encapsulate many of the qualities Americans both
admired and deplored in their leaders. And while Welles and his co-scriptwriter, Her-
man Mankiewicz, thought of the fictitious Kane as a composite figure whose traits
were drawn from several well-known publishing moguls, it was William Randolph
Hearst, whose pillar-of-society public persona and far less appealing private personal-
ity, who provided them with the life-model for which they were looking. Neither
Welles nor Mankiewicz particularly liked Hearst, nor, as ardent supporters of FDR
and the New Deal, did they particularly admire Hearst’s conservative political views,
so it was hardly surprising that they found in Hearst a combination of personal arro-
gance and right-wing political sanctimony that practically cried out for ridicule.
Once Hearst got wind of what Welles-Mankiewicz had in mind—namely, a movie
that portrayed him as an emotionally unstable demagogue and that hinted broadly at
his extramarital relationship with the actress Marion Davies—he was not slow to react.
His first impulse was to try and put them out of business. Failing to convince a local
draft board to induct Welles into the army, Hearst then sought to convince his friends
in Hollywood that it would be worth their while to prevent Citizen Kane from being
released. Toward that end, Hearst persuaded Louis B. Mayer (studio head of MGM)
to offer RKO’s Schaefer a substantial bribe either to stop production of the film or, fail-
ing that, to destroy all available prints. Fortunately, RKO held firm, and what film
scholars have subsequently referred to as the “Battle Over Citizen Kane” was won by
Welles and company, at least in its first round. However, Hearst was not ready to con-
cede defeat, and after failing to suppress the film, he utilized the resources of his vast
newspaper empire to bad-mouth both Welles and his film, with the result that atten-
dance at movie theaters was far less than anyone at RKO had anticipated. Although
subsequently nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Actor and Best
Director, the only award Citizen Kane finally received was for Best Original Screenplay.
Historians have wondered since then to what extent Hearst’s influence over the film
community dissuaded members of the Academy from bestowing the honors on the
picture it so obviously deserved. Yet, for all the sturm und drang associated with its
production and its less-than-spectacular reception, Citizen Kane was far from being a
flop, and when rereleased after the war, its reputation continued to grow, both in the
United States and in Europe. Certainly by the 1960s, film critics had already come
to see it as one of the landmark achievements of Hollywood’s golden age.
Interestingly, for all its complexities of structure and tone, Citizen Kane tells a rela-
tively simple, almost admonitory tale of a man who, in the words of Kane’s (Welles)
accountant, Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), “lost almost everything he had.” The rea-
sons for this loss, and the consequences of Kane’s moral failures, demanded a compli-
cated story arc and multiple perspectives on the man and the many contradictions that

94
 Citizen Kane

defined his personality. Nevertheless, the final judgment on Kane’s moral character is
rendered unambiguously by Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), Kane’s closest friend
and ultimately his most bitter enemy: “All he really wanted out of life was love. That’s
Charlie’s story, how he lost it. You see, he just didn’t have any to give.” Seen from this
perspective, Kane’s rags-to-riches life story is almost a distraction from the real inner
drama that Welles clearly wants to explore, and while it is possible to see Kane as the
central fixture in a melodramatic political satire, it is Kane’s inability to love, or to
respond appropriately to those who love him, that seems to interest Welles more than
anything else.
The decision to tell this story over and over again, from differing and even conflict-
ing points of view, was one for which both Welles and Mankiewicz were responsible, at
first separately and then in concert as they pieced together the fragments of testimony
that would form the substance of their plot. Mankiewicz’s term for their method of
nonlinear narrative presentation was “prismatic,” but in fact the five component narra-
tives (presented as flashbacks) represent more than just different perspectives on a sin-
gle stationary subject. Each narrator is at once reliable and unreliable—each has his or
her own judgmental view of Kane and what he meant to them—and while a mosaiclike
image of their subject finally emerges by the end of the film, no single observation
about Kane can be taken as objective truth. The film’s narrative methodology forces
us to carefully observe the tellers of each tale, and to factor in what we know about
their personal biases. The truths that emerge from this process are therefore necessarily
subjective and relative; but that is all we can hope for in a film that deliberately with-
holds something like old-fashioned authorial omniscience.
There is a fundamental irony, it should be noted, in Welles’s decision to present his
modernist satire-cum-biography of The Great Man in pseudo-documentary form.
From the very beginning we are invited to view the film that is unfolding before us
not as a type of public history so much as a kind of intimate exposé, complete with pri-
vate interviews and equally private memoirs, all assembled in the hopes of discovering
the meaning of Kane’s deathbed utterance, “Rosebud.” That quest, as Welles observed
later, was the movie’s gimmick, its narrative “hook.” Yet, no matter how hard the mov-
ie’s investigative reporter, Jerry Thompson (William Alland), tries to piece together all
of the scattered facts that he has gathered about Kane’s life and loves, he still cannot
unravel the one mystery he was asked to solve. Of course, it is the viewer who puts
the last piece of that puzzle into place, as Kane’s childhood sled, with the word Rose-
bud emblazoned on it, is being fed into a furnace: this is a privileged perception,
reserved for the audience alone, for like the spectators of classical drama, it is the audi-
ence that literally sees things the characters in the play cannot. Not surprisingly, then,
the final moments of Citizen Kane exhibit none of the “Voice of God” rhetoric of the
mock-March of Time obituary that is flashed on the screen near the beginning of the
film. Instead, Welles’s ultimate comment on Kane’s life in the concluding frames of
the film takes a wordless, symbolic form, as the smoke from Xanadu’s furnace curls
up into the atmosphere. Kane’s life, literally and figuratively, has gone up in smoke,
but no one except the camera’s eye (and the viewer’s) is allowed to perceive it. As Welles
intimates in the opening shots of this film, we have been “trespassing” on a private

95
Citizen Kane

domain of memory and perception, and have seen things that no biographer is likely to
discover.
Significantly, Citizen Kane’s preeminence in the history of American film is not sim-
ply a reflection of either its psychological depth or narrative intricacies. It is, without
question, the most technically innovative film of its time, and while earlier filmmakers
had experimented with many of the formal devices that Welles and Gregg Toland
(Citizen Kane’s cinematographer) utilized throughout their picture, few did so as con-
sistently or as effectively. The list of such devices is impressively long: overlapping dia-
logue; unusual camera angles (requiring the construction of ceilings on each set);
stylized editing techniques, like wipes and dissolves; montage scenes and images that
condense the passage of time; chiaroscuro lighting effects that create pools of light
and shadow; flashbacks and flash-forwards; and relatively long takes. Most important
of all, however, was Toland’s use of deep-focus shots that create a depth of visual field,
allowing a larger amount of visual data to enter the picture frame. Where shorter lenses
would not achieve this effect, Toland used matte shots to crowd as many figures and as
much information as possible onto the screen without sacrificing clarity of representa-
tion. Nothing really escapes the camera’s eye in Citizen Kane, and it is precisely this
type of photographic hyperrealism that allowed Welles to dwell on certain objects that
take on emotionally charged significance.
Chief among those objects is the glass ball/paperweight that Kane fixates on when
his second wife, Susan Alexander Kane (Dorothy Comingore), leaves him, and that
drops from his hand at the moment of his death, shattering on the floor as he mutters
“Rosebud” for the last time. We initially spot this object in Susan Alexander’s room on
the occasion of her first encounter with Kane, but its deeper associations become clear
once we recognize that Kane has appropriated this ball as a symbol of his lost child-
hood, as the snow-laden cabin inside the ball reminds him of his mother’s boarding-
house and the maternal love that was taken from him forever. A similar
transformation of object into visual motif occurs when the camera fixes on Susan’s jig-
saw puzzles, presented in a montage sequence that marks the passage of seasons one
into the next. Susan’s growing boredom, the stultifying idleness of her life, and her
sense of imprisonment at Kane’s hands are all objectively conveyed by a roving camera
that silently comments on what it sees.
No less memorable are the breakthrough performances of Welles’s Mercury Players,
particularly those of Cotten as Jedediah Leland, Sloane as Mr. Bernstein, and Agnes
Moorehead as Kane’s mother. None of these actors had had any feature film
experience—though all three had extensive theatrical résumés—and their adaptation
to the new medium and their nuanced interpretation of roles—which might easily have
degenerated into caricature—is all the more remarkable for their being screen novices.
Of course, it is Orson Welles’s portrayal of Kane that not only dominates the film but
remains longest in the minds of viewers; indeed, without his presence at the center of
this drama it could scarcely have had the impact it did. Welles’s conspicuously theatrical
style of acting—entirely appropriate given the flamboyant character he is portraying—
the subtle shading of his often sonorous voice, the changes in gesture and in gait that
characterize the aging Kane, all combined to create the illusion of a man whose obvious

96
 City Lights

egotism and less obvious generosity of spirit are woven together into a painfully delicate
existential balance.
See also: Film Editing; Film Noir; Welles, Orson

References
Carringer, Robert L. The Making of Citizen Kane. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996.
Mulvey, Laura. Citizen Kane. London: British Film Institute, 1992.
—Robert Platzner

CITY LIGHTS. At the conclusion of City Lights (United Artists, 1931), the Tramp
(Charlie Chaplin) looks wistfully at the Flower Girl (Virginia Cherrill) and asserts,
with the hopeful inflection of a question, “You can see now?” She replies, “Yes, I can
see now,” and it seems as if the whole of the film could be contained in the ambiguous,
equivocal meaning of that exchange. City Lights is a richly romantic, tragic, and—at
the same time—comic film that speaks powerfully of the difficulty of inhabiting a
world from which one is in danger of being ejected. Written, directed, produced,
and scored by Chaplin, City Lights took almost two years and $1.5 million to finish,
though it made nearly $2 million over the course of its run; it was a commercial as well
as a critical success. Today, it remains one of the most moving and significant films in
American history.
City Lights addresses several themes typical of Chaplin’s Tramp films—the flaws
endemic in the world of luxury, the struggle of the alienated individual in urban
America, the moral superiority of the working poor—and others specifically related
to the role of sight in American cinema at the dawn of sound. As the film opens, the
title appears in lights over an energetic evening cityscape; in the distance we see a
monument to “Peace and Prosperity” that will be unveiled in the next scene. This
vignette sets the stage for the story to come, presenting a picture of urban America
from the privileged perspective of the wealthy and those who are accepted. The
modern, forward-looking city becomes an anonymous site of misery, misrecognition,
and pitilessness for the Tramp. As the monument is unveiled, amidst the quacking of
the city’s elite, we see the Tramp ironically curled in the arms of Prosperity, where he
has slept the night before. Offended, the crowd commands him to remove himself.
The Tramp wanders the bustling city street, and to avoid the gaze of a nearby police-
man, he climbs through a waiting car to the other side where he meets the Flower Girl.
After purchasing a flower, the Tramp discovers that she is blind—for her part, having
heard the car door slam shut, believes him to be something he is not. Unable—and
perhaps unwilling—to correct her misrecognition, he observes her for a time, under
the cover of her blindness. Returning that evening to the shabby flat she shares with
her grandmother (Florence Lee), she dreams of her wealthy suitor.

97
City Lights

Later, the Tramp encounters an inebriated Millionaire (Harry Myers) attempting

suicide by drowning; he is in despair because his wife has left him. The Tramp saves
him, though both fall into the river several times during the process. Returning to
the Millionaire’s luxurious home, they drink heavily under the disapproving eye of
the butler (Allan Garcia). After the Millionaire again attempts suicide, the two head
out for an evening under the city lights, the Tramp in his new friend’s borrowed
clothes. At a stylish supper club, the two frenetically dance the night away. In his
inebriated state, the Millionaire gives the Tramp his car. He sees the Flower Girl pass-
ing, and retrieves a few bills from the Millionaire to buy all of the Flower Girl’s mer-
chandise before driving her home. When he returns, the Millionaire has sobered up
and forgotten the camaraderie of the night, though the routine is once again played
out later that evening. The next morning, the two awake in the Millionaire’s bed—
one of several homoerotic moments in the film. Despite his mighty struggle to remain
in that world, the Tramp is again thrown out.
Visiting the Flower Girl, he learns that she is ill. Saddened, he is determined to earn
money to help her and her Grandmother. Under the gaze of Peace and Prosperity, the
Tramp, newly employed as a street cleaner, shovels animal droppings into his bin. Later
that afternoon, he calls on the Flower Girl, who eagerly awaits his arrival. He arrives
laden with gifts of food; he tells her of a Viennese doctor who not only has a cure for
blindness, but cures the poor for free. The two share a comfortable visit, until he dis-
covers a letter informing her of impending eviction; now the Tramp is even more in
need of funds, but he has lost his job as a street cleaner. A crooked boxer offers him easy
money if he will participate in a rigged fight, but, wanted by the law, he flees, leaving
the Tramp with a robust new opponent (Hank Mann). He attempts to ingratiate him-
self, smiling winsomely, and awaits his fight as boxer after boxer returns, badly beaten.
In the ring, still wearing his bowler, it looks for a brief moment that the Tramp might
indeed succeed, but after the second round, the Tramp is carried out, dazed. Later, he
wanders the city streets, searching for a way to help the Flower Girl; a wave of well-
dressed people rushes by him, and among them he encounters the Millionaire, who,
once again drunk, takes him home.
Unbeknownst to all, two burglars await. The Tramp explains his troubles to the
Millionaire, who is touched and gives the Tramp $1,000. Discovering a gun on the
floor, the Tramp worries that his friend will again seek to take his life; as they argue,
a burglar creeps up behind them with a sap, eventually knocking the Millionaire
unconscious. By the time the police arrive, the burglars have fled, the Millionaire does
not remember the Tramp, and the Tramp has a wad of money in his pocket. He escapes
in the confusion of the darkened room, and runs to the Flower Girl, giving her the
money for her trip to the eye doctor. After leaving, however, he is captured by the
law. For close to nine months, the Tramp is incarcerated; meanwhile, the Flower Girl
has regained her sight and opened a successful shop. When we next see her, she is serv-
ing a handsome, well-dressed man, and for a brief moment, she thinks he must be her
suitor; he leaves, however, without recognizing her.
Released from prison, the Tramp seems broken. He aimlessly wanders the streets in
torn pants, dirty bowler, and safety-pinned jacket, a far cry from either tidy vagrant or

98
 Cleopatra

gentleman in borrowed clothes. On the street, he is mocked and tortured by paper-

boys, and when he finds some flowers swept into the gutter from the shop, he stoops
to pick one up only to endure the boys tearing at his exposed underwear. After he
chases them away, the Tramp recognizes the Flower Girl and gazes with such force
she wonders if she has made a conquest; she gives the funny vagrant a coin and flower
to replace the one from the gutter that he had crushed in his astonishment. As they
touch, she recognizes him; she acknowledges that she can see, but in her eyes there is
sadness, for he is not the man she thought he was. The camera fades out on the Tramp’s
shy, hopeful smile.
Among Chaplin’s numerous financial and personal crises during the production of
City Lights, the advent of sound threatened to make his most well-known character—
and the moral-aesthetic sensibility he represents—a relic of a bygone era. As part
owner of United Artists, however, Chaplin was able to enjoy the privilege of indulg-
ing his spontaneous production habits and the freedom to reject dialogue. In the late
1920s, cinema was quickly passing the Rubicon marked by synchronized sound-on-
film; City Lights, not a true silent film but a “silent talkie,” would attempt to nego-
tiate this new technological terrain by employing a synchronized soundtrack but no
dialogue. Chaplin’s score is notable in its use of sound effects that not only comple-
ment the film’s physical comedy but also suggest a kind of commentary on the empty
noise of talking pictures—in the opening sequence, for instance, the pompous city
luminaries “speak” through kazoos. Despite this satirical commentary, there is also a
nostalgic quality about the film especially resonant for its Depression-era audiences.
City Lights seems aware of itself as an anachronism, much like the Tramp himself,
who belongs to none of the worlds he so desperately wants to inhabit. The Flower
Girl’s unresolved choice at the conclusion of the film is thus not hers alone.
See also: Chaplin, Charlie; Silent Era, The

References
Davies, Therese. “First Sight: Blindness, Cinema and Unrequited Love.” Journal of Narrative
Theory 33(1): 48–62.
Flom, Eric. Chaplin in the Sound Era: An Analysis of the Seven Talkies. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1997.
Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989.
Molyneaux, Gerard. Charles Chaplin’s City Lights: Its Production and Dialectical Structure. New
York: Garland, 1983.
—Tonya Howe

CLEOPATRA. Released in 1963, Cleopatra has sometimes been referred to as the

biggest movie failure in film history. Twentieth Century-Fox was in financial difficul-
ties, and Cleopatra was originally conceived as a low-cost production. With easily
affordable second-tier actors such as Peter Finch, Stephen Boyd, and Joan Collins,

99
Cleopatra

the film’s producers reasoned that they could easily stay within the limits of their
$2 million budget. Production costs began to balloon almost immediately, however,
when Fox agreed to Elizabeth Taylor’s salary demand of $1 million. Still, filming began
on an optimistic note at the Pinewood Studios in London under the direction of
Rouben Mamoulian; but 16 months and $7 million later, after Elizabeth Taylor had
almost died of pneumonia and most of the sets were destroyed by rain, the production
was shut down. A year passed before it was resumed, now with Joseph Mankiewicz,
who had directed Taylor in the highly successful Suddenly Last Summer, in charge.
The surviving ten minutes of usable film from the London shoot was discarded, Rex
Harrison and Richard Burton replaced Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd as Caesar and
Mark Antony, and filming was moved to Rome and various locations in Spain.
Things began to break down again, though, as Mankiewicz began rewriting the script
and filming scenes in the order that they were written, which created costly time delays.
During these delays a romance developed between Taylor and Burton. The affair
became a bigger story than the film itself, since both Taylor and Burton were married
at the time. Taylor was still in the tabloids for, some believed, having stolen Eddie Fisher
away from his first wife Debbie Reynolds, soon after her own husband, Michael Todd,
was killed. This new scandal brought condemnation from the Pope and even reached
the floor of Congress, where attempts were made to revoke Taylor’s passport.
Mankiewicz wanted to make Cleopatra an historical epic with the emphasis on “his-
torical.” He hired thousands of extras and pushed his set and costume designers to
make everything he was going to shoot as historically accurate as possible. Conceiving
the film as an extended, six-hour production, Mankiewicz suggested that the picture
would be divided into two three-hour segments that would be released separately.
Darryl Zanuck, who took control of Fox during the final phase of production, when
costs were again spiraling out of control, opposed the two-part release and forced Man-
kewicz to cut first two, and then three hours from the film. While Cleopatra still man-
aged to be nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture, and did eventually break
even at the box office, critical opinion was mostly negative. Mankewicz believed that
the final product was a poor substitute for the grand film spectacle that he had imag-
ined, and the actors grumbled that their best scenes had been left on the cutting-
room floor. Taylor was so upset she refused to attend the opening.
Because it followed other successful historical epics, such as The Ten Commandments
(1956), Ben Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and El Cid (1961), there was good reason
to believe that Cleopatra, especially with its stellar cast, would be successful. Epics, after
all, were popular enough to compete with television for audiences; and it was thought
that another big-budget extravaganza would bring people back to theaters. Epics, it was
argued by many in Hollywood, were good investments because they shared several
common features: longer running times, that allowed for advance ticket sales and inter-
missions; multiple storylines; heroes who experience setbacks but whose deaths or suf-
fering have redemptive qualities; star-studded ensemble casts; and unified action,
where the various storylines and characters serve one overarching theme. Unfortu-
nately, because historically Cleopatra was less heroic than seductively disruptive, there
was little about her, or her story, that seemed redemptive. Even the forbidden

100
 Clockwork Orange, A

relationship between Taylor and Burton, which was eerily close to that of Cleopatra
and the men she brought down and which was now being played out on the screen,
could not save the picture; indeed, because the stars were less than discreet about their
affair, their relationship may have angered audiences, keeping them away from thea-
ters. In the end, the dismal failure of Cleopatra effectively brought a close to the
studio-financed, big-budget epic. With the development of computer-generated
imagery, however, making filmic spectacle possible without the expense of “casts of
thousands,” the historical epic returned in 2000 with the highly successful Gladiator.
See also: Taylor, Elizabeth

References
Burns, Kevin. “Cleopatra: The Film that Changed Hollywood.” Disc 3. Cleopatra, special ed.
DVD. Prometheus Entertainment, 2001.
Santas, Constantine. The Epic in Film: From Myth to Blockbuster. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2008.

—Rick Lilla

CLOCKWORK ORANGE, A. One of the most controversial films in the history of

American cinema, A Clockwork Orange (1971) is, perhaps, director Stanley Kubrick’s
darkest assessment of the human condition, even though it stands within a body of
work that is replete with similar bleak observations. One of the few American cin-
ematic offerings initially to receive an X-rating and yet still be considered for Best Pic-
ture at the Academy Awards (the other was Midnight Cowboy), Kubrick made slight
changes to the film to earn it an “R” rating, thus allowing it to be seen by larger audi-
ences and to become financially successful. And successful it was, earning more than
10 times its estimated budget in its American release alone. Critics were sharply di-
vided over the film, which may be reflected in the fact that although A Clockwork
Orange was nominated for a plethora of mainstream awards (four Oscars, seven
BAFTA Awards, and three Golden Globes), it failed to win any of them. Probably
the least likely of Kubrick’s films to be shown on cable television, and banned with
Kubrick’s consent from presentation in England for nearly 30 years, the film has
remained a cult classic, earning over 2 million pounds in a 2000 English rerelease after
the death of the director in 1999.
A Clockwork Orange follows the story of Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a young
Beethoven-loving malcontent who terrorizes the inhabitants of a futuristic, style-
conscious, and dystopian England with his fellow “Droogs.” His story is divided into
three interconnected narrative segments. In the first, we see Alex and his friends raping,
fighting, and pillaging for the sheer thrill of it. In the next, Alex is imprisoned and
medically reconditioned to reject violence (and, accidentally, Beethoven) through a
new behavioral technique that eliminates his free will. In the final section, a now
reformed (and helpless) Alex retraces his steps from the first section of the film, and
is preyed upon by his former victims in a nightmarish sequence that eventually results

101
Clockwork Orange, A

Malcolm McDowell in a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which shocked audi-
ences when it was released in 1971. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

in an attempted suicide. It is this act that breaks his conditioning, and in the final
sequence of the film, the audience is treated to a gloriously depraved look inside Alex’s
mind, with the promise of more violence and sex to come. Once again free to choose,
Alex returns to his former life as a violent street thug.
Like his prior film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange is suffused with rich,
original, complex, and shocking images, all expertly filmed by cinematographer John
Alcott. While the violence and sexuality of the movie have received a great deal of
attention, the film’s most enduring images may be those focused on Alex’s eyes: his
audience-directed glare in the film’s opening shot; his gleeful, masked expression after
he croons “Singin’ in the Rain” during a rape sequence; and the terror-stricken stare
when his eyes are forced open during the administration of the unsettling behavioral
process, called the Ludovico technique in the film. In a perverse way, Kubrick compels
us to view the world, literally and figuratively, through Alex’s eyes. As Thomas Allen
Nelson suggests, it is through the use of this filmic device that Kubrick attempts to turn
his audience members into voyeurs who cannot tell the difference between their own
fantasies and the ones depicted on the screen.
The stylistic imaginings of Alex’s futuristic violent youth culture were certainly
meant to be terrifying; but for Kubrick, it seems, they were also meant to be compre-
hensible as a real, and vital, part of our world. It may be argued that in leading his
audiences to sympathize with Alex, even as they recoil in horror from his disturbing
behavior, Kubrick was seeking to expose humanity’s deep fascination with deviant

102
 Clueless

forms of sex and violence, a fascination that continually threatens to burst forth from
within the boundaries imposed by civilized societies striving to regulate the appetites
and consequences that accompany these base activities. Given that Alex’s life is really
only threatened when he becomes suicidal after losing his ability to choose his own
path, what Kubrick may have been saying with A Clockwork Orange was that humans
are nothing more than pathetic wind-up toys if they do not have choices, even if those
choices sometimes unleash the most disquieting elements of our existence.
See also: Kubrick, Stanley

References
Naremore, James. On Kubrick. London: British Film Institute, 2007.
Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, expanded ed. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2000.

—James M. Brandon

CLUELESS. Clueless, a 1995 film directed by Amy Heckerling, is a modern-day

adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. This update of the Austen novel features Alicia
Silverstone as Cher Horowitz (the contemporary Emma Woodhouse), a matchmaker
who speed dials her love matches from her cell phone in a Beverly Hills mall. Though
Cher does not involve herself in matchmaking as a result of a deal or a bet, she does feel
it is her responsibility (as the most popular girl in her Beverly Hills high school) to
make over an out-of-place transfer named Tai (Brittany Murphy) and find her a suit-
able boyfriend. Little does Cher realize that love has been what she herself has been
looking for all along.
The film opens at an outdoor pool party. Hordes of impossibly beautiful and weal-
thy teenagers are splashing one another as Cher narrates the scene, taking the audience
on a brief introductory journey through her life. Cher, a late twentieth-century teenage
girl, picks out her daily outfits from a computer-programmed closet, refuses to date
high school boys, and has an older, ex-stepbrother named Josh (Paul Rudd), who
accuses her of having only one direction in life: “toward the mall.”
Anxious to prove there is more to her than a superficial exterior, Cher embarks on a
crusade of selflessness. She begins by playing matchmaker to two of her teachers, the
nerdy Mr. Hall (Wallace Shawn) and lonely Miss Geist (Twink Caplan). Her next
project is to make over Tai, a “tragically unhip” new arrival at their high school. After
a trip to the mall, Cher attempts to set up Tai with Elton (Jeremy Sisto), a popular,
good-looking boy in school, although Tai has her eye on a skateboarding stoner, Travis
(Breckin Meyer). Cher discovers Elton actually prefers her and is left to comfort the
distraught Tai, who feels betrayed by her mentor. That weekend, Cher brings Tai to
a party, and she ends up falling for Josh. Cher’s experiment soon turns sour when Tai’s
popularity surpasses her own, as Tai morphs into a self-obsessed monster who has no
idea how “clueless” her mentor really is. Crushed by Tai’s rejection (and upset by her

103
Conversation, The

inability to pass her driver’s test), Cher goes on a soul-searching expedition (which
includes a shopping spree at the mall). Vowing to make a stronger effort at a more pro-
ductive life, Cher volunteers for a disaster-relief drive and makes amends with Tai,
encouraging her to go out with Travis. She also begins to spend more time with Josh,
coming to understand that what she took to be the most unappealing things about
him—his intellect, his commitment to hard work, his rejection of Cher’s superficial
lifestyle—are the very things she now finds most attractive about him.
Clueless was the first in a series of modern filmic remakes of classic novels that were
aimed at teenage audiences. Filmmakers had often turned to works by authors such as
Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen, but most of the pictures they produced were
“straight” adaptations of literature to the screen. In adapting classic literary works as
teen films, however, studios were attempting to broaden the appeal of these narratives
and market them to younger audiences (Davis, 2006). Other teen films that followed
the trend set by Clueless include 10 Things I Hate about You (a 1999 remake of Taming
of the Shrew), Cruel Intentions (a 1999 remake of Dangerous Liaisons), and O (a 2001
remake of Othello).
Although widely popular with audiences, Clueless split critics. Many praised the
film, seeing it as an indictment of the “cult of popularity” that acted to marginalize
teens without the financial or emotional resources to become part of the affluent “in-
crowd.” Others saw Clueless as nothing more than a “makeover film,” one that brought
consumption to the forefront of teenage consciousness, masking superficiality and
opulence with satire and references to popular culture, and demonstrating that anyone
can be popular through shopping and by prescribing to the right beauty conventions.
Disturbingly, they argued, films such as Clueless, and later, She’s All That (1999) and
Never Been Kissed (1999), made the mall into a kind of utopian sacred space wherein
social outcasts could be normalized and carried from the “lowest high school social
rung to the top” of the social ladder (Quart, 2003).
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The; Heckerling, Amy

References
Davis, Hugh H. “I Was a Teenage Classic: Literary Adaptation in Turn-of-the-Millennium Teen
Films.” The Journal of American Culture 29(1), March 2006.
Quart, Alissa. Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003.
—Jennie Woodard

CONVERSATION, THE. The Conversation is a film written and directed by

Francis Ford Coppola. Released between the first two installments of his Godfather tril-
ogy, it won the Palme d’Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for
three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Surprisingly, perhaps because of its nar-
rative opacity, it was not a box-office success, although it has since grown in influence.
Coppola has referred to it as his favorite of the films he has made.

104
 Conversation, The

The movie follows Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a private surveillance expert hired
by the Director (Robert Duvall) to record the conversation between his wife, Ann
(Cindy Williams) and her lover, Mark (Frederic Forrest). Using a number of different
listening devices, he is able to piece together much of their exchange. A comment by
Mark, “he’d kill us if he got the chance,” troubles Caul, as he believes that the lives of
Ann and Mark are in danger. Although he meets the Director’s assistant, Martin (Har-
rison Ford), Harry refuses to hand over the tapes he has recorded.
Ironically, Harry’s skill at exposing the most intimate secrets of those on whom he
spies is the very thing that makes his private life so disturbingly sterile. Terrified to
open up to anyone else, including his assistant Stan (John Cazale) and his girlfriend
Amy (Terri Garr), he turns to the only person with whom he feels somewhat safe, his
priest. In a painful act of contrition, Harry confesses that in the past his work led to
the deaths of two people. Now, he believes, the same thing might happen if he reveals
what was said during the conversation between Ann and Mark.
Although Harry hides the tapes, they are stolen by the Director’s operatives. When
summoned to the office of the Director so that he can be paid for his work, Caul finds
his client in a state of rage over what he has heard on the tapes. Believing that the
Director is planning to kill his wife and her lover at a meeting in a hotel that had been
mentioned during the conversation between Ann and Mark, Harry decides to listen in.
He bugs the meeting room and overhears a confrontation between the couple and the
Director. Overwhelmed by what he is hearing, Harry peeks through a window into the
meeting room and is startled to see the results of a bloody struggle. Horrified and
impotent, Caul retreats into his own room. After regaining his composure, he sneaks
into the adjoining room to find that it has no mark of a struggle. When he flushes
the toilet, however, blood flows out and Harry is certain that he has been complicit
in at least one more murder.
Later, Caul is shocked to find that Ann is alive and well, and that it is the Director
who is dead. Realizing that he has been a pawn in a plot to murder the Director, it
dawns on Harry that what Mark had said to Ann was really, “He’d kill us if he got
the chance.” The fateful statement, it is now clear, had been a justification for murder.
Returning home, he receives a call instructing him not to discuss the murder with any-
one and warning him that he is under surveillance. Terrified, Harry dismantles his
apartment piece by piece, but cannot find a bug.
Coppola points to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) as the inspiration for
The Conversation. Like Antonioni’s film, The Conversation explored the technological
blurring of lines between the private and public spheres and the real-world consequen-
ces, both psychological and political, to which such technological acts of elision can
give rise. Interestingly, although conceived before the Watergate scandal rocked
America, The Conversation was released just months before President Nixon was forced
to resign in the summer of 1974, after it was revealed that he had recorded plans for a
cover-up of the break-in at Democratic Headquarters. The parallel between the fate of
The Conversation’s protagonist—Harry Caul is exposed by the very technology that he
believed would keep him safe—and that of President Nixon was one of the things that
led to the film’s cult status.

105
Cool Hand Luke

See also: Coppola, Francis Ford; Politics and Film

References
“The Conversation (1974).” Boxofficemojo.com. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id
=conversation.htm.
Cowie, Peter. Coppola: A Biography. New York: Da Capo, 1994.
Phillips, Gene D., and Rodney Hill, eds. Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2004.
Turner, Dennis. “The Subject of ‘The Conversation.’ ” Cinema Journal 24(4), 1985.

—Alan C. Abbott

COOL HAND LUKE. Cool Hand Luke is a 1967 Stuart Rosenberg film depicting
one man’s encounter with discipline and punishment within the confines of a 1940s
chain gang. The tenor of Cool Hand Luke and its release during the late 1960s reflects
the spirit of an era in the midst of civil transformation.
Paul Newman in his role as “Lukas ‘Luke’ Jackson,” delivers a performance charac-
terized by non-conformity and a skepticism about the infallibility of institutions of
control. Serving a two-year sentence in a correctional facility, Luke finds himself
entangled in a web of trivial rules and regulations. His unwillingness to operate within
these formal boundaries, his clever wit, and his calm demeanor earn him the name
“Cool Hand Luke.”
Soon prison inmates befriend Luke for his carefree attitude, appetite for adventure
and constant defiance. These antiheroic qualities can be found in scenes where Luke’s
resistance reverses the legitimacy and efficacy of institutionalized masculinity, disci-
pline, and punishment; in effect revealing the social ironies of a correctional system
designed to diminish one’s sense of self.
In one example of this resistance, Luke finds himself embroiled in a dispute with
another inmate named “Dragline,” played by George Kennedy. As prison rules and
hypermasculinity take hold, Dragline and Luke begin to settle their dispute through
a fight. With bets riding and the fervor of male competitiveness growing, Dragline
delivers a vicious beating to Luke. Disadvantaged in both size and strength, Luke’s
stubborn posturing and reluctance to give up somehow drains Dragline of his determi-
nation.
As the fight comes to an end, the seriousness of the violence becomes more appar-
ent, and the excitement of onlookers transforms into disgust. In the end, the crowd
of observers disperses and Dragline walks away leaving Luke badly beaten. Despite
his obvious loss, Luke’s willingness to continue his fight, even though he knows he
has no chance of winning, impresses all who witness the performance. This critical
scene emphasizes the brutality of the violence and draws out the absurdities of making
such behavior an acceptable negotiating mechanism for prisoners.
Luke’s unflappable personality is also accompanied by an amusing tact for dealing
with boredom; often resulting in the entertainment and inspiration of his fellow
inmates. In one illustrative scene, Luke wins a wager that he can eat 50 eggs in one

106
 Cool Hand Luke

Paul Newman, playing a banjo, and George Kennedy talk in a still from the 1967 film Cool Hand
Luke, directed by Stuart Rosenberg. Newman was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar while Kennedy
won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for their roles in the film. (Warner Bros./Getty Images)

hour. Although this scene appears to be a farcical episode of senselessness, the event
suggests a rethinking of the impossible, while encouraging the unthinkable.
Throughout the movie a growing tension emerges between definitions of incarcera-
tion and freedom. In one of the most popular scenes, the “Captain” of the facility,
played by Strother Martin, castigates Luke for escaping; uttering the now-famous
phrase “What we’ve got here is [a] failure to communicate.” Herein a paradox exists
where such a communication breakdown could only be possible under the circum-
stances of an imbalanced distribution of power.
Although Luke makes three attempts to escape, a subtext of his venturesome life
within the prison suggests that he is only physically incarcerated, while his mind and
soul remain virtually free. During one of Luke’s escape attempts, he mails the inmates
a picture of himself nuzzled between two attractive women with a postscript that reads,
“Dear Boys, Playing it Cool, Luke.” The picture becomes an article of veneration for
the inmates, one that appears to provide a sense of optimism for a life beyond the pris-
on’s fences. Yet, upon being apprehended and returned to the facility, Luke concedes
that the photograph was a fake—paid for and doctored merely to entertain. In a telling
scene that follows, the inmates struggle to accept Luke’s admission, somehow holding
onto the notion that such a system of control and incarceration is surmountable. Yet,

107
Crash (1996)

in this instance, and indeed at the end of the film when Luke’s final escape ends in his
death, such a notion of romantic invincibility proves illusory. Given the release of this
film during the civil unrest of late 1960s, such a theme seems to have resonated with
audiences engaged in a similar form of futile resistance, irrespective of an unprec-
edented show of opposition toward conventional values.
See also: Newman, Paul; Politics and Film

References
Mason, Paul. “The Screen Machine: Cinematic Representations of Prison.” In Mason, Paul, ed.
Criminal Visions. Portland, OR: Willan, 2003.
Pearce, Donn. Cool Hand Luke. New York: Scribners, 1965.
—Salvador Murguia

CRASH (1996). One can scarcely imagine a more sympathetic filmmaker to adapt
the late J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash than David Cronenberg (the novel was released in
1973, the film in 1996). One of the few truly radical sensibilities operating in main-
stream cinema, Cronenberg is equally preoccupied, as critic Gavin Smith notes, with
“the communion of characters with technology, disease, narcotics, telepathy, and Oth-
erness” (1997). One has only to recall the loners and malformed techno-creatures that
populate other Cronenberg films—Videodrome, The Fly, and Naked Lunch, for example—
to understand Smith’s point.
Ballard’s brilliant, controversial novel probes contemporary society’s obsessions with
sex, death, and the automobile. Flesh and metal, blood and gasoline, copulation and
collision run like bright threads through the narrative—frequently intertwined, some-
times fused—forecasting a transcendent, disastrous apocalyptic moment. According to
Ballard, the story grew out of a concatenation of circumstances, including a bad acid
trip, a personal preoccupation with earth-shattering cataclysm (foregrounded in his
1960s science fiction novels), and a museum exhibit he organized himself in 1970,
which displayed three car wrecks and was introduced to the public by a topless female
guide. The latter event, he says, was his “green light” to write Crash. Public response
was one of immediate shock and indignation. “This author is beyond psychiatric help,”
moaned one commentator.
In his novel, Ballard literally wrote himself into the narrative as the central character—
the author gave his protagonist the name James Ballard and made him a filmmaker at
London’s Shepperton Studios, Shepperton being the name of the suburb in which the
real-life Ballard lived. The story unfolds from the point where Ballard survives a nearly
fatal car crash and quickens to the erotic charge of a culture given over to traffic jams
and automobile accidents, as well as to a subculture of sex-and-crash freaks huddled at
society’s margins. Ballard indulges in every aspect of automobile sex with a host of
bizarre friends and acquaintances: Robert Vaughan, a former actor who now spends
his time photographing accidents and plotting out imaginary collisions for himself

108
 Crash (1996)

and others; Catherine, his nymphomaniacal wife; Dr. Remington, a survivor of Ballard’s
crash; Gabrielle, an accident survivor whose body has been patched and shackled with
metal braces; and Seagrave, a stunt driver who revels in his work. “The motor car,”
writes Ballard, “was the sexual act’s greatest and only true locus.”
What follows is not so much the evolutionary unfolding of a plot as the depiction of
a series of violent encounters, described in highly graphic—some would say porno-
graphic—detail. Ballard and his companions seem to have been stunned by the glare
of approaching headlights and damaged by the concussive force of metal meeting
bone. Their bodies, like their automobiles, are broken and twisted into bizarre shapes
that elicit experiments in new forms of erotic activity. “[Their] wounds,” says Ballard,
“were the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology.” It is an arc of
steadily intensifying activity that leads to Vaughan’s unsettling obsession with stage-
managing a crash that will kill actress Elizabeth Taylor. In the end, it is Vaughan, not
the actress, who lies dying in the crumpled metal. Ballard is left to mourn Vaughan,
ultimately coming to the realization that he must begin designing the elements of his
own car crash, which, as it turns out, will be but a small part in a global apotheosis
of carnage: “In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous auto-
mobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting
loins and engine coolant.”
Cronenberg’s faithful film adaptation of the Ballard novel received a mixture of
cheers and boos—it won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1996, but received a chilly
reception in America from distributor Ted Turner. Except for a minor change in loca-
tion (from London to Toronto) and the excision of the Elizabeth Taylor motif, it
retains intact the novel’s major elements. James Ballard (James Spader) is a filmmaker
who encounters Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), the widow of a man killed in a
crash. She introduces Ballard to a strange, dark man named Vaughan (Elias Koteas),
the guru of car crashes. Slaughter, it seems, feeds Vaughan’s hunger, extends his vision,
and arouses in him a sense of both pain and fulfillment. He hangs around hospitals
taking pictures of accident victims. He and his friends sit at home watching videocas-
settes of crash-test dummies being slammed about. They stage reenactments of famous
auto disasters (a plot detail only hinted at in the novel). In front of a bleacher full of
onlookers, Vaughan reprises the James Dean collision—and almost kills himself in
the process. (He will, in fact, eventually kill himself in an attempt to restage the Jayne
Mansfield accident, in which the star was purportedly decapitated.)
Meanwhile, our hero, James, has been sampling, on his own, all kinds of automo-
bile sex. His strange encounters are more like emotional and psychological collisions,
random and anonymous. James, finally, is left with no other desire than to wander
the freeways looking for disaster and sex. In a departure from the novel, the climactic
scene has him impulsively running Catherine’s (Deborah Ungar) car off the road. He
scrambles down the embankment and embraces her broken and bleeding body. Is he
glad she’s still alive; or is he disappointed she did not die? “Maybe the next one, dar-
ling, maybe the next one,” he says enigmatically. The camera lifts up and away—leav-
ing the scene of an accident, as it were—in a panoramic act of voyeurism, allowing us
to witness James and Catherine having sex before the image fades to black.

109
Crash (2004)

Aside from this shocking ending, which is not an alteration so much as a visualiza-
tion of the prophecy in the novel’s penultimate paragraph, the film’s most sensational
moments stem directly from the book—the homosexual encounter between Ballard
and Vaughan, the bizarre sex scene between Ballard and the metal-braced Gabrielle
(Rosanna Arquette), and the lyrically dazzling carwash sequence that intercuts back-
seat lovemaking with the orgasmic frenzy of the squirting sudsy water and flailing
cloth pads.
Crash has the panoply of imagery and props typical of a Cronenberg film—the mat-
ing of flesh and metal, the dehumanization of the sex act, the invasive presence of
broadcast media, etc. The sex scenes are frequent (there are three encounters within
the first minute of screen time), blunt, and graphic. It earned its NC-17 rating. Signifi-
cantly, however, the film version of Crash, like Ballard’s novel, chronicles all this in a
cold, remote fashion, regarding the floundering and cruelties of the characters with a
dispassionate gaze—as if they were mere reflections spreading across the sleek surface
of polished metal. Cronenberg eschews stylistic hype, the expected hard-rock sound-
track, the token frenzied handheld camera, and the predictable frenetic cutting.
Instead, the characters and the story seem to drift, a gasoline-inhaling machine moving
at full throttle but with the clutch all the way in. As Gavin Smith writes, “Cronenberg’s
film exemplifies cool, hieratic austerity. His setups and cutting have never been more
inhumanely deliberate and exact. . . . In its subdued, subtractive minimalism and
almost oppressive formal control, Crash toys with the possibilities of enervation and
entropy” (Smith, 1997). Ballard and Cronenberg aspired to force us into a disturbing
imaginative space, it seems, one in which the flame of fantasy burns with an intensely
cold dystopic heat.

References
Shone, Tom. “The Road to ‘Crash.’ ” New Yorker, March 17, 1997.
Smith, Gavin. “Cronenberg: Mind Over Matter.” Film Comment 33(2), March-April 1997.
Tibbetts, John C., and James M. Welsh, eds. The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film. New York:
Facts on File, 2005.

—John C. Tibbetts

CRASH (2004). Paul Haggis’s Crash (2004) is about racial and social tensions in Los
Angeles, and is a harsh critique of the hypocrisy of multicultural thought, political cor-
rectness, and the abuse of stereotypes. The story was inspired by a real-life incident in
which Haggis’s car was carjacked outside a video store in 1991. The film won three
Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing.
“In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we
miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”
So says Detective Graham Waters (Don Cheadle) to his colleague and partner, Ria
(Jennifer Esposito), as they head to a crime scene at the beginning of the film—Waters

110
 Crash (2004)

will come to find out that the victim at the scene is actually his brother. Spinning off
from this opening, Crash proceeds in flashback, as a series of seemingly unrelated yet
ultimately intersecting storylines, which are organized around the jarring, fleeting rela-
tionships that are established among members of different racial groups. The white,
upper-middle-class Cabots—D.A. Rick (Brendan Fraser) and his wife Jean (Sandra
Bullock)—“crash” into two black thieves, Anthony (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) and
Peter (Larenz Tate), when the young men draw guns and carjack their vehicle. Shaken,
Jean must now deal with the aftermath of the unsettling event by having the locks
changed at their house. Disturbed by the appearance of a Puerto Rican locksmith,
Daniel (Michael Peña), who is performing the service, Jean demands of her husband,
within earshot of Daniel, that he have the locks changed again in the morning—this
time, one assumes, by someone who, as Jean sees it, is not a gang member. A racist
policeman, John Ryan (Matt Dillon), humiliates a middle-class black couple, the
Thayers, Cameron (Terrence Howard) and Christine (Thandie Newton), when, after
pulling them over, he sexually molests Christine while supposedly frisking her—as
her outraged but helpless husband is forced to watch. Later, John will be have the cultural
tables turned on him when he must try to convince a black social worker, Shaniqua
Johnson (Loretta Devine), that his father needs government-funded assistance; and, in
a cruel irony—for both people, it seems—he actually saves Christine’s life after she is
in a car accident. Finally, Officer Ryan’s politically correct partner, Tom Hansen (Ryan
Phillipe), who prevents Cameron from being shot by other cops, ends up shooting
Peter—whom he thinks is reaching for a gun. Peter, it turns out, is the brother of Detec-
tive Waters. There is more woven among these complex storylines—a disturbing narra-
tive sequence in which an Iranian shopkeeper, Farhab (Shaun Toub), who thinks that
Daniel has robbed him after Daniel is called out to look at Farhab’s locks, almost kills
Daniel’s young daughter—but Haggis’s powerful point about racial hatred can be lifted
from any of the individual vignettes.
Although audience and critical responses to the film were exceptionally good, espe-
cially given that it focuses on subject matter that makes many viewers uncomfortable,
some found certain aspects of Crash problematic. Its portrayals of certain ethnic
groups, for instance, especially Asians and Asian Americans, were sometimes degrad-
ing; and, as film critic Paul Gromley pointed out, the portrayal of the character Farhab
lapses into caricature, suggesting that the Iranian shopkeeper is driven by some primi-
tive belief in blood revenge, and thus appears to be nothing more than a “deranged,
paranoid individual.” Because of this, argues Gromley, the film’s message risks being
subverted, as the prejudice it criticizes is sometimes cinematically directed toward the
members of particular ethnic groups (Gromley, 2007).
According to film critic Roger Ebert, however, because the characters in Crash “say
exactly what they are thinking, without the filters of political correctness,” the film,
even with its flaws, is ultimately about “progress,” representing, as it were, a cultural
awareness of Otherness.
See also: African Americans in Film; Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema

111
Crying Game, The

References
Ebert, Roger. “Crash.” Chicago Sun-Times, May 5, 2005. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/
pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050505/REVIEWS/50502001/1023.
Gromley, Paul. “Crash and the City.” darkmatter, May 7, 2007. http://www.darkmatter101.org/
site/2007/05/07/crash-and-the-city.
—Zoltán Dragon

CRYING GAME, THE. Neil Jordan’s controversial 1992 film The Crying Game
explores issues surrounding the creation of national, gender, racial, and sexual iden-
tities. Although The Crying Game received six Academy Award nominations, it won
only one, for Jordan’s screenplay.
The film begins at a fair where IRA terrorists kidnap a British soldier in order to use
him to ransom IRA prisoners. Fergus (Stephen Rea), a reluctant IRA member, is
entrusted with keeping an eye on the prisoner, Jody (Forest Whitaker). Hidden away
in a barn at a countryside cottage, prisoner and guard begin to establish a bond, one
that becomes so intimate that Jody asks Fergus to make sure his girlfriend, Dil (Jaye
Davidson), is safe in case he should die. Fergus is ultimately ordered to execute Jody,
although he is unable to carry out the task. Head covered by a sack and hands tied
behind his back, Jody desperately tries to escape; eventually stumbling onto a road,
he is run down and killed by a British military vehicle. Disturbed by what he has seen,
and by his role in it, Fergus flees to London, recreating himself as a Scottish construc-
tion worker. Seeking to fulfill his promise to Jody, Fergus finally contacts Dil. In an
interesting parallel to the evolving relationship that was established between Fergus
and Jody, Fergus and Dil now establish their own increasingly intimate relationship.

Scene from the 1992 film The Crying Game, directed by Neil Jordan. (Photofest)

112
 Crying Game, The

In one of the most unsettling, and redemptive, scenes in modern cinema, an excited
Fergus slowly undresses Dil, only to discover that “she” is a man. Shocked, Fergus
wants nothing more to do with Dil; and yet he cannot tear himself away from her—
their bond has already grown too strong. When he is imprisoned after failing to carry
out an IRA plan, Dil faithfully visits him in jail, now as his girlfriend.
Jordan does a masterful job drawing his audiences in: by the time Dil’s identity is
disclosed to us—moviegoers and critics were urged not to “reveal the secret” to those
who had not yet seen the movie—we, like Fergus, have already come to care about
Dil, making it all but impossible for us to dismiss her as some infectious Other. Inter-
estingly, Jordan created musical bookends for his narrative: in the opening sequence we
hear Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman”; and during the final scene, we hear
Lyle Lovett’s rendition of “Stand by Your Man.” Respectively blues and country ballads
about the torturous dynamics of heterosexual relationships, their use in The Crying
Game seems to represent Jordan’s attempt to trope normative notions of love and
responsibility. The director goes further by weaving through the narrative three distinct
interpretations of the song “The Crying Game.” Offered three times, by three different
artists, using three very different musical styles, the song has a way of segmenting the
plotline, emphasizing its visual and narrative dimensions and guiding the interpreta-
tion of particular scenes and of the film itself.
A complex and provocative picture, The Crying Game was controversial on many
levels. One of the most notorious—and politically relevant—moments in the film
was the seduction scene set at the carnival. Preparing the way for Jody’s kidnapping,
Jude (Miranda Richardson) assists him at the bathrooms (an act that is later repeated
between Jody and Fergus), and afterwards offers herself to the soldier. Critics were
angered by what they saw as a problematic plot point: a British paratrooper is played
by an African American actor, who is seduced by a white, female Irish Republican
Army activist, played by a British actress. Scholar Patrick McGee interprets this scene
within a nationalist context, suggesting that Jude’s act of sexual surrender may be
understood as the symbolical mother of the Irish nation (Kathleen Ni Houlihan—a
maternal symbol of Ireland and Irish nationalism) offering herself up for violent inva-
sion (McGee, 1997). Although seemingly an interpretive stretch, it must be remem-
bered that the film’s release coincided with brutal IRA terrorist attacks on London.
Director Jordan even claimed that the original box-office failure of his film could be
attributed to the contentious political issues upon which it touched. Interestingly, after
the film was released in the United States—becoming a huge hit—it was successfully
rereleased in Great Britain.

References
Jordan, Neil. A Neil Jordan Reader. New York: Vintage, 1993.
McGee, Patrick. Cinema, Theory, and Political Responsibility in Contemporary Culture.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
—Zoltán Dragon

113
This page intentionally left blank
 v
D
DANCES WITH WOLVES. Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) reimagines
the West as a place where Indians, and not whites, rule the plains, at least for a time.
Offering audiences a revisionist perspective on the West, and on the western itself,
the film depicts a world in which at least some whites have a genuine interest in learn-
ing about the lives and customs of Native Americans.
In the early 1980s, Michael Blake’s screenplay about a Civil War soldier’s relationship
with Dakota Indians found its way to Kevin Costner, who was greatly impressed by it.
Costner suggested that Blake turn it into a novel, which Blake did. The novel was
released with little fanfare, and Costner quickly optioned the work; the two collaborated
to write the screenplay for the film. Dances with Wolves tells the story of Lt. John Dunbar
(Costner) and his journey to a military outpost in the Dakota Territory during the Civil
War. The film opens with a wounded Lt. John Dunbar inadvertently leading Union
troops to victory on an otherwise stalemated battlefield. Hailed as a hero and allowed
to decide where he wants to be stationed, he chooses the Western frontier. Asked by a
major, “You wish to see the frontier?” Dunbar responds, “Yes sir, before it’s gone.”
Arriving at the deserted frontier outpost, Dunbar realizes that he is not only alone,
but the only white person for miles. He diligently works at a daily routine that includes
recording his experiences in a journal. Dunbar also attempts to befriend a wolf, whom
he affectionately nicknames Two Socks for the two white patches of fur on its front
paws. Unbeknownst to the isolated soldier, members of a neighboring Sioux Indian
tribe are watching him with interest. These native peoples have seen the Spanish and
then the Mexicans come and go, but they are convinced that the white man will not
leave once he arrives, and they want to learn all they can about him.
Members of the tribe, including the openly disagreeable Wind In His Hair and the
more patient and inquisitive Kicking Bird, eventually encounter Dunbar face-to-face.
Further meetings ensue, and cultural barriers begin to be broken down. Dunbar duti-
fully details what occurs at each meeting in his journal, at one point exclaiming,
“Nothing I have been told about these people is correct. They are not thieves or beg-
gars. They are not the boogeyman they are made out to be. On the contrary, they are
polite guests and I enjoy their humor.”

115
Dances with Wolves

Scene from the 1990 film Dances with Wolves, directed by and starring Kevin Costner. (Photofest)

Most of the remainder of the film depicts the growing relationship between Dunbar
and the Sioux. Hoping to cross the language barrier and to deepen their conversations,
Kicking Bird asks a tribe member named Stands With Fist to act as their translator.
Stands With Fist, a white woman who was rescued by the Sioux as a young girl after
a Pawnee attack that killed her entire family, is reluctant at first, but acquiesces because
she recognizes Dunbar’s importance to her tribe. When Kicking Bird and Chief Ten
Bears ask Dunbar to tell them how many whites will be coming, the increasingly unset-
tled Dunbar, now feeling part of the tribe, assures them that many whites will be com-
ing, in fact “as many as the stars in the sky.” Dunbar’s adoption into the tribe is
completed when he is given the name “Dances With Wolves,” after his interaction with
Two Socks.
Now part of the tribe, Dunbar comes to understand the very different vision of the
world that his new community holds. Now, as Dances With Wolves, he participates in
both the sacred ritual of the Bison Hunt and a necessary attack on the violent Pawnee.
He ultimately marries Stands With Fist and completely rejects his former life. Literally
leaving behind the military outpost he had established, Dances With Wolves prepares
himself to move with the tribe as the seasons change. Initially exuberant, Dances With
Wolves remembers that he has left his journal behind at the outpost. Realizing that the
book contains incriminating information, he attempts to retrieve it from the outpost,
only to be taken prisoner by newly arrived United States soldiers. They intend to
court-martial him for abandoning his post and “turning Injun.” Wind In His Hair
leads a rescue party that is able to free Dunbar and reunite him with Stands With Fist.

116
 Days of Wine and Roses

Understanding that more soldiers will come, however, and that they will not rest until
they have killed Dunbar, he and Stands With Fist, now caught between two cultures,
wander off alone.
One of a number of films that sought to deconstruct the myth of the West, and of
the western, Dances with Wolves gave expression to the Native American story from
the perspective of the “Indians.” Costner utilized the Dakota language for 25 percent
of the dialogue in the film, hired over 2,000 Native American extras, and sought the
counsel of numerous Native American tribespersons in creating the story. Dances with
Wolves was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, winning seven, including Best Direc-
tor (Kevin Costner) and Best Picture (Kevin Costner and Jim Wilson).
See also: Costner, Kevin; Native Americans in Film; Western, The

References
Costner, Kevin, Michael Blake, and Jim Wilson. Dances with Wolves: The Illustrated Story of the
Epic Film. New York: Newmarket Press, 1991.
Keller, Alexandra. “Historical Discourse and American Identity in Westerns since the Reagan
Administration.” Film and History 33(1), 2003.

—Lucas Calhoun

DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES. Among Hollywood’s most unflinching, complex

depictions of alcoholism, and a film notable for the courageous performances of leads
Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, Blake Edwards’s Days of Wine and Roses (1962) was not
the first major feature to deal with this sensitive topic, but it was groundbreaking none-
theless. Originally a television drama, the film tells the tragic story of San Francisco
advertising executive Joe Clay (Lemmon) and his wife, Kirsten (Remick), “social
drinkers” who both wind up in the grip of an addiction that destroys their respective
careers as well as their marriage. Eventually, Joe turns to Alcoholics Anonymous, but
Kirsten resists sobriety to the end, leaving the couple’s future in question.
Days’ refusal to provide audiences with a resolution to its characters’ problems rep-
resents just one of several artistic risks taken in the making of the film. Also significant
is how the story links alcoholism not principally to the characters’ personal struggles or
individual flaws, but to underlying uncertainties in what appears on the surface to be a
flourishing society. Whereas Don Birnam (Ray Milland), the main character in the
classic Lost Weekend (1945)—a film to which Days is often compared—is an unsuccess-
ful writer pained by past relationships, Joe appears to live an enviable life. He has a
high-paying job working in an office adorned with fashionable abstract art and
designer furniture; he woos and marries his client’s beautiful assistant; and the couple
moves into a lavish apartment featuring a picture-window view of San Francisco Bay.
Why does addiction wreck these apparently successful lives?
To the film’s credit, the answer in Days is not obvious. On the one hand, this
reflected increasingly influential theories of alcoholism, promulgated by a growing

117
Dead Poets Society

professional treatment community, as well as by AA, which saw addiction as much in

medical as psychological terms. As Joe’s AA sponsor (Jack Klugman) explains to him,
“It’s a lottery, Joe, and you lost.” Yet in Edwards’s rendition of a script by J. P. Miller, alco-
holism also has its origins in the social milieu of American business, in middle-class “fear of
falling” (to use Barbara Ehrenreich’s term), and in longings for intimacy in not-as-
functional-as-they-seem families. Especially in its portrayal of Joe, Days seems to argue that
alcoholism is a symptom of anxiety within urban postwar America and its abundance-
fueled dreams of social mobility. Rejecting his public relations profession, Joe laments,
“I’m a garbage man, a eunuch in a harem,” and adds that he has failed to make his life bet-
ter or substantively different than that of his parents, who were vaudeville entertainers. In
this respect, the film could be seen as part of a growing critique of middle-class lifestyles
found at the same time in the work of writers such as John Cheever and John Updike.
A final key feature of Days is the film’s depiction of alcoholism as a family disease,
one that affects both men and women, often as a codependent pair, as is the case with
Joe and Kirsten, who only know how to bond via booze. Unlike female alcoholic char-
acters in films such as I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1951), Kirsten is not a celebrity or eccentric,
but a typical young woman who shrieks when she encounters bugs in her apartment
and wishes her father (Charles Bickford), who runs a nursery on the Peninsula south
of the city, paid more attention to her. A woman who grew up surrounded by beautiful
plants and flowers, Kirsten inexplicably tells Joe, “The world looks so dirty to me when
I’m not drinking . . . I want things to look prettier than they are.” Kirsten’s story sug-
gests that the roots of addiction lie in Americans’ constant longing for something
more, even though they tend to have more than enough.
Days of Wine and Roses reflected several important developments in the cultural his-
tory of alcoholism in the United States, including the receding into the past of temper-
ance crusades and the increasing influence of 12-step programs and treatment
specialists. The film marks a shift into an era in which addiction had come to be seen
as something more than fodder for tabloids and nightclub comics. Addiction, the film
shows, was not simply a foible of quirky characters but a complex ailment located at
the very core of American culture.
See also: Melodrama, The

References
Denzin, Norman K. Hollywood Shot by Shot: Alcoholism in American Cinema. New York, Aldine
Transaction, 1991.
Room, Robin. “Alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous in U.S. Films, 1945–1962: The Party
Ends for the ‘Wet Generations.’ ” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 50(4), 1989: 368–83.

—Kenneth F. Maffitt

DEAD POETS SOCIETY. Although it was forced to vie for audiences with block-
busters such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Batman, License to Kill, Ghostbusters
II, Back to the Future Part II, and Lethal Weapon 2 when it was released in the summer
of 1989, Peter Weir’s small, arty Dead Poets Society grossed $236 million worldwide,

118
 Dead Poets Society

outperforming most of its compet-

itors. Earning an Academy Award
for Tom Schulman’s original
screenplay, as well as nominations
for picture, Weir’s direction, and
Robin Williams’s performance as
John Keating, Dead Poets Society
became a contemporary cinematic
classic.
Detailing the events of the fall
semester of 1959 at Vermont’s fic-
titious Welton Academy, Dead
Poets Society examines the issue
of institutional control during
the era of Cold War conformity.
Hired to teach courses on poetry,
John Keating has returned to
Welton, the school that had pre-
pared him for the world when he
was a young man. He immedi-
ately demonstrates his passion
for his subject matter, demanding
that his students rip the sterile,
academic introductions from
their poetry textbooks. Carpe
diem, gentlemen, seize the day,
he tells them. And so they do,
embracing the ideas of their Scene from the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, directed by Peter
unusual—and to Welton admin- Weir and starring Robin Williams. (Photofest)
istrators, disturbing—new ins-
tructor and ultimately reviving
the Dead Poets Society that Keating had founded when he was a student at Welton.
Leadership of the next-generation Dead Poets Society falls to Neil Perry (Robert
Sean Leonard), an honor student whose unrelenting father (Kurtwood Smith) forbids
him from acting in local stage productions, insisting that Neil concentrate on his stud-
ies so that he can secure his place at an Ivy League university. Confronting similar fam-
ily pressure is Neil’s roommate, Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), the brother of a
former Welton valedictorian whose anxiety has given rise to a terror of public speaking.
Along with Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen), Steven Meeks (Allelon Ruggiero), Gerard
Pitts (James Waterston), Richard Cameron (Dylan Kussman), and Knox Overstreet
( Josh Charles), Neil and Todd convene late-night sessions of the Dead Poets Society
in a dark and eerie cave, during which they read poetry and participate in ritualistic,
wholly un-Welton-like forms of cathartic expression. Enthused by what Mr. Keating
has released in him, Neil takes the part of Puck in a production of A Midsummer

119
Deer Hunter, The

Night’s Dream; when his father discovers what his son has done, he pulls Neil out of
Welton and enrolls him in military school. Overwhelmed, Neil commits suicide, and
the school uses Keating as a scapegoat, claiming that Neil’s participation in the Dead
Poets Society is what led him to take his own life. Keating is forced to resign from
Welton; but as he exits his classroom for the last time, certain of his charges jump upon
their desks—ignoring the demands of their headmaster (Norman Lloyd) to “sit
down”—and shout out honorific words for their teacher: “O Captain, my Captain,”
the stirring refrain from Walt Whitman’s poem in which he declares that “the prize
we sought is won.”
Though the film earned a reputation as an inspiring, feel-good piece of cinema,
director Weir imbues it with a strong sense of ambiguity. Although a talented, commit-
ted teacher, in the end Keating cannot stop his students from involving themselves in
juvenile pranks, nor can he mend the relationship between Neil and his father; and
although Todd’s act of rebellion in the film’s soaring climatic scene may be understood
as an extraordinary moment of personal release, his hero remains out of a job, Neil is
still a victim of the era’s repression, and the majority of the academy’s students, faculty,
and administrators never understand just what it is that Mr. Keating was trying to
teach them about life beyond Welton’s hallowed halls.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The; Melodrama, The

References
Gauper, Stephanie. “Aborigine Spirituality as the Grounding Theme in the Films of Peter Weir.”
Midwest Quarterly 42(2), Winter 2001: 212–27.
Hammond, Mike. “The Historical and the Hysterical: Melodrama, War, and Masculinity in
Dead Poets Society.” In Kirkham, Pat, and Janet Thumim eds. You Tarzan: Masculinity,
Movies, and Men. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993.
Rattigan, Neil. Images of Australia: 100 Films of the New Australian Cinema. Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1991.
—Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield

DEER HUNTER, THE. For almost a decade, the U.S. government deployed
American soldiers in Southeast Asia. As U.S. involvement in the conflict increased,
the nation’s emotions intensified. Although the American people had generally been
supportive of the war during the early 1960s, as the decade unfolded and more of
the nation’s young men died in the jungles of Vietnam, attitudes toward the war began
to sour. Images of protests, especially on college campuses, often juxtaposed with
images of the war itself, appeared with increasing frequency on nightly newscasts.
Significantly, although dozens of combat pictures had been made by the 1960s
about the many conflicts in which the United States had been involved, American film-
makers had been reluctant to turn their attention to movies about Vietnam. This was
especially true after more and more voices began to be raised in protest against U.S.
involvement in the war, and particularly after it became apparent in 1975 that the

120
 Deer Hunter, The

Director Michael Cimino (left) confers with actor Robert De Niro on the set of Cimino’s film The
Deer Hunter. (United Artists/Getty Images)

United States had suffered what was perceived by many in the nation as a shameful
defeat in Southeast Asia. With the exception of a few unremarkable pictures, then, it
was not until the late 1970s that movies about Vietnam began to be made by U.S.
filmmakers. Interestingly, although it was Francis Ford Coppola who would turn out
to be the driving force behind the production of combat pictures about Vietnam, his
landmark offering, Apocalypse Now, did not make its way into theaters until 1979, a
year after the release of Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer
Hunter.
Unlike the vast majority of American combat pictures that preceded them,
Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, and The Deer Hunter all proved to be antiwar films.
All of them were also powerful, and highly disturbing, character studies that sought
to deconstruct the myth of the members of the American military fighting and dying
in order to keep the world “safe for democracy.” All three pictures had their own
unique characteristics. Ashby’s Coming Home, adapted from the novel of the same
name, focused on veterans struggling to reenter society after their experiences overseas,
while Coppola’s Apocalypse Now focused almost entirely on the soldier’s experience of
the war itself. Lacking the almost surreal quality of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now,
Cimino’s The Deer Hunter had a raw, visceral feel that many viewers at the time found
deeply unsettling. Cimino’s film is admittedly difficult to watch, a fact many attributed

121
Deer Hunter, The

to the picture’s length—it runs just over three hours. Yet, even though the picture is
much longer than most contemporary studio movies—Cimino took the time to flesh
out the elements of his major characters in painstaking detail—The Deer Hunter moves
along just as it should, slowly, sometimes seeming almost to stand still, much like the
lives of the characters it depicts.
It may be argued that The Deer Hunter is not really one film but three—a sort of
segmented triptych bound together by way of the complex characters who populate
the movies-within-the-movie. Cimino gets the first hour-long segment of The Deer
Hunter just right, as he opens up his narrative by exploring the lives of a group of fast
friends who live—exist—in a Pennsylvania steel town. The film opens with a noirish,
blue-tinted establishing shot: a dimly lit steel mill just before dawn, framed by a
heavy-pillared overpass, smoke billowing from the factory smokestacks. A semi truck
enters the frame and roars toward the factory, kicking up snow as it makes its way
relentlessly toward some unknown destination. From here, Cimino deftly cuts to a
shot of the truck careening around a corner and continuing its mad dash down a road
in back of the factory. He allows the camera to linger on the still dark street as the truck
passes from view: neon streetlights glow an unearthly green, illuminating slick streets
made wet by melting snow; power lines crisscross the sky, inorganic reflections of the
leafless, lifeless trees that cannot disguise the cold; a nightclub sign flickers red in the
distance. Another cut and we are suddenly inside the hellish heat of the steel mill:
sparks fly and flames leap toward the ceiling; heavy machinery moves hulkishly, inexo-
rably; and figures appear—human beings, they must be—dressed up like strange
robotic, medieval knights, armored against temperatures from which they cannot be
protected.
We are relieved when Cimino takes us from that demonic place, moving us along
with the men as they strip off their suits, and make their way up and out of the factory
to the world above. In one smothering sequence, Cimino makes us hate the place, and
to feel glad that we will not be forced to labor inside those walls; he also allows us to
understand that these men will go back inside—that they must go back, over and over
again, until their bodies and spirits are too broken to go on. This is their life, and there
is little that awaits them outside the factory—their sparsely furnished houses, their beer
and whiskey, their love affair with sports, their perversely childish adult male rituals of
friendship, their stultifying sexual and romantic relationships.
This is a special day, though, as one of the members of the group, Steven (John
Savage) is getting married. Although they have just worked all night, the other mem-
bers of the group—Rusyn Americans whose families, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Poles, stem
from the region around the Carpathian Mountains—head with Steven to a local bar,
where they begin drinking. As they stroll to the factory parking lot, Michael (Robert
De Niro) suggests that the day is auspicious, that the group should embark on a deer
hunting trip later that night. Michael, as it turns out, is the resident philosopher—a
spiritual guide whose strength and courage are admired by his friends, but whose ideas
about the world they find peculiar. Steven, of course, points out that he is getting mar-
ried that night, and plans for the deer hunting trip are put aside. There will be hunts,
however, although it is never quite clear exactly what their significance might be. “One

122
 Deer Hunter, The

shot,” declares Michael, the deer has to be taken with just one shot. One assumes that
there will ultimately be some connection made between Michael’s odd spiritual
notions about hunting and what goes on in Vietnam, but there never really is—some-
thing, it seems, that Cimino gets wrong in his film.
While the men drink throughout the day—one is hard pressed to understand how
they will be coherent for the wedding that evening, after working all night and drink-
ing all day—the women prepare for the celebration. Steven is marrying Angela
(Rutanya Alda), who, according to Steven’s very old-world mother (Shirley Stoler), is
not only a “strange girl”—she is not Rusyn American—but also not “so thin,” if you
get her meaning. Angela will seek support from the members of her wedding party,
one of whom, Linda (Meryl Streep), is involved with the third member of the trio that
will head for Vietnam, Nick (Christopher Walken). We learn at the wedding celebra-
tion that evening—an elaborate affair conducted first in a resplendent Russian
Orthodox church and then in a local community center equipped with a bar, a stage
for the band, and signs indicating that in this community the people are “Serving
God and Country Proudly”—that Michael, Nick, and Steven will soon head off to war.
The second segment of The Deer Hunter takes us to Vietnam. Here, Cimino seems
much less sure of what he is doing with his film. He does not linger long in Vietnam—
at least not in the war zone. Once he gets Steven, Nick, and Michael there, they are
quickly captured and forced to play out one frightening round of Russian roulette after
another for the enjoyment of their captors. It is unclear how often these horrifying
games of chance actually took place in Vietnam, or if they took place at all, but Cimino
is not concerned with the historical accuracy of these scenes, using them rather as
microcosmic expressions of the overarching idea of both the brutality and the senseless-
ness of war. The sequences in Vietnam, however, fail to get this point across, as they
seem to be more about demonstrating Michael’s extraordinary courage, commitment,
and resignation to the terrible task at hand than they do about communicating a
message about the horrors of war.
Initially terrified at the prospect of playing Russian roulette, Nick ultimately
becomes obsessed with it. Cimino leaves him in Vietnam, a psychologically anes-
thetized figure who becomes a local legend known for his willingness to take his
chances with the game—with a great deal of money on the line—and the eerie length
of time he has survived. In the end, the game will cost him his life. Steven is returned to
America; legless and emotionally broken, he languishes in a veterans’ hospital until he
is taken back home by Michael. The last segment of The Deer Hunter focuses on
Michael—in particular on how much he has been changed by his experiences in
Vietnam. Unwilling to celebrate his successes fighting for his country—a patch on
his uniform identifies him as an Army Ranger and his service stripes indicate that he
has served for three years—Michael is reluctant to discuss what he has gone through.
Once home, he seeks out Linda, to whom he has always been drawn. Bound through
Nick, and through the loss of him to the war, they begin a romantic relationship that
seems tender and tortured in the same moment. Cimino eventually brings the friends
back together—at Nick’s funeral. Gathered together at the bar after the burial, the
friends sing a stanza of “God Bless America” and raise a final toast to Nick.

123
Deliverance

Assuming that he meant his ending to be taken seriously, it is certainly heavy-

handed, especially given all that has come before—for three hours Cimino appeared
to be saying that the idea of proudly serving God and country, at least in relationship
to the Vietnam War, was naive; and then “God Bless America,” an ending suitable
for the dozens of prowar films that had preceded The Deer Hunter. Perhaps, though,
Cimino was saying something important about family, friends, and community—
perhaps he was saying that they stand with us against an all too often senseless world.
See also: War Film, The

References
Burkett, B. G., and Glenna Whitley. Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its
Heroes and Its History. Dallas: Verity Press, 1988.
Guttmacher, Peter. Legendary War Movies. New York: Metro Books, 1996.
Lanning, Michael Lee. Vietnam at the Movies. New York: Ballantine, 1994.
Suid, Lawrence. Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

—Jennifer Lyons-Hunt

DELIVERANCE. Director-producer John Boorman sets Deliverance in a Georgia

river valley soon to be flooded by a hydroelectric dam. Taking a last opportunity to
canoe the river are four suburbanites: Lewis (Burt Reynolds), a macho weekend out-
doorsman; Ed (Jon Voight), Lewis’s domesticated foil; Bobby (Ned Beatty), a buffoon
who condescends to the locals; and Drew (Ronny Cox), a quiet, contemplative soul.
Before their journey, the men stop at a gas station where Drew on guitar and a retarded
local boy on banjo play “Dueling Banjos,” a traditional bluegrass piece that serves as
the score of Deliverance and has since become synonymous with the film. As the canoe
trip commences, a vertiginous tracking shot affords us Drew’s point of view. He pad-
dles under a bridge and looks up at the banjoist swinging his instrument, suggesting
a pendulum clock and foreshadowing Drew’s few remaining hours.
After a day of canoeing, the men are camping, drinking, and joking, when Lewis
hears a suspicious sound. In one lengthy take, Lewis walks off-camera to investigate,
leaving the three frightened men on-screen, and then reenters the shot in a striking
close-up, startling his friends. Lewis finds nothing, but the unusual take suggests pos-
sible unseen threats. The next morning, Ed cannot steady his nerves to shoot a deer,
indicating that he is unprepared to face these threats.
The men then endure a series of ordeals. Two armed mountain men assault Bobby
and Ed. Bobby is raped; Ed nearly so. Lewis kills one attacker, but the other escapes.
Drew insists that the law demands they report the incident, but the canoeists vow to
remain silent, bury the dead man, and continue downriver. Drew then inexplicably
falls overboard and disappears. Confused, the remaining three capsize and are washed
through violent rapids. Lewis, badly injured, claims that Drew was shot. Fearing their
attacker’s return, the men hide in a gorge. Ed scales the cliff where they believe their

124
 Deliverance

Actors (from left) Ned Beatty, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, and Ronny Cox pull their canoes through
the shallows of a river in a still from director John Boorman’s film Deliverance. (Warner Bros./Getty
Images)

attacker has taken position, kills a rifleman, and injures himself in the fight. The men
dump the corpse in the river and continue downstream. Doubts plague them. Was
Drew shot? Did Ed kill the right man? Next, they discover Drew’s corpse but find no
obvious bullet wound, increasing their uncertainty. They sink Drew’s body and con-
coct a cover story.
The survivors arrive in a town that will soon be flooded by the dam, and receive
quiet sympathy from some elderly locals and medical attention. Deliverance novelist-
screenwriter James Dickey plays the local sheriff, who deduces what has occurred but
lacks sufficient evidence to make arrests. The film ends with Ed at home dreaming of
a hand emerging from the water—a recurring image in Boorman’s films.
The thematic tension of Deliverance, like that of many Boorman films, lies between
civilization—associated with domesticity, law, and pampered decadence—and nature—
associated with aggression, anarchy, and a brutal but uncompromised authenticity.
Lewis tries to connect with nature, bemoans the destruction of “the last wild, untamed,
unpolluted . . . river,” and characterizes the valley’s development as a “rape” of the wil-
derness. However, Lewis, a product of civilization, fails to connect with nature. In a line
characteristic of the film’s resonant dialogue, Drew states, “He learned [the woods]. He
doesn’t feel them. That’s Lewis’s problem. He wants to be one with nature, and he can’t
hack it.” Nature exacts vengeance. As civilization metaphorically rapes the valley,

125
Die Hard

nature’s symbolic representatives rape Bobby. Drew, who insisted on society’s laws, dies
on the river. Ed’s nightmare implies that the ordeal will always haunt the survivors.
Boorman’s cinematography emphasizes nature’s beauty and power, particularly that
of rushing water. The 1.66:1 aspect ratio showcases the wide valley’s lush greens, colors
both magical and foreboding throughout Boorman’s films. Tellingly, the deepest greens
appear in the grove where Bobby is assaulted and the mossy gorge atop of which Ed
commits murder.
The film’s title suggests rescue and salvation but is tinged with irony. Though the sur-
vivors are delivered from their ordeal, they are not truly saved. Indeed, they are threat-
ened with another kind of deliverance: a guilty verdict. Seeking salvation, Drew and
Bobby pray in moments of hardship (“Lord, deliver us . . .”). However, religion, one of
civilization’s institutions, offers only fleeting solace—an idea symbolized by the reloca-
tion of a church, the first building the canoeists see after their ordeal. Its bell tolling omi-
nously, the church is trucked out of the valley to avoid the rising waters. In Boorman’s
vision, the deliverance promised by society’s institutions is a transient delusion.
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The

References
Boorman, John. Adventures of a Suburban Boy. London: Faber & Faber, 2003.
Ciment, Michel. John Boorman. London: Faber & Faber, 1986.

—Eric L. Sarlin

DIE HARD. In addition to launching a very successful series that has yielded four
films to date, Die Hard (1988) established Bruce Willis as one of America’s most popu-
lar action movie heroes. Fresh from Moonlighting, the ABC television series in which
he played private investigator David Addison, Willis created a similarly likeable char-
acter as the indefatigable, wisecracking New York City cop, John McClane.
With a script by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza that was loosely based on Roderick
Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, director John McTiernan set out to make an
action movie with an everyday, imperfect hero. The character and film struck the right
chord in the late 1980s, and Die Hard made over $80 million in U.S. box-office
receipts.
Die Hard begins on Christmas Eve. Officer McClane flies to California, hoping to
reconcile with his estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), who moved to L.A. for her
job at the Nakatomi Corporation. During her company’s Christmas party, international
terrorists storm Nakatomi’s high-rise headquarters and begin taking hostages. McClane,
who was relaxing in Holly’s office when the terrorists arrived, escapes to the upper floors
and overhears the terrorist leader, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), planning to take
$640 million in bearer bonds from the building’s vault. When Gruber shoots Nakatomi
executive Jo Takagi (James Shigeta) for refusing to give him the vault’s combination,
McClane realizes he must act to foil their plan. Taunting and outmatching the terrorists

126
 Die Hard

Scene from the 1988 film Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan and starring Bruce Willis.
(Photofest)

with his relentless banter and perseverance, McClane picks them off one by one until
only Gruber is left, holding Holly at gunpoint. Ultimately, McClane outwits Gruber
and is reunited with Holly.
Like many Reagan-era macho movies, Die Hard attempts to revitalize a traditional
notion of American masculinity after decades of decline precipitated by defeat in
Vietnam, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the gradual encroachments of feminism.
At the start, McClane is a blue-collar cop in danger of losing his white-collar wife. His
conservative East Coast values appear out of touch with progressive California, where
a man kisses him after wishing him Merry Christmas. He is awed by the affluence of
the Nakatomi Corporation, visually represented by the towering skyscraper, and
clearly signifying Japan at the height of its economic power. Gradually, however,
McClane’s rugged individualism proves superior to his adversaries. He not only
single-handedly defeats the team of highly skilled European terrorists, but he does so
in spite of the LAPD and FBI, incompetent bureaucracies that, in their ignorance,
thwart him at every turn. By the end, McClane leaves the Nakatomi building in
flames. With Holly at his side, he is unquestionably the hero.
What separates Die Hard from other Reagan era macho movies is the way it highlights
its hero’s vulnerabilities. Although Willis clearly buffed up for the role, he does not display
the sculpted physique of iconic 1980s action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger or
Sylvester Stallone. The prominent scar on his left shoulder and his receding hairline
mark Willis as a flawed, average-guy hero. He has no specialized training apart from

127
Dirty Dancing

being a New York cop. When Gruber derisively calls him a cowboy, McClane does
not identify with John Wayne but Roy Rogers, better known for his singing than
gunslinging. The most obvious sign of McClane’s vulnerability is that he is barefoot
throughout the movie. In a key scene in which McClane is pulling shards of broken
glass from his feet, he apologizes for not understanding all that his wife has endured
to gain her position.
Despite these efforts to undermine its macho hero, Die Hard takes a reactionary
stance toward feminism. Holly may be a successful business executive, but she still
relies on her husband to save her. At the film’s climax, McClane frees Holly from Hans
Gruber’s dangerous grip by unclasping the Rolex watch she was given by Nakatomi’s
president. At the end, when McClane introduces her to a fellow officer using her
maiden name, Gennaro, she corrects him, calling herself Holly McClane.
With its entertaining portrayal of 1980s cultural conflicts, and its title subtly allud-
ing to the president’s survival of an assassination attempt early in his first term, Die
Hard may be the ultimate Reagan-era movie.
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The

References
Abele, Elizabeth. “Assuming a True Identity: Re-/De-Constructing Hollywood Heroes.” Journal
of American and Comparative Cultures 25(3/4), 2002: 447–54.
Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1993.
Yacowar, Maurice. “Die Hard: The White Man’s Mythic Invincibility.” Jump Cut 34, March 1989:
2–4.
—Joseph Christopher Schaub

DIRTY DANCING. “That was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me
Baby, and it didn’t occur to me to mind . . . , when I couldn’t wait to join the Peace
Corps, when I thought I’d never find a guy as great as my dad.” So says the main char-
acter Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey) in the opening voice-over of the
1987 musical-romance Dirty Dancing. Thinking back to her experiences as an inno-
cent, and initially hopelessly naive 17-year-old, Frances whisks us back to a 1960s
world marked by erotic dance, sex, passion, love, and unsettling expressions of class
conflict, racial marginalization, and gender oppression.
At the vacation resort, Kellerman’s, where Baby and her upper-middle-class Jewish
family escape the city, she is rescued from what appears to be yet another terminally
boring summer, when she meets the worldly dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick
Swayze), who is part of the working-class entertainment staff. Behind closed doors,
she is introduced to, and then literally seduced by, the staff ’s “dirty dancing.” When
Johnny’s dance partner, Penny Johnson (Cynthia Rhodes), gets pregnant, Baby, rapidly
emerging from her infancy, secures money from her father for an illegal abortion and
becomes Johnny’s secret dance partner as he readies himself for an important

128
 Dirty Dancing

performance. Over the course of

a few short days, largely spent in
grueling practice sessions, Johnny
not only teaches Baby to dance,
but the two become lovers, violat-
ing the clearly defined class boun-
daries that define the communal
relations at the resort. When
Baby’s strict but kindhearted
doctor-father (played by the won-
derfully endearing Jerry Orbach)
finds out that Penny’s abortion
has been botched, he treats her,
despite the legal and cultural
ramifications. Disturbed by these
sordid events and Baby’s partici-
pation in them, however, and
mistakenly believing that it was
Johnny who had impregnated
Penny, Dr. Houseman demands
that Baby stay away from her
“man” and his unsavory crowd.
Ignoring her father’s orders, Baby
steals off and performs with
Johnny. Much to Baby’s dismay,
Johnny is subsequently wrongly
accused of stealing wallets from
guests; and even though Baby
provides an alibi, pointing out Scene from the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, directed by Emile
Ardolino and starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey.
that she was with him when the
(Photofest)
thefts occurred, he nevertheless
loses his job. On Baby’s last eve-
ning at the resort, however, he returns and boldly strides up to the table where she sits
disconsolately with her family. Uttering the clichéd and yet strangely poignant line,
“Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” Johnny takes his love in his arms and whisks her up
onto the stage. In a last, rousing dirty dance of the season, during which all cultural
barriers tumble down and it seems that Baby has, ironically, gotten a man very much
like her strong, ethical father after all, everything is reconciled.
Dirty Dancing was a huge box-office hit, especially among teenagers, and earned an
Academy Award for “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” as Best Original Song.
Although dancing had obviously been a large part of many other musicals before this
film was released, it had rarely been shown in quite such a provocative manner. Signifi-
cantly, dancing functions on multiple levels in the film, exposing the class, racial, and
gender tensions that haunted 1980s America. For example, when dancing among

129
Dirty Harry

themselves, literally on the margins of the resort where they are housed, the staff mem-
bers exude an erotic energy and sensual intimacy that seems to meld them together
into a wildly passionate communal whole; while dancing with their cultural “superiors”
in the resort’s centrally located activity hall, however, the staff members’ movements are
staid and emotionless, expressing the vast distance that exists between the groups even
while these group members are literally joined together. Set in the 1960s, yet plainly a
cautionary tale about the repressive attitudes that characterized the Reagan years, Dirty
Dancing may be seen as a popular, and then contemporary, attempt to transgress
authoritarian and conformist culture boundaries. Building on the success of iconic
films such as West Side Story (1961) and Saturday Night Fever (1977), Dirty Dancing
gave expression to the angst-filled experiences of a new teen generation. Although it
cannot be considered “great filmmaking,” the picture remains topical and is still popu-
lar among latter-day teens.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The

References
“American Cultural History, The Twentieth Century: 1960–1969,” 1999. Lone Star College,
Kingwood. http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade60.html.
Canby, Vincent. “Film: ‘Dirty Dancing,’ A Catskills Romance in 1963.” New York Times, 1987.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE6DF133FF932A1575BC0A96194
8260&sec=&pagewanted=2.
Prince, Stephen, ed. American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2007.

—Daniela Ribitsch

DIRTY HARRY. Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry depicts an iconoclastic San Francisco cop
on a crusade against a psychotic criminal. Ostensibly based on the real-life Zodiac
killer who had terrorized the Bay Area during the 1960s, the character of Scorpio
(Andy Robinson) has no qualms about targeting minorities, Catholic priests, and
young women. Although Inspector Harry Callahan—one of Clint Eastwood’s iconic
film roles—captures Scorpio, the District Attorney is forced to turn him loose on a
legal technicality. Callahan, it seems, violated Scorpio’s civil rights in bringing him to
justice: he failed to Mirandize his prisoner, tortures him, and confiscates his weapon
without a search warrant. Harry is fully aware he has violated Scorpio’s rights. His
rationale? He was racing against a deadline to rescue a helpless kidnap victim that
Scorpio had buried with a limited supply of oxygen. Despite Callahan’s warnings that
Scorpio will strike again if he is released—“He likes it,” says Harry—the District Attorney
frees the prisoner. Not surprisingly, Scorpio does strike again: he hijacks a school bus
loaded with children and demands $200,000 in ransom money and a jetliner. Capitulat-
ing to Scorpio’s demands, Harry’s superiors call on the disgruntled cop to serve as a liaison
between the city and the madman, a call he refuses. Instead, Callahan takes matters into

130
 Dirty Harry

his own hands. He chases Scorpio

down, kills him, and, disgusted
by a legal system in which the
rights of criminals seem to come
before the rights of their victims,
hurls away his badge.
Significantly, Dirty Harry was
not forged in a vacuum, but
grew out of the politically turbu-
lent 1960s. In the 1966 Miranda
v. Arizona case, Chief Justice Earl
Warren and the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that individuals in
police custody had certain con-
stitutional guarantees when
authorities questioned them
about crimes. The court enacted
this mandate so suspects and
prisoners would not be forced
into incriminating confessions.
Although the Constitution states
that authorities have no right to
compel an individual to act as a
witness against him or herself,
Actor Clint Eastwood as Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan in
police were not required to
a scene from Don Siegel’s thriller Dirty Harry, 1971. (Silver
inform the suspect that anything Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
said could be used against them.
The Miranda ruling changed
everything. Authorities now had to advise suspects and prisoners about the right to
counsel before and during police interrogation. Furthermore, suspects and prisoners
had to waive their rights before questioning could commence. Enraged citizens and
police complained that the Supreme Court had gone “soft on criminals.”
Dirty Harry not only redefined police procedural thrillers as political discourses for
decades to come, but it also captured the ambivalent feelings that law enforcement
held about the Miranda legislation. Most hard-boiled detective films depicted their
heroic protagonists blatantly ignoring the rights of suspects. Siegel’s highly politicized
film galvanized public debate over victims’ rights. Liberals criticized Dirty Harry as a
law-and-order manifesto, while conservatives hailed it as a “justice-at-any-cost”
masterpiece. Interestingly, even Siegel was ambivalent about the film. A political
liberal, Siegel found himself at odds with Callahan’s conduct. As the director told an
interviewer after the film was released, “This doesn’t mean I agree with him.”
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The; Eastwood, Clint; Hard-Boiled Detective
Film, The

131
Do the Right Thing

References
Siegel, Don. A Siegel Film. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1993.
Warren, Earl. The Memoirs of Chief Justice Earl Warren. New York: Doubleday, 1977.

—Van Roberts

DO THE RIGHT THING. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) explores racial
tension and associated socioeconomic problems in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant
neighborhood. Inspired by incidents such as the 1983 arrest and subsequent death of
graffiti artist Michael Stewart and the 1986 racially motivated attacks in New York’s
Howard Beach, the film takes place over a 24-hour period of intense summer heat
and follows protagonist Mookie (Lee), an African American pizza delivery man, as he
navigates his way through work, family, and his neighbors, many of whom will riot
by film’s end.
The film’s characters represent various ethnic populations and, in some cases, evoke
racial stereotypes. We meet Sal (Danny Aiello), an Italian American pizzeria owner and
Mookie’s employer; Sal’s two sons, one of whom, Pino (John Turturro), is an outspoken
racist; Jade (Joie Lee), Mookie’s pragmatic sister who insists he behave responsibly and
find more lucrative employment; Tina (Rosie Perez), a quick-tempered Puerto Rican
woman who makes similar demands of Mookie and is the mother of his child; Buggin’
Out (Giancarlo Esposito), an angry black radical who organizes a boycott of Sal’s
pizzeria; Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), an intimidating African American man whose

Director Spike Lee on the set of Do the Right Thing, 1989. (Photofest)

132
 Do the Right Thing

boombox constantly blares rap group Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”; Da Mayor
(Ossie Davis), the neighborhood drunk and attenuated village elder; Mother Sister
(Ruby Dee), the community matriarch who is critical of Da Mayor’s behavior; Smiley,
a mentally challenged African American who sells photographs of Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King Jr.; Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel Jackson), a DJ
whose on-air badinage narrates the story; and a Korean couple who own the local
bodega.
Lee’s frenetic composition and fast-paced editing underscore the film’s conflicts.
Radio Raheem appears larger than life in Dutch tilts and in-your-face, wide-angle
close-ups. In one such shot, Raheem borrows dialogue from The Night of the Hunter
(1955) to explain to a shaky, handheld camera how love defeats hate, the two emotions
symbolized by the gold jewelry on his hands. Raheem’s assertion is laden with dramatic
irony in light of the circumstances of his death later in the film. In another striking
sequence—one that interrupts the film’s otherwise traditional narrative progression—
characters directly address dollying cameras and deliver angry, racist soliloquies. Color-
ful costumes add to the film’s visual intensity and serve as metaphors for ethnic diver-
sity. Coupled with the oppressive summer heat, the mise-en-scène suggests a
community approaching the boiling point.
Poverty and economic disparity fuel the interpersonal and racial tensions. Repeat-
edly, characters are admonished to “get a job.” Jade, Mother Sister, and other characters
accuse Mookie, Da Mayor, and others of laziness or irresponsibility. Though the com-
munity is largely African American and Puerto Rican, Korean Americans and Italian
Americans own the local businesses. Clifton (John Savage), the neighborhood’s only
apparent homeowner, is of northern European descent, drawing attention to the issue
of gentrification. The entitlements of white and Asian property owners engender addi-
tional hostility within the black and Puerto Rican community.
This hostility comes to a head when Buggin’ Out organizes a boycott to compel Sal
to add photographs of African Americans to his “Wall of Fame” honoring Italian
American celebrities. Though Raheem and Smiley participate in the boycott, other
neighbors decline, citing their friendship with Sal or dismissing the matter as incon-
sequential. As Sal’s restaurant closes for the day, the boycotters storm the pizzeria and
renew their demands, while “Fight the Power” blasts from Raheem’s radio. Prior to this,
Sal had been a conscientious, charitable citizen, expressing gratitude for the patronage
of the minority community and challenging Pino’s racism. However, with the boycot-
ters’ intrusion, Sal erupts with racist epithets and smashes Raheem’s radio. The ensuing
brawl brings the police, who arrest Buggin’ Out and kill Raheem as he violently resists.
Mookie joins the crowd the incident has drawn and incites a riot that sets the pizzeria
ablaze. As the chaos ebbs, Smiley hangs a photo of Malcolm X and King on Sal’s wall,
and smiles at what seems to him a successful conclusion of the boycott.
This resolution is ambiguous. Did Mookie and his neighbors do the right thing by
rioting? Was the boycott a trivial matter that ended tragically or a worthwhile fight in
the name of equality and cultural identity? Can a diverse neighborhood function, or
is the balkanization favored by some of the characters preferable? The film ends with
two quotations: one from King denouncing violence as self-defeating and another

133
Double Indemnity

from Malcolm X equating violence in self-defense with intelligence. The viewer is left
to decide which perspective constitutes “the right thing.”
See also: African Americans in Film; Lee, Spike

References
Canby, Vincent. “Critic’s Notebook: Spike Lee Stirs Things Up at Cannes.” New York Times,
May 20, 1989.
Fuchs, Cynthia, ed. Spike Lee: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
—Eric L. Sarlin

DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity is seen today as one of

the best examples of the film noir genre; but even at its initial release in 1944, long
before the “noir” label had been affixed by French film critics to crime melodramas
of this era, audiences recognized that this film confronted them with a compelling nar-
rative of self-consuming desire and fated death. Based on a novel by James M. Cain
(first published in 1936), Double Indemnity posed a seemingly insurmountable prob-
lem for Wilder and his co-writer Raymond Chandler, as they set to work adapting
Cain’s violent and salacious novel to the screen. The Production Code, which, for over
three decades determined what American filmmakers could place before audiences, vir-
tually forbade any open representation of sexuality and demanded that criminal acts be
punished unequivocally and with finality. Cain’s novel, however, turns on the actions
of two adulterous lovers who plot the murder of a man and the theft of thousands of
dollars in insurance payments (the “double indemnity” clause that gives the story its
title). The fact that Cain evokes a measure of empathy for his killers, or at least with-
holds judgment against them by allowing them to explain their morally deviant emo-
tions, was seen as a challenge to the rigid moralism of the Code, and threatened to
scuttle the project before it began. To satisfy his censors, and to tone down the amoral
detachment of Cain’s novel, Wilder went so far as to shoot a final scene in which his
male protagonist is seen going to his death in the gas chamber, only to cut that scene
entirely from the final version of the movie—presumably because his principal charac-
ters had already been punished enough to satisfy conservative moral standards. Never-
theless, executives at Paramount initially doubted that Wilder could adapt a subject
that defied established standards of good taste, and when the film was passed over for
several Academy Awards, that seemed to confirm earlier suspicions that Double Indem-
nity was simply too daring for its time.
Still, for all its notoriety, Double Indemnity drew a sufficiently large audience to
insure that Wilder would remain on Paramount’s A-list of directors, and much of the
success of this film derives from the extraordinary performances of its principal actors.
Barbara Stanwyck’s portrayal of Phyllis Dietrichson—a heartless and homicidal femme
fatale—startled audiences in the ’40s, and even today her icy determination to betray
and destroy all of the men in her life still has the power to shock and dismay. Her

134
 Double Indemnity

Scene from the 1944 film Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward
G. Robinson. (Apic/Getty Images)

amorality may represent either a belated recognition of the new economic power and
psychological independence that working women had achieved during wartime, or
(negatively viewed) a more intense and open misogyny than anyone in Hollywood
had, to that point, felt free to express. In contrast, Edward G. Robinson’s Barton
Keyes—a blustering but ultimately soft-hearted claims manager for the “All Risk”
insurance company—serves as the emotional and moral center of this film, providing
a bracingly unambiguous judgment of the hopelessly corrupt world around him, while
at the same time expressing an unexpectedly ambivalent and even empathic view of a
friend and colleague who is driven to commit murder and fraud.
That colleague, Walter Neff, portrayed by Fred MacMurray, assumes throughout
the film the role of both criminal and judge, as he plots the murder of Phyllis’s husband
and passes judgment on his own character at every juncture of the story. By allowing
Neff to narrate this film, Wilder accomplishes two objectives: He allows the audience
to glimpse his character’s ineffectual struggle to resist the criminal impulses that will
ultimately destroy him, while at the same time conveying (paradoxically) a sense of
inevitability, as Neff repeatedly compares his situation to that of someone riding a trol-
ley car to the last stop—”straight down the line”—with no hope of arresting the engine
of fate that he has set in motion. The very fact that this film unfolds through a series of
voice-over flashbacks insures that once we have returned to present time we will be
convinced that the past is more than merely a prologue to the present: it has become
its determining force.

135
Dr. Strangelove

Wilder’s choice of Fred MacMurray as his male lead was in part fortuitous, as the
studio’s preferred “stars” turned him down, one after another. It was at that point in
the casting process that Wilder turned to MacMurray: a second-tier actor who had
appeared only in comedies, and who openly doubted that he could carry off a tragic
role. Evidently, what Wilder was looking for was an actor who could project at least
a measure of decency and remorse, and who would serve as a dramatic foil to Stanwyck’s
relentless and incorrigibly evil nature. As an insurance agent who takes “all risks” for
either love or money, MacMurray’s Walter Neff is as much a victim of his own char-
acter flaws as the perpetrator of unforgivable crimes, and all the more believable for
his confusion.
Film historians tend to focus on two remarkable aspects of this film: its hard-edged
dialogue and its atmospheric photography. The latter achievement is the work of John
Seitz, Double Indemnity’s director of photography, whose moody low-key lighting and
tight framing soon became the visual signature of later noir movies. The fast-paced
and often sardonic dialogue, however, was the collaborative achievement of Wilder
and Chandler, who tried to fashion speech patterns that not only echoed the lingo of
hard-boiled detective fiction of this period, but also that captured the cynicism and
desperation of the antiheroes whose crimes and punishments form the dramatic focus
of this film.
See also: Film Noir; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The; Wilder, Billy

References
Gemunden, Gerd. A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films. New York: Berghahn Books,
2008.
Schickel, Richard. Double Indemnity. London: British Film Institute, 1992.
—Robert Platzner

DR. STRANGELOVE. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb, is the second film in what amounts to an antiwar trilogy,
beginning with Paths of Glory (1957) and concluding with Full Metal Jacket (1987).
Each of these films has its own special take on what Kubrick saw as the insanity of
war, but of the three, Dr. Strangelove is the most obviously satiric and self-consciously
surreal account of a warrior culture that Kubrick directed.
Using Peter George’s novel Red Alert—first published in Britain under the title Two
Hours to Doom—as his initial inspiration, Kubrick initially intended to create a cold-
war melodrama focused on the dangers of an accidental nuclear holocaust, and the
early drafts of his script (entitled, alternately, Edge of Doom and The Delicate Balance)
suggest that he wanted to remain as close as possible to the literary original. But at
some early point in the evolution of his script, Kubrick’s concept of this film took
a sharp turn toward dark comedy, and with the assistance of screenwriter Terry

136
 Dr. Strangelove

Southern, he refashioned his

characters and plot—not to men-
tion the subtitle of his film—into
a mixture of apocalyptic fantasy
and farce.
In spite of its comic mayhem,
though, the narrative structure of
Dr. Strangelove is rather tightly
controlled, and Kubrick moves
his plot along by employing a
constantly shifting mise-en-
scène, cutting from one set loca-
tion and personality to a second
to a third. The first locale, “Bur-
pelson” Air Force Base, is an
operational center for the Stra-
tegic Air Command, and its com-
manding general, Jack D. Ripper,
is quite clearly insane. Played by
Sterling Hayden with appropriate
manic intensity, General Ripper
(not unlike his criminal name-
sake) is suffering from both hom-
icidal impulses and paranoid
delusions, and his decision to Actor Slim Pickens sits atop a nuclear weapon prop during
production of the movie Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned
send a fleet of nuclear-armed
to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley
B-52s hurtling toward Russia sets Kubrick. (AP/Wide World Photos)
Kubrick’s plot in motion. His
second-in-command, Group Cap-
tain Mandrake (one of three roles
played by Peter Sellers) tries unsuccessfully to dissuade Ripper from carrying out this mis-
sion, but he soon discovers that Ripper is mad as a hatter, and that he cannot convince
Ripper that fluoridated water is not a “Commie” plot, nor that the general’s sexual
impotence has nothing to do with an imagined Russian invasion. Ripper’s sexual dys-
function, in fact, serves not only as the absurd catalyst for irrational command decisions
but also as a metaphor for even scarier patterns of irrational behavior at the highest levels
of political power.
From the claustrophobic confines of General Ripper’s base office, whose blinds are
kept tightly shut, we cut to the second locale: the even more cloistral interior of
a B-52, commanded by Major T. J. “King” Kong. Slim Pickens plays Major Kong as
a seemingly low-keyed, good-old-boy Texan, complete with ten-gallon hat, whose first
reaction to the order to attack is to suspect that his crew has been playing a practical
joke on him. Once convinced that the order is real, however, “King” Kong puts on
his warrior-persona and exhorts his crew to patriotic duty in one of the film’s more

137
Dr. Strangelove

memorably comic speeches. Interestingly, though, for all his outlandishness, Kong
emerges as a loyal and resourceful officer, and our last image of him is both laughable
and strangely poignant, as he rides a nuclear bomb to its destination, astride his
weapon as if he were riding a rodeo steer. Throughout these B-52 scenes we hear the
familiar battle song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” on the soundtrack, and
as in Full Metal Jacket, one cannot be entirely certain that Kubrick doesn’t secretly
admire the desperate heroism of his soldier-protagonists.
The third locale—arguably the most important from the perspective of political sat-
ire—is the Pentagon War Room where President Merkin Muffley has assembled the
Joint Chiefs, the Russian Ambassador, and a German scientific advisor whose pros-
thetic arm is forever attempting to give the Nazi salute. Peter Sellers’s talent for verbal
mimicry and playing multiple characters is put to the test during these scenes as he
switches from the bland American speech patterns of President Muffley to the heavily
accented Germanic English of Dr. Strangelove, with all of the personality quirks that
go along with each character. Sellers’s Strangelove is a masterpiece of satiric caricature:
a mad scientist whose ideas about nuclear war and personal survival are so fundamen-
tally evil that he periodically loses control of both his mind and his voice, and imagin-
ing himself back in Nazi Germany he finally shouts out “Mein Fuehrer” when
addressing the American president.
Strangelove’s comic counterpart in these scenes is the head of the Strategic Air
Command, General “Buck” Turgidson (George C. Scott in one of his many over-
the-top performances). Turgidson is widely believed to be a caricature of the real-life
head of the Air Force during the 1950s and ’60s, General Curtis LeMay, whose bluster
and anti-Communist vitriol made him a favorite target for leftist satire; but Scott’s
oversexed and overbearing Turgidson is torn between his desire to annihilate the
“Russkies” and his faltering realization that any attack against Russia will result in
mutual annihilation. Kubrick’s original script called for a food-fight between Turgid-
son and the Russian ambassador (amusingly called De Sadesky: i.e., De Sade), and
though, happily, he scrapped that scene, Kubrick’s consistent view of the War Room
and its inhabitants is that no one, during this mother-of-all crises, ever manages to
behave like a morally responsible adult.
Kubrick’s final version of nuclear apocalypse takes the form of the Russian
Doomsday Machine—a computer-operated system that responds automatically and
with maximum lethality to a perceived attack on the Motherland—which we ulti-
mately discover cannot be deprogrammed or outsmarted in any way. It is, in effect,
more intelligent than any merely human brain, and it emerges by the end of the film
as Kubrick’s central trope for both the savage mindlessness of modern warfare and
the equally mindless fatalism that seems to infect our ruling class. As mushroom
cloud follows mushroom cloud in the film’s final frames, and while the lyrics of a
popular World War II song (“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know
when”) ring in our ears, Kubrick’s disarming and deceptive subtitle comes into ironic
focus at last: we have every reason to worry and fear the latent nihilism of our
conflict-ridden age.
See also: War Film, The

138
 Driving Miss Daisy

References
Duncan, Paul. Stanley Kubrick: Visual Poet 1928–1999. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2008.
Falsetto, Mario. Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, 2nd ed. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2001.
Walker, Alexander, Ulrich Ruchti, and Sybil Taylor. Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
—Robert Platzner

DRIVING MISS DAISY. Based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning play by Alfred Uhry,
Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy (1989) is a deceptively simple story about two
outsiders living in postwar Atlanta, Georgia. Told from the perspective of Daisy
Werthan (Jessica Tandy), a proud old Jewish lady with considerable wealth, the film
chronicles the delicate relationship she fosters with Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman),
her black chauffer. The film is pleasant, if at times idealistic, but it is also sincere, and
through its sincerity manages to capture a truth about American race relations many
films ignore: the problem of latent racism. Daisy doesn’t consider herself prejudiced,
and in fact scoffs at her son for even suggesting it; but through her interactions with
Hoke the audience begins to see that while she may not exhibit the characteristics
attributed to ideological racists like George Wallace, her own dormant prejudices are
just as damning. In this way, Beresford’s film illuminates a social problem pertinent

Scene from the 1989 film Driving Miss Daisy, directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Morgan
Freeman and Jessica Tandy. (Photofest)

139
Driving Miss Daisy

to post–civil rights America, but does so in a traditional format through a straightfor-

ward narrative rooted in themes of compassion and understanding.
The changes in Daisy’s attitude toward black folk happen over a 25-year period
(1948–1973), during which she is forced to confront, and reevaluate, her racist opin-
ions based on her dealings with Hoke, who is hired by Daisy’s son, Boolie (Dan
Aykroyd), to chauffer her around town after she backs her car into the neighbor’s yard.
Hoke is patient with the stubborn Daisy, who initially refuses his services, and eventu-
ally wears her down. As the narrative unfolds, Hoke is revealed to be smart and savvy; a
man who knows how to work southern whites to get what he wants. His calm, pleasant
disposition enables him to subvert Daisy’s authority without making it seem like a
transgression has taken place. Witness the scene where Hoke replaces a can of salmon
he took from Daisy’s pantry because he found the pork chops she left for him too stiff,
or when he defiantly pulls the car to the side of the road to relieve himself because no
gas station would allow him to use their restrooms. As the years progress, Daisy and
Hoke warm to one another, though the residue of Daisy’s earlier prejudice continues
to linger. After her Temple is bombed by a group of white supremacists, Hoke links
the event to his own memory of seeing his childhood friend’s father hanging dead from
a tree, the victim of a lynch mob, but she refuses to see the connection. Later she goes
to a fund-raising dinner to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak. As she sits in the ban-
quet hall with an empty seat beside her, Hoke stays in the car waiting for her return.
This troubling scene acts as the film’s climax. The change that occurs between the
two characters here is never committed to dialogue; rather, it is communicated through
their facial expressions as the voice of Dr. King narrates the subtext of the scene.
Finally, by the late 1960s, aged and senile, Daisy reveals to Hoke what her own preju-
dices have prevented her from recognizing all along: “Hoke, you’re my best friend.”
Interestingly, Driving Miss Daisy was released during the same year as Spike Lee’s
incendiary allegory of post–civil rights American race relations, Do the Right Thing.
The two films could not have been more dissimilar in their content and reception.
While Daisy was showered with critical attention, including nine Academy Award
nominations, Do the Right Thing’s bold exposition of simmering racial hostilities in
1980s urban America polarized critics, some of whom anticipated riots would erupt
after screenings. Today, Lee’s picture is frequently regarded as the most important film
about American race prejudice, yet despite this, Daisy still has much to offer contem-
porary audiences, especially in the way it exposes the damaging effects of latent racism
on human relations. More than this, however, it also shows the value of compassion
and understanding—two qualities needed to overcome the trials present in post–civil
rights America.
See also: African Americans in Film

References
Fredrickson, George. “Toward a Social Interpretation of the Development of American
Racism.” In Huggins, Nathan Irvin, Martin Kilson, and Daniel M. Fox, eds. Key Issues in
the Afro-American Experience, Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

140
 Duck Soup

Salzman, Jack, and Cornel West, eds. Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-
Jewish Relations in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Sitkoff, Harvard. The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1992. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
—Ryan J. Kirkby

DUCK SOUP. Duck Soup (1933) is considered by many to be the Marx Brothers’
finest movie. It is pure satire, taking jabs at government, war, diplomacy, and affairs
of state. It was so well done that Benito Mussolini banned it in Italy after seeing its
stance on fascism and totalitarianism. The brothers were very proud of that fact.
The movie lacked the harp and piano scenes and love interests that were found in ear-
lier work. It was darker than the Brothers’ previous movies, as well.
Duck Soup was directed by Leo McCarey and was Paramount Studio’s last release of
a Marx Brothers film. It was written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and contained
more of a plot than previous Marx Brother movies, but was highly absurdist and laced
with so many skits that the plot was superficial at best.

Comedy actors the Marx Brothers star in the Paramount Pictures production Duck Soup in 1933.
Pictured are (left to right) Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, Groucho Marx, and Harpo Marx. (American
Stock/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

141
Duck Soup

The movie is based in the fictional country of Freedonia. The country needs money,
and the only person that can get it is Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont), who will only
do so if Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) is made president. The coronation scene is a
direct poke at affairs of state. Even the man of honor, Firefly, doesn’t take his entrance
seriously, arriving late and entering via a fireman’s pole. National anthems are not
immune from the Marx Brothers’ attacks as shown by a musical number that proclaims
Firefly will be a tyrant while he plays a fife between verses. This is also where the Ambas-
sador of Sylvania, Trentino (Louis Calhern), rival to Firefly, is introduced. Angered when
Firefly is installed, Trentino hires Chicolini (Chico Marx) and Pinky (Harpo Marx)
as spies.
The cabinet scene lampoons the running of government as Firefly turns it into lit-
tle more than monkeyshines over which his Minister of War resigns. Chicolini is
hired as secretary of war after passing an inane quiz highlighting the seemingly arbi-
trary appointment of people to cabinet posts. Diplomacy is mocked as the scenes
between the Ambassador and Firefly are shown to be no more than insults and child-
ish posturing. Antiwar sentiment is expressed as war between the two countries is
provoked over little more than Firefly and Trentino fighting over Mrs. Teasdale and
a simple slap.
The musical scene that follows Freedonia’s declaration of war is the only musical
number in all of their movies in which all of the Marx Brothers appear at once. The
music it is set to is a mixture of a Negro spiritual, patriotic music, and folk music.
As the two countries engage in war, the scenes become increasingly absurd. Firefly
switches into uniforms from many different eras including the American Civil and
Revolutionary Wars, suggesting that the Marx Brothers felt that all war was absurd
regardless of cause. Firefly fires on his own troops at one point. Even after Freedonia
claims victory, Mrs. Teasdale is pelted with fruit while singing the national anthem,
demonstrating that victory is not necessarily winning when war is involved.
Aside from the political satire, there were also scenes of slapstick. The scene with the
lemonade vendor (Edgar Kennedy) is a classic hat-switching sequence where the hats
of the Pinky and the vendor fall off and the vendor eventually ends up with Chicolini’s
dunce cap on his head. The mirror scene, although not original to Duck Soup, is
another example of excellent physical comedy and one of classic scenes of American
comedy. While sneaking around Firefly’s mansion to steal Freedonia’s war plans, Pinky
breaks a large mirror while dressed like Firefly. Firefly enters the scene, and not wanting
to be caught, Pinky pantomimes Firefly’s actions move for move in an artful vaudevil-
lian, silent scene. The act is broken when Chicolini enters the scene dressed as a third
Firefly.
The movie did not fare well at the box office. The Depression hurt sales, and there
was a general outcry at the time at the lack of respect shown by the Marx Brothers for
politics. Later years showed Duck Soup for the classic it was, and in 1990, the Library
of Congress deemed it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and opted
to preserve it in the National Film Registry.
See also: Marx Brothers, The

142
 Duck Soup

References
Adamson, Joe. Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo: A History of the Marx Brothers and
a Satire on the Rest of the World. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1987.
Charney, Maurice. The Comic World of the Marx Brothers’ Movies: “Anything Further Father?”
Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 2007.
Ebert, Roger. The Great Movies. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.
—James Heiney

143
This page intentionally left blank
 v
E
E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL. The story of a marooned alien explorer and
the boy named Elliott (Henry Thomas) who befriends him, E.T. is one of the most suc-
cessful movies ever made in the United States. It altered the fortunes of science fiction as
a cinematic genre, and of its director, Steven Spielberg. Its title character was unique not
only for its alien appearance, but for its role in the film: a being as curious, vulnerable,
and occasionally overwhelmed as the human children who become its allies.
Released in June 1982, E.T. spent 16 weekends as the top-grossing movie in
America, 27 among the top five highest-grossing movies, and 44 among the top ten
(Box Office Mojo, 1982). It displaced Star Wars (1977) as the highest-grossing movie
of all time, a title it held until it was displaced in turn by Titanic (1997). E.T. remains
among the top five highest-grossing movies in history. Its extraordinary success,
coupled with that of Alien (1979) and the initial Star Wars trilogy (1977, 1980,
1983), revived the studios’ interest in the science fiction genre, which (with scattered
exceptions like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes) had been moribund since
the early 1960s.
E.T. begins and ends in a dark forest “enchanted” by the presence of aliens, and
much of what happens between owes more to fantasy than science fiction. Focused
squarely on children and told through a child’s eyes, it can be read as a fairy tale
(“The Frog King”), dressed in science fiction trappings and set in a California suburb
rather than a European village (Gordon, 2008). E.T.—along with Raiders of the
Lost Ark (1981) and his contribution to Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)—made
Spielberg’s name synonymous with stories where good triumphed handily over evil
and the forces of light decisively dispelled those of darkness. It gave Spielberg a reputa-
tion for sentimentality—a quality absent from his early thrillers like Duel (1971) and
Jaws (1975)—that he has never entirely lost. The reputation followed him to more
serious projects, such as The Color Purple (1985), Schindler’s List (1993), and Saving
Private Ryan (1998), and led to frequent suggestions that he was ill-suited to direct
more adult dramatic pictures such as these.
The sentimentality of E.T. made it unique at the time of its release—and nearly so
since—among science fiction movies featuring aliens. Two polar-opposite images have

145
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

Scene from the 1982 film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, directed by Steven Spielberg. (Photofest)

dominated cinematic portrayals of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth since the early

1950s. One, introduced in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and repeated in films
such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Contact (1997), presents aliens as godlike fig-
ures: distant, aloof, unknowable, and possessed of powers (whether natural or techno-
logical) beyond human comprehension. The other, introduced in The Thing from
Another World (1951) and repeated in films as varied as Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956), The Andromeda Strain (1970), and Independence Day (1996), is aliens as
malevolent figures: violent, destructive, treacherous, and bent on the extermination
or enslavement of humankind. E.T. confounds both sets of expectations. He possesses
the ultimate godlike power—resurrection—but is gentle and approachable rather than
aloof. He comes in the night, avoids authority figures, and infiltrates Elliott’s home and
family by stealth and subterfuge, but he is gentle rather than destructive—more fright-
ened than frightening.
The film insists that E.T. is, despite his strange appearance, ultimately like us. The
central tension in the film is not between humans and aliens, but between humans
who are willing to accept an alien Other into their midst (the children who befriend
and shelter E.T.) and those who are not (the scientists who chase and imprison him).
Adults’ encounters with E.T. function as a kind of litmus test for their true character.
Elliott’s mother, Mary (Dee Wallace)—initially suspect because her divorce from
Elliott’s father has left the boy feeling lonely and miserable—shows her true maternal
colors when she protects the alien. The leader of the scientists—initially suspect
because he is affiliated with them—becomes sympathetic when he confesses to Elliott
his own childlike desire to meet and befriend an extraterrestrial.

146
 East of Eden

The idea of aliens as mirrors in which we see our true selves reflected—kindred
spirits who, by our treatment of them, show us who we are—has become a recurring
theme in a quarter-century of science fiction movies, from Starman and The Brother
from Another Planet (both 1984) to District 9 (2009). Though well established in print
science fiction long before the 1980s, this idea entered the American cinematic lexicon
with E.T.
See also: Science Fiction Film, The; Spielberg, Steven

References
Brode, Douglas. The Films of Steven Spielberg. New York: Citadel Press, 1995.
“E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982)—Weekend Box Office Results.” Box Office Mojo. http://
boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=et.htm.
Gordon, Andrew M. Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
Ruppersburg, Hugh. “The Alien Messiah in Recent Science Fiction Films.” Journal of Popular
Film and Television 14(4), Winter 1987: 158–66.
—A. Bowdoin Van Riper

EAST OF EDEN. East of Eden (1955) is one of Elia Kazan’s best-known movies of
the 1950s; a critical and box-office success that initiated the career of the iconic young
actor, James Dean. The film manages to offer a commentary on both the Eisenhower
era of the 1950s and the World War I era in which the story was set. Kazan envisioned
the film as an anti-Puritan statement against what he saw as the oppressive conserva-
tism of the 1950s.
Previewing the film for teens, Kazan was astonished at their reaction to Dean’s pres-
ence on the screen. East of Eden struck a nerve in the conformist 1950s, especially
among teens, who apparently located their own emotions in Dean’s anguished por-
trayal of Cal, an unloved, rebellious son. The 1950s was openly criticized as a decade
of stifling conformity in such best-selling books as The Organization Man and The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Oddly, though, it was also the decade of Elvis, Rock ‘n
Roll, existentialism, and modern jazz. A lot was boiling beneath the surface, and Dean,
like other “method” actors such as Marlon Brando, who also worked in Kazan’s films,
was capable of exposing the turbulent feelings of young Americans.
Based on a John Steinbeck novel, East of Eden is technically brilliant and beautifully
acted. Utilizing both color and wide screen technology for the first time in his career,
and working closely with screenwriter Paul Osborn and cinematographer Ted
McCord, Kazan created what many critics saw as a unique, modernist film. Employing
raked camera angles in certain scenes and adding an offbeat, musical score by Leonard
Rosenman—one with odd, contrapuntal melodies, quirky excursions, and an orches-
tration that was unlike the majority of lush Hollywood scores—Kazan dazzled audi-
ences and critics alike with the look of his film. He was also able to evoke raw,
emotional performances from his actors, who provided rapt audiences with a realist

147
East of Eden

version of natural speech—lines that were mumbled, interrupted, and broken with
hesitation—that was still powerfully poetic in its expression.
Kazan focused the film’s narrative on the final portion of Steinbeck’s novel, high-
lighting the story of Cal. Clearly inspired by the biblical narrative—Cain is banished
to a place “East of Eden” after he kills his brother Abel in the Genesis story—the film
depicts an unloving father, Adam (Raymond Massey), a stiff, self-righteous man who
dotes on his older son, Aron (Richard Davalos), and his “intended” Abra (perfectly
realized by stage actress Julie Harris), and pays little attention to his younger son.
Interestingly, the traditionally trained Massey was infuriated by Dean’s demands for
script changes, profanity on the set, and method-acting-hostility toward his on-
screen father. Knowing that Dean was estranged from his own father, Kazan encour-
aged the mutual hostility between the two actors in order to make the scenes sharper
and more persuasive.
In the film, Cal and Aron are told by their father that their mother, Kate (Oscar
winner Jo Van Fleet), is dead; but Cal learns that she is actually alive and overseeing
a brothel in nearby Monterey. In an attempt to discover who he is and why his
father dislikes him so, Cal seeks out his estranged mother, establishing a tenuous
relationship with her. When his father loses most of his investment monies on a
business venture to ship refrigerated produce by rail, Cal strikes out on his own,
backed by a loan from his mother, ultimately making a fortune selling beans to the
U.S. military that will be used to feed American soldiers during the war. Trying des-
perately to earn his father’s love, Cal offers him a large monetary birthday gift to
replace the monies Adam has lost. Adam, who is overjoyed by the birthday gift that
Aron gives him—the revelation that he and Abra are going to be married—rejects
Cal’s gift, declaring that he won’t benefit by way of war profiteering. After Adam suf-
fers a stroke, and is counseled by Abra to let Cal in, there is finally reconciliation
between Adam and Cal: Cal will nurse his father as he lives out the rest of his diffi-
cult life.
Dean’s anguished performance was heralded by critics, who described him as a bril-
liant and charismatic young actor. Unfortunately, the radiant Dean would die in a
tragic car accident in September of 1955, depriving the cinematic world of what would
surely have been a stellar acting career.
Many critics regard East of Eden as Kazan’s finest film, due in no little part to the
presence of Dean. Rich in social commentary, skillfully crafted, and with an excellent
cast, it remains as startling and contemporary as when it was released in 1955.
See also: Method Acting

References
Kazan, Elia. A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
Schickel, Richard. Elia Kazan. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
Young, Jeff. Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films. New York: Newmarket Press, 1999.
—James Delmont

148
 Easy Rider

EASY RIDER. Easy Rider appeared in 1969 and had an immediate impact on
American cinema and society. Made on a limited budget and shot in an improvisa-
tional style, it was a collaborative effort: directed by Dennis Hopper; produced by
Peter Fonda; written by Hopper, Fonda, and Terry Southern; and starring Hopper,
Fonda, and Jack Nicholson. The film encapsulated the tumultuous counterculture
era of the preceding decade, becoming an enormous box-office hit and critical success.
Indeed, Easy Rider became a cult phenomenon, with mass-produced poster images of
Fonda and Hopper, resplendent on their choppers, gracing the walls of thousands
who sought to imitate their hip biker personas.
The film opens with a pair of jarringly discordant scenes. The first portrays Wyatt
(Fonda)—also known as Captain America—and Billy (Hopper) buying cocaine in a
Mexican village. We could be in the world of Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch; but this
Mexico is a businesslike space of mutual exploitation—and oddly nonviolent. From
Mexico, the film shifts to a Los Angeles no-man’s land, where the cocaine is sold to a
rich, white young man (Phil Spector) in a Rolls-Royce. California, dream destination
of the Hollywood western, has become a consumer playground, and in Easy Rider,
the protagonists’ point of departure. They cram the plastic-wrapped cash they have
received into the gas tanks of their motorcycles and head for New Orleans to enjoy a
carnival bacchanal. What follows seems, at first, to be a road movie.
Significantly, Hopper and Fonda envisioned themselves making a modern-day
western, with Billy (as in The Kid) and Wyatt (as in Earp) ranging over America’s back
roads on two-wheeled, gasoline-powered horses. Although this peculiar vision gave the

Dennis Hopper (left) and Peter Fonda in a scene still from Easy Rider, 1969. (Bettmann/Corbis)

149
Easy Rider

film a kind of overarching narrative structure, it did not force Easy Rider within tradi-
tional linear boundaries. In fact, the picture is really more a series of filmic episodes
loosely but effectively strung together. Much of the film’s intensity results from the
imaginative camera work of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs and from the powerful
performances that Hopper and Fonda were able to draw out of the diverse cast mem-
bers, many of whom were nonactors. And then there are those cinematic images of rap-
turous landscapes and unaffected communion among ordinary people, which at their
best evoke in us the feeling that we are experiencing a sort of Woody Guthrie-like
“This Land is Your Land” pastoral.
The film’s pastoral sensibilities are expressed early on in a scene where Captain
America repairs his bike at a ranch. He compliments the rancher for “living off the
land,” bringing to mind a latter-day notion of Grapes of Wrath populism. The rancher
measures time naturally, by the seasons and crop cycles—in contrast to Captain
America who keeps time with a watch, a consumer-culture artifact that he ultimately
flings to the ground in disgust. Interestingly, though, we begin to sense something a
bit unsettling at this point, as we come to realize that the rancher is strange and that
the disturbing cultural distance that exists between him and his Mexican wife seems
to violate what we assumed would be a relational idyll.
Billy and Wyatt go on to meet two very different emblematic characters as the film
unfolds. One is a hippie-ish commune leader (Luke Askew), who dutifully wipes down
Captain America’s bike at a filling station as payment for a ride, speaks up in defense of
Native Americans, and opines on the need for spiritual awakening. His commune is
dressed out in the clichés of flower power, complete with mime troupe; but as with
the ranch, it seems almost creepy—in a Charles Manson, Spahn Ranch sort of way—
its leader less a wise man than a manipulative hustler. Perhaps, Hopper and Fonda
seem to be saying, the American pastoral no longer exists—or maybe it never did.
The second emblematic character Billy and Wyatt encounter is an ACLU lawyer,
the black sheep of a leading Southern family. George Hanson—Nicholson in his
breakout role—is an alcoholic loser, even if his heart is in the right place. He takes a
bold and fateful step, however, by abandoning his old life and joining Billy and
Captain America. Ironically, George finds a certain joy in their journey that seems
strangely lacking in Billy and Wyatt—indeed, his soliloquy on freedom, with its
indictment of those who are afraid to admit they are not free, is more poignant than
almost anything Billy and Wyatt have to offer.
Upon reaching New Orleans, Billy and Wyatt wander among thousands of Mardi
Gras revelers. These scenes are shot in grainy 16mm, giving them both a realistic and
a nightmarish feel. In a particularly powerful scene in a bordello—in which the erotic
and the religious are incongruously joined—Captain America comes to understand the
debasing nature of prostitution. Realizing that he is complicit in the capitalism he
claims to hate, he refuses to become a partner in this most unholy union. After drop-
ping LSD in an old cemetery, he breaks down when long-buried emotions connected
to his mother rush to consciousness—an intertextual cinematic moment, it appears,
during which character and actor became one, as Fonda has revealed that these scenes
were inspired by his own feelings about his mother’s suicide.

150
 Erin Brockovich

Given how thoroughly audiences embraced Easy Rider, its unremittingly tragic end-
ing is striking. Unredeemed, Captain America must admit that “We blew it”—their
journey, based as it was on ill-gotten gains, has been a waste. George is beaten to death,
while Billy and Wyatt are literally blown from their bikes by shotgun blasts fired by
good old boys in a pickup truck—dying, then, on the American back roads that
seemed to hold so much promise. In the film’s last sequence, the camera swoops up
and away from the horrible scene on the road, revealing a majestic river that continues
to flow despite all that has happened.

References
Grant, Barry Keith, ed. American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations. Piscataway, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2008.
Hill, Lee. Easy Rider. London: British Film Institute, 1996.
Orlean, Matthieu, Jean-Baptiste Thoret, Bernard Marcade, and Pierre Evil. Dennis Hopper and
the New Hollywood: Actor, Director, Artist. Paris: Flammarion, 2010.

—Dimitri Keramitas

ERIN BROCKOVICH. Erin Brockovich, released in 2000 and based on a true story,
seeks to demonstrate the significance of environmental damage and its effect on local
residents as well as the means by which ordinary citizens can challenge industries that
have produced those harmful effects. In some ways, it could be regarded as an updating
of Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Instead of a gullible politician taking on the political
establishment, however, it is a plucky and passionate paralegal who leads the fight
against a large corporation whose environmental disregard leads to grievous harm for
neighboring residents.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh, who, at the time, was best known for producing the
original and provocative picture Sex, Lies and Videotape, the film follows the struggles
of the eponymous title character, played by Julia Roberts, who won the Best Actress
Academy Award for her performance. The film opens with Brockovich, an unem-
ployed single mother of three, searching for a job. While she is conducting her search,
she is injured when her dilapidated car is smashed into by a runaway Jaguar. She goes
to court seeking damages but loses the case—some suggest that her skimpy outfits,
rough language, and revelations about her failed marriages make her less than a sympa-
thetic character with the jury.
Brockovich finagles her way into a job with the law firm that had unsuccessfully
argued her case, and while working through what seems to be little more than routine
paperwork, she discovers information indicating that an inordinate number of peculiar
illnesses have been suffered by the firm’s clients in Hinckley, California. Convinced
that something is amiss, Brockovich doggedly works to expose a plot by the Pacific
Gas & Electric Company to hide the fact that it has been dumping harmful chemicals
into the ground around its plant in Hinckley.

151
Erin Brockovich

Albert Finney and Julia Roberts in a scene from the film Erin Brockovich, which won Roberts an
Oscar for Best Actress in 2001. (AFP/Getty Images)

Brockovich invests herself emotionally in the case and will not let the firm’s legal
team turn aside from the matter. Ed Masry (Albert Finney), the lead attorney and
Erin’s boss and father figure, is often the voice of rational analysis—he is not sure it
is worthwhile proceeding with the case. In the end, however, he is moved by Brockovich’s
passion and agrees to support her. Brockovich comes to know the residents of Hinckley,
and they come to trust her. Her commonsense touch and empathy are somewhat sim-
plistically contrasted with the cold reason of the high-powered attorneys. In addition
to examining the issue of powerless citizens confronting powerful corporations, the film
also explores the problem of class-based prejudice—some individuals in a position to
help, such as certain personal injury attorneys, are often inhibited from doing their best
because of their own prejudices.
The lawyers who are assigned to the case advise binding arbitration rather than a
jury trial. Although she very much wants her clients to have their day in court, Brock-
ovich comes to understand that the strategy is the most prudent one to pursue. There
are no dramatic courtroom scenes, then, as the real case involved the examination of
reams of technical data and the eventual disclosure that Pacific Gas & Electric Com-
pany officials knew full well that the plant was dumping dangerous chemicals in the
areas around Hinckley. In the end, there is no rousing, redemptive moment when
the jury comes back with a guilty verdict; due to the perseverance of Brockovich, how-
ever, the case is decided in favor of the Hinckley residents.
Significantly, the film encouraged other firms to put together class-action lawsuits
alleging that other companies had been guilty of environmental damage—a result that

152
 Exorcist, The

not all believed was positive. While fear of lawsuits may have led potential polluters to
resist the temptation to save money by dumping their toxic waste instead of disposing
of it properly, it has been suggested that unscrupulous attorneys have made billions by
way of class-action suits that have helped their vast numbers of clients very little. In
regard to the film itself, while audiences loved it, some critics argued that it oversimpli-
fied the science and painted too simple a picture of corporate heads as faceless, name-
less robber barons with no regard for anyone but themselves. A. O. Scott, for instance,
a reviewer for the New York Times, characterized the film as being filled with clichés
and suggested that Roberts’s portrayal of Brockovich provided viewers with little more
than a heavy dose of “moral vanity and phony populism.”
See also: Women in Film; Male Gaze, The

References
Banks, Sedina. “The ‘Erin Brockovich Effect’: How Media Shapes Toxics Policy.” Environs:
Environmental Law and Policy Journal 26(2), 2003: 219–32.
Houser, Scott, and Don Leet. “Economics Goes to Hollywood: Using Classic Films and Docu-
mentaries to Create an Undergraduate Course.” The Journal of Economic Education 34(4),
2003: 326–32.
Scott, A. O. “ ‘Erin Brockovich’: High Ideals, Higher Heels.” New York Times, March 17, 2000.

—Michael L. Coulter

EXORCIST, THE. During the 1960s, various events—including the assassination

of President John F. Kennedy, the seemingly interminable Vietnam War, and an
increasingly bloody civil rights movement—shattered America’s optimistic political
and social climate. Amidst the nation’s rapidly rising fears, the release of George A.
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby in 1968 ush-
ered in the modern era of the horror film (Waller, 1987). Prior to the release of these
seminal works, horror films had generally been set in another time and place—usually
in the past and/or in remote locales. By contrast, Romero and Polanski brought terror
into our everyday lives by setting their tales in contemporary America (Waller, 1987).
The Exorcist, in a profoundly disturbing way, continued this unsettling trend.
By the time The Exorcist was released in 1973, the nation’s confidence in the American
Dream—peaceful, prosperous lives centered on nuclear families—had eroded.
A sequence of events that had begun five years earlier suggested that the United States
was becoming increasingly violent. In March 1968, American troops brutally massacred
hundreds of Vietnamese citizens at My Lai, a widely publicized atrocity that appalled
and angered many. Only one month later, pacifist civil rights movement leader Martin
Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Since King’s faith, grace, charisma, and influence had
helped calm an intermittently violent movement, his murder was both symbolic and a
turning point.
After King’s death, race riots erupted across the United States while millions of anti-
war protesters took to the streets. The general climate intensified when, in May 1970,

153
Exorcist, The

The silhouette of Father Merrin outside the McNeil home in a still from the film The Exorcist,
directed by William Friedkin, 1973. (Warner Bros./Getty Images)

members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four student antiwar protesters
at Kent State University. Campuses across the country erupted in response. Young
people seemed to be dangerously out of control; the free-spirited hippies who had
reveled in peace, love, and happiness at Woodstock in August 1969 appeared to have
morphed into violent rebels. For many, the stabbing death of African American
Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival only four months later, in
December 1969, set the tone for 1970s America. Even the sacrosanct office of the
U.S. president was under attack as the Watergate scandal raged; only seven months
after the release of The Exorcist, Nixon, facing impeachment, became the first president
to resign.
In early 1970, widely publicized details about the 1969 Manson Family murders
contributed to Americans’ growing sense of unease and bewilderment. Cult leader
Charles Manson had directed his followers to carry out two sets of brutal killings in
Los Angeles. Their goal was to instigate what Manson called “Helter Skelter,” an inevi-
table apocalyptic war Manson believed would be precipitated by growing racial ten-
sions in the United States. The Family members who committed the murders were
in their late teens and early twenties, and the connection Manson made between his
cult’s beliefs and various songs on the Beatles’ White Album exacerbated Americans’ dis-
trust of an increasingly rebellious youth culture.

154
 Exorcist, The

Moreover, the Manson Family, headed by father figure Manson, made a macabre
parody of the American family and symbolized its breakdown. During a time of social
violence and political deceit, not even family life could provide Americans a sense of
security. Divorce was on the rise; throughout the United States, single-parent house-
holds became more common. Also, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade gender
discrimination, women had begun joining the work force in increasing numbers.
Many Americans questioned whether this change was positive and speculated about
its impact on social stability. Adding to the turmoil, women joined together—on the
streets and in the name of a sisterhood of solidarity—to create a liberation movement
that grew exponentially in the early 1970s. Americans connected youthful rebellion to
lax parenting, which inevitably led to the breakdown of the nuclear family and women’s
increasing independence. The Exorcist reflected their concerns.
The film’s main character is a 12-year-old named Regan (Linda Blair), whose single
mother works as an actress. Left alone to entertain herself, Regan contacts and
befriends a demon by way of what is ostensibly a child’s toy: a Ouija board. As her
mental and physical states deteriorate, medical doctors and psychiatrists fail to find a
cause, much less a cure, for her illness. In a remedy suggestive of the pro-nuclear family
sentiment of the day, Regan’s nonreligious mother asks a Catholic priest, Father Damien
Karras, to help her family by exorcising the demon (Phillips, 2005).
This process is a difficult one, in part because Karras fears he is losing his own faith.
In a scene that conflates youth culture, decadence, and evil, he expresses his concern to
a fellow priest at a bar while the Allman Brothers Band’s song “Ramblin’ Man” plays
loudly in the background. Significantly, Father Lankester Merrin, the senior priest
the Catholic Church asks to assist with the exorcism, is in Woodstock writing a book
when he receives word about the possession. He reads the letter from the Church while
walking slowly through a forest; the subtle message is that Merrin will return from
bucolic, pre-Altamont times to restore order to contemporary America by casting evil
from young Regan.
In the meantime, Karras is experiencing problems caused by the breakdown of his
own family. His mother, who lives alone with only a radio to keep her company, is ill
with an injured foot. If her nuclear family unit were intact, she would be cared for;
in actuality, however, her brother visits infrequently and eventually commits her to a
psychiatric hospital so she can receive the medical care neither he nor her son can pro-
vide. Eventually Karras’s mother does return home; but she dies, broken and alone—
her body lying undiscovered for a number of days.
The demon uses Regan’s possession to provoke Karras about his mother’s death.
When Karras first visits the teen, the demon claims it has his mother, and that its
goal is to unite the priest with “us.” It accuses Karras of leaving his mother alone
to die and claims she will never forgive him. Later, it plays tricks on him by adopting
the physical guise of his mother and, speaking in her voice, asking him why he
treated her poorly. Father Merrin cautions Karras to beware the demon’s mixing of
lies and truth. For viewers in 1970s America, this warning recalled President Nixon’s
comments about the American media as it probed the breaking story of Watergate
(Cull, 2000).

155
Exorcist, The

Near the end of the exorcism, Karras determines that the strain of possession is
causing Regan’s heart to fail. The situation worsens when the elderly Merrin dies
during the rite. When the demon giggles about his death, Karras physically attacks
Regan’s body. He angrily instructs the demon to leave her and to take possession of
him instead. Once it does, he struggles not to kill Regan, finally meeting his demise
after jumping out the girl’s bedroom window. Karras’s sacrifice saves Regan’s life and
her family.
The Exorcist does not present Regan as an entirely passive victim. Significantly, her
name is an allusion to a thankless child in Shakespeare’s King Lear (Cull, 2000, 48).
During a time of seemingly uncontrollable youths, The Exorcist depicts that quintes-
sential teenage haven—the bedroom—as a source of evil. The film presents shots of
Regan’s closed door before revealing each round of hideous atrocities within the room
(Kermode 2005, 42): the girl swears, strikes her mother, vomits on a priest, and mas-
turbates fervently with a crucifix.
Violence perpetrated by university students inspired a key scene in The Exorcist
(Cull, 2000). Regan’s mother, Chris, is shown acting in a film that portrays dissent at
Georgetown University. While in character, she implores students to work “within
the system.” Ironically, the film places the “real” Chris outside the system by suggesting
she invited evil into her home because she is not a full-time mother.
As Americans debated motherhood, female bodies became a source of anxiety.
Wide availability of birth control pills beginning in 1960, followed by the Roe v. Wade
decision to legalize abortion in January 1973, meant women could choose their repro-
ductive futures—and therefore their destinies—for the first time in history. At a time
when many Americans questioned this newly acquired freedom, The Exorcist show-
cased a frightening female body beyond control (Cull, 2000); Regan even defies natu-
ral order by rotating her head 360 degrees.
When William Peter Blatty wrote the eponymous book on which The Exorcist is
based, he fictionalized the 1949 account of a 14-year-old Maryland boy’s exorcism.
Blatty’s decision to change the possessed from a teenage boy to a female on the cusp
of womanhood complimented issues current in 1970s America. That Blatty set the
story in Georgetown, just outside Washington, D.C., strengthens the film’s political
and social statements (Cull, 2000, 49). The Exorcist equates the evils of the modern
world with Satan and, therefore, presents religion and traditional morality as their sole
antidote (Kinder and Houston, 1987). Although Blatty intended this conservative
message to be the film’s focus, director William Friedkin packed The Exorcist with
terror-inducing delights that kindled audiences’ love of the horror genre (Phillips,
2005). Arguably, in 1973 Americans were poised to be scared.
See also: Horror Film, The

References
Cull, Nick. “The Exorcist: Film in Context.” History Today 50(5), May 2000: 46–51.
Kermode, Mark. The Exorcist, 2nd ed. London: British Film Institute, 2005.

156
 Exorcist, The

Kinder, Marsha, and Beverley Houston. “Seeing Is Believing: The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now.”
In Waller, Gregory A. American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Phillips, Kendall R. Projected Fears: American Films and American Culture. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2005.
Waller, Gregory A. “Introduction.” In American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror
Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987: 1–12.

—Joyce M. Youmans

157
This page intentionally left blank
 v
F
FAHRENHEIT 451. Throughout history, book burning has been used to eradicate
particular ideas. In the science fiction film Fahrenheit 451 (1966), directed by François
Truffaut and starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie, book burning serves a more far-
reaching goal, the elimination of individual thought. Based on Ray Bradbury’s novel of
the same name (1953), Fahrenheit 451 shares with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
Four (1949) a critique of authoritarianism and censorship. In both tales, censorship
and propaganda are used to control the populace. But in Nineteen Eighty-Four, they
support a totalitarian state; while in Fahrenheit 451 censorship begins with the major-
ity, which has lost its desire for books.
The protagonist is Guy Montag, a “fireman.” In this future dystopia, firemen don’t
put out fires. They burn books. But Montag undergoes a change of heart. One day he
meets a young woman on a train who asks why he burns books, if he’s happy, and if he
ever reads the books he burns. The next day, he hides a book and brings it home to
read. This little act of defiance grows into an obsession, apparently triggered by
another event. Montag’s unit is called to burn books at the house of an old woman,
where they find an immense library. They are ordered to burn down the whole house,
but the woman refuses to leave, instead, choosing to burn with her books.
At home, Montag lashes out, telling his TV-obsessed wife and her friends, “You’re
nothing but zombies, all of you. Just like those husbands of yours you don’t even know
anymore. You’re not living, you’re just killing time!” Turning off the TV, he insists they
listen to him read. And as he reads a passage about a man whose wife is dying, one
woman cries, “I can’t bear to know those feelings. I’d forgotten all about those things.”
The more Montag awakens from his stupor, the more he sees how numb and lifeless
people are. But in books he finds truth, meaning, and remembrance.
Book burning, in this story, is about more than books. As the books are burned, so
are the thoughts, feelings, and histories they contain. As people reject books, they reject
thinking and accept distractions like propaganda, drugs, and games. The burning is a
metaphor for the myriad ways people conform rather than think, and the ways indi-
viduality and meaning are lost. In this world, people are hedonists whose only goals
are pleasure and happiness. Conflict is anathema to this, so they eliminate it by

159
Fail-Safe

burning difference away. With their differing views, books are the enemies of peace.
The chief explains, “We’ve all got to be alike. The only way to be happy is for everyone
to be made equal. So, we burn the books.” But the result is a false happiness, underlaid
with fear, anger, and rage.
As Montag begins to think for himself, he starts to see the monotony that surrounds
him and the dull, lifeless character of his relationships. But he remains unaware, as yet,
of the rage he feels within. What is missing most of all in this world is remembrance.
Without books, no one remembers the past, or even what happened yesterday. Neither
Montag nor his wife remembers where or when they met. But in books, Montag finds
a way out of the lackluster, alienated life he shares with others in his society. This is
visualized in the film through dull, languid expressions and a monotony of sameness,
like the rows of invariable gray coats at the school.
Back at work, Montag attempts to resign. But he is asked to stay for one more call.
When they arrive at the house, he realizes it is his own, and that Linda has turned him
in and packed her bags. When the chief asks Montag to do the honors, he takes the
torch and burns his bed. He burns his TV. And then he burns his books. Finally, in a
release of pent up rage he hardly seems aware of, he burns the chief, an act both sym-
bolic and real. Afterwards, he escapes, and joins a group of homeless dissidents called
“the Book People.” They memorize books, and then burn them to avoid arrest. Later,
the books are passed on to the next generation, as the Book People lie in wait for the
day when books, and the things they represent, are once again desired.
See also: Science Fiction Film, The; Truffaut, François

References
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 1953.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1949.

—Susan de Gaia

FAIL-SAFE. The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in 1945, the Soviet Union successfully tested its own bombs in 1949, and within a few
years the Cold War rivals possessed nuclear arsenals that could destroy the planet many
times over. It was not until the late 1950s and 1960s, however, that Hollywood pro-
duced its most significant films dealing with nuclear holocaust and the U.S.-Soviet
arms race. From the end of World War II through Joseph McCarthy’s political witch
hunts of the early to mid-1950s and the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in
the late 1950s, fears of Soviet domination seemed to make the topics too inflamma-
tory. In Hollywood, of course, McCarthy-era blacklists also discouraged the making
of films based on such controversial themes. Filmmakers tended to try to lighten things
up with screwball comedies like The Atomic Kid (1954), or to sublimate fears of
communism in paranoid sci-fi thrillers about alien attacks on the United States, most
famously in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). But then, in 1959, On the Beach

160
 Fail-Safe

launched a half-decade period during which several of the most enduring films about
nuclear anxiety were released, culminating in 1964 with two of the best-known Cold
War pictures, the absurdist classic Dr. Strangelove and the tense drama Fail-Safe.
While the penetrating black humor of Dr. Strangelove often leaves viewers con-
cluding that a satirical approach is the only fruitful way of dealing with Cold War
nuclear confrontation, Sidney Lumet’s straight, serious counterpart was innovative
and illuminating in ways that are perhaps difficult to imagine almost a half-century
later. In the film, written by blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein, a mechanical
glitch in mainframe computers at Omaha Strategic Air Command generates errone-
ous orders for an Alaska-based Air Force squadron to drop two 20-megaton nuclear
bombs on Moscow. Communications fail, and the planes quickly surpass “fail safe,”
the point at which they cannot be called back through normal protocols. The film
then builds suspense as a drama of human improvisation during a crisis created by
machines, with characters’ behavior conditioned by years of Cold War political and
military training.
Fail-Safe contributed to the demystification of the U.S. national security state sim-
ply by imagining people interacting in top-secret settings like Omaha SAC, the presi-
dential bunker, and the Pentagon. Scenes in the Pentagon “war room” frame the
discussion about what to do as a debate about the lessons of World War II. When dov-
ish Gen. Warren Black (Dan O’Herlihy) proposes that the United States must do
everything it possibly can to abort the mission or shoot down the planes, civilian
adviser Professor Groeteschele (Walter Matthau) disagrees and argues that the bomb-
ing should be carried out because the Russians will surrender after Moscow is
destroyed. When he is told, “We don’t go in for sneak attacks, we had that done to
us at Pearl Harbor,” he argues that Pearl Harbor was justified and that the Japanese
blundered by not attacking harder, adding, “They paid for that mistake at
Hiroshima.” Matthau’s character is based on political scientist Herman Kahn, whose
best-selling 1960 book On Thermonuclear War argued that nuclear war was winnable
and survivable. Fail-Safe’s overzealous Cold Warrior is a Jew who says he learned
from the Nazis the importance of striking first, but he is alone in recommending the
bombing of Moscow.
If Groeteschele is Fail-Safe’s post-traumatic madman, its paragon of sensitivity and
diplomacy is the nameless American president (Henry Fonda), who communicates
with the Soviet premier through young translator Buck (Larry Hagman) on an iconic
Cold War crisis telephone. The men’s intelligent, emotionally realistic negotiations
and their militaries’ attempt to work together to end the standoff amounted to a
humanist counter-fantasy for a nation long taught to think of Soviet leaders as mon-
sters. To modern viewers, Fail-Safe’s war room graphics may look like a primitive
video game, and the film may seem grandiose and humorless. Understood in its his-
torical context, however, it directly confronted a topic that had been avoided or trivi-
alized for years by dramatizing a crisis made no less plausible by the disclaimer in the
end credits in which the U.S. military reports, “a rigidly enforced system of safeguards
insure that occurrences such as those depicted in this story cannot happen.”
See also: War Film, The

161
Falling Down

References
Evans, Joyce A. Celluloid Mushroom Clouds: Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1998.
Shapiro, Jerome F. Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film. New York:
Routledge, 2002.
—Kenneth F. Maffitt

FALLING DOWN. Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993) follows the story of a
laid-off middle-class white male named William Foster (Michael Douglas), who is
known throughout the film mainly by the name on his vanity license plate: D-FENS.
Foster was formerly an engineer who developed nuclear missiles, and as the film begins,
he is stewing in a hellish Los Angeles traffic jam. In a masterful sequence directly
inspired by the opening of Federico Fellini’s 8, D-FENS sits in bumper-to-bumper traf-
fic that is completely immobile. The heat is stifling, the air conditioner and the driver-
side window handle are broken, and a fly consistently bites Foster while evading his
attempts to kill it. Outside of the car, horns are blaring, lights on a construction sign
flash incessantly in his face, and the surrounding bumper stickers proclaim messages
of Christian sacrifice, economic liberation, and confrontation. The faces around him
are devoid of all but negative expressions, and they seem to be staring at him: a
“Garfield” window stick-on with a toothy grin, the weary man whom D-FENS can
see in his rearview mirror, a woman putting on lipstick and watching D-FENS through
her rearview mirror, the deadened expression of a student on the bus next to him. And
finally, the little girl directly in front of him, holding a doll and staring at him with a
totally blank expression. She is about the same age as his own daughter, Adele (Joey
Hope Singer), and a particularly painful reminder that he has not been invited to her
birthday celebration, which is scheduled to occur later on during this momentous day.
All of these forces assail D-FENS as he boils away in his little car; but rather than
floating away like Fellini’s Guido, D-FENS makes the ill-fated decision to abandon
his car, telling the stunned driver behind him only that “I’m going home.” As he walks
toward what we assume to be his Venice Beach residence, he makes his way through
some of the worst neighborhoods in Los Angeles, encountering all manner of what
he concludes are depraved and morally bankrupt individuals. His antagonists, xeno-
phobically depicted as ethnic caricatures that exist, it seems, only because the rage of
D-FENS must have some sort of rationale, represent the “melting pot” of a dystopic
Los Angeles, and he metes out violent justice to each of them with the various weapons
he acquires during his journey. Eventually we come to understand that there may be
something seriously wrong with D-FENS’s sense of reality; most notably, that he and
his wife Beth (Barbara Hershey) are divorced and that he no longer resides with her
and his daughter in Venice Beach. Indeed, Beth has a restraining order against her for-
mer husband. In the end, he must be stopped by a policeman on his last day of work,
Lt. Prendergast (Robert Duvall), who, ironically, seems to be the only person in Los
Angeles who can identify with the raging D-FENS.

162
 Fargo

Interestingly, Schumacher and screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith were developing Fall-
ing Down as Los Angeles was ripped apart by the 1992 L.A. riots that exploded after
a jury acquitted four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. The film, it seems,
captured the angst-filled zeitgeist of 1990s urban America, with its tragic antihero, por-
trayed brilliantly by Douglas, evoking in audiences fear, rage, and ultimately pity: “You
mean I’m the bad guy?,” asks a disillusioned Foster when confronted by Prendergast.
Yet, even in a film that exploited the frustrations and anxieties of ordinary Americans,
and provided an unlikely vigilante to respond to them, the status quo of the existing
social order is reaffirmed: Foster’s vigilante is dispatched, and Prendergast decides to
continue on as a policeman. The film, if understood as a cautionary tale and not
merely as a rationalization for the marginalization of ethnic Others, is a successful
attempt to categorize the anxieties of the early 1990s, providing the audience with a
cathartic story that purges violent impulses through an everyman figure for whom they
could cheer.

References
Denby, David. “Raging Fool.” New Yorker, March 8, 1993: 64, 76.
Schickel, Richard. “Losing It All in L.A.” Time, March 1, 1993: 63.
Teachout, Terry. “Movies and Middle-Class Rage.” Commentary, April 1993: 52–54.

—James M. Brandon

FARGO. Fargo (1996), written, produced and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, is at
once a rural deconstruction of traditional film noir pictures, an “American Gothic” com-
edy of errors, and a symbolic allegory pitting the agents of creation and life against those
of entropy and death. It is also an homage to all things Minnesotan, as evidenced by the
numerous location shots throughout the film and even a veiled tribute to Minneapolis
music legend Prince, whose symbol is seen turned on its side in the credits. Fargo also
owes much to the 1967 Richard Brooks true-crime film In Cold Blood, going so far as
to claim—falsely, it turns out—that the events in Fargo were based on real events that
occurred in Minnesota. If the Brooks film was reality presented as fiction, then the Coen
Brothers offering may be understood as a fictitious expression of reality as fiction.
Like a negative image of classic film noir, Fargo is set in a vast whiteness. The snowy
landscape of the Northern Plains stretches toward the horizon along grey roads and
fence lines as far as the eye can see. Unlike the urban noir detective movie, where mys-
tery is expressed by the chiaroscuro of dim streetlights against claustrophobic darkness,
here clarity is obscured by too much whiteness, by snow blindness, by the glaring can-
dor of evil committed in the light of day and by the slow fade to a white screen.
The movie opens with a scene in which strapped-for-cash car salesman Jerry Lunde-
gaard (William H. Macy) meets with kidnappers-for-hire Carl Showalter (Steve Bus-
cemi) and the pale and mysteriously taciturn Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare).
Lundegaard is there to work out the details of a plot to kidnap his wife and to extort

163
Fargo

Scene from the 1996 film Fargo, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and starring Frances McDor-
mand, shown here kneeling over a dead body. (Photofest)

ransom money from his wealthy but antagonistic father-in-law. An hour late for the
meeting and derisively chastised for his infraction by Showalter, Lundegaard nervously
excuses himself, repeating the prophetic line, “Well, that was a mistake, then.” As the
story unfolds, mistake builds upon mistake as the conspiratorial scheme devolves from
a relatively benign hoax into a surreal pastiche of horrific murders.
Standing over against the darkly humorous, conniving criminals Showalter, Grimsrud,
and, in a different way, Lundegaard, is the small-town sheriff of Brainerd, Minnesota,
Marge Gunderson, played by Frances McDormand—Joel Coen’s wife—in a role that
earned her the Best Actress Academy Award. Marge personifies Good. She is honest,
noble, diligent, trusting and trustworthy; and she is pregnant, a constant reminder that
Marge is the calm, life-bearing antithesis to the chaotic, abyssal Lundegaard, Showalter,
and Grimsrud. She carries life, the appreciation of life, and the promise of life within
her, even as she confronts situations that are beyond her understanding. In one of the
most poignant scenes in the film, Sherriff Gunderson speaks to one of the murderers as
he rides in the back seat of her patrol car after she has arrested him:

So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accom-
plice in the wood chipper . . . and those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a
little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. . . . Don’tcha
know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well . . . I just don’t understand it.

In the end, that Marge does not understand—that she can never understand—is the
very thing that makes her a redemptive character. The positive universal force with

164
 Fast Times at Ridgemont High

which Marge is infused radiates out from her, even in the midst of all of that evil that
surrounds her. Nowhere is this more movingly expressed than in the scenes between
Marge and her husband Norm. As the film draws to a close, Marge, cleansed of the
filth and degradation that she has touched up against in her role as sheriff, snuggles
with Norm in their bed, safe and warm against the Minnesota cold. A wildlife painter,
Norm shares with Marge the bittersweet moment of finding out that one of his images
has been chosen to appear on a postage stamp, although not on the most expensive
one. Pleased, yet disappointed that he is again second best, he turns to Marge for
reassurance:

Norm: “People don’t much use the three-cent.”

Marge: “Oh for Pete’s sake, of course they do! Whenever they raise the postage, people
need the little stamp . . . when they’re stuck with the old ones.”

The film ends with Marge—now as wife and mother—in the arms of her husband
making small talk, both looking forward to the end of winter and the birth of their
child in the spring. Ever nurturing, Marge soothes away the memory of incomprehen-
sible evil by celebrating the importance of small stamps and small dreams—the
extraordinary things of our wonderfully ordinary lives.
See also: Coen, Joel and Ethan; Film Noir

References
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York: Random House, 1965.
Conrad, Mark T. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2008.
Hirsch, Foster. The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2008.
Keillor, Garrison. Leaving Home. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Mohr, Howard. How to Talk Minnesotan: A Visitor’s Guide. New York: Penguin, 1987.

—Helen M. York

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH. A filmic representative of 1980s teen

life, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) was declared by the American Film Institute
one of “America’s Funniest Movies”; it was added to the National Film Registry in
2005. The picture was adapted for the screen from Cameron Crowe’s book Fast Times
at Ridgemont High: A True Story, an account of Crowe’s experiences when he went
“undercover” at a San Diego high school while working as a reporter for Rolling Stone.
Teaming with Crowe, director Amy Heckerling crafted a disturbingly realistic film that
explored the confusing world of American teens as they attempt to negotiate their way
through the minefield of adolescence.
The film follows a dizzying array of characters that populate a fictional Southern
California high school. At the heart of Fast Times, however, are the stories of Stacy
Hamilton ( Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Mark Ratner (Brian Backer). These two innocent

165
Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Scene from the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, directed by Amy Heckerling and starring
Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli, shown here with Ray Walston, playing the part of teacher Mr. Hand.
(Photofest)

idealists are guided through the trials and tribulations of high school romance by their
more experienced friends, Linda Barrett (Phoebe Cates) and Mike Damone (Robert
Romanus). Unfortunately, their ongoing attempts to establish a romantic relationship
suffer from bad timing, differing levels of sexual maturity, and betrayal.
While the narrative flow of the film revolves around the experiences of Stacy and
Mark, the picture’s most notable character may be Jeff Spicoli, the stoner/surfer played
brilliantly by Sean Penn. Penn developed an endearing caricature of the quintessential
class clown who wants nothing more than to enjoy his high school years by doing as
little as possible. Creative, insubordinate, and full of life, Spicoli’s ability to coast
through the educational system without learning a thing is put to the test by Mr. Hand
(Ray Walston), an eccentric history teacher who engages in a humorous, if lopsided,
intellectual tug-of-war with the young burnout. Walston shines as the rigid arbiter of
knowledge, and his reactions to Spicoli’s various provocations, such as having a pizza
delivered to Mr. Hand’s classroom, show him to be the young man’s better in this cru-
cial game of life.
While there are many unforgettable scenes in Fast Times, perhaps the most memo-
rable is one involving the masturbatory fantasy of Stacy’s brother Brad (Judge Rein-
hold). Helplessly desirous of the ethereal Linda (Phoebe Cates), Brad indulges
himself in his bathroom while imagining his dream girl slithering out of his swimming
pool and walking toward him in slow motion while she seductively removes the top of

166
 Fatal Attraction

her bright red bikini. Set to the sounds of “Moving in Stereo” by the Cars, the fantasy
ends in jarring fashion when the real-life Linda bursts into the unlocked bathroom,
discovering Brad in the act. Frequently parodied in other films and on television
shows, the scene is often mentioned by radio DJs when they play the Cars’ “Moving
in Stereo,” just one of the hit songs that appears on the film’s popular soundtrack,
which features music from artists such as the Go-Go’s, Oingo Boingo, Jackson
Browne, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Significantly, Amy Heckerling would go on to make Clueless (1995) and Loser
(2000) and Cameron Crowe Almost Famous (2000), solidifying their places as pop-
culture anthropologists who have been able to give expression to the tortured world
of teenage angst and redemption in profound and entertaining ways. Perhaps unex-
pectedly, Fast Times at Ridgemont High became for Generation X audiences what
George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) became for baby boomers: a nostalgic
coming-of-age picture that expertly captured the spirit of the times for suburban teens.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The

References
Crowe, Cameron. Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1981.
Ebert, Roger. “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Chicago Sun-Times, January 1, 1982. Available
at http://www.rogerebert.com.
Paul, William. Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1994.

—James M. Brandon

FATAL ATTRACTION. Released in 1987, Fatal Attraction concerns a married man—

a devoted husband and father—who has a weekend fling with a business associate while his
wife and daughter are out of town; when he seeks to end the affair, the woman relentlessly
pursues him. A box-office hit that garnered six Academy Award nominations, the film
proved extremely controversial, generating wide-ranging and often vitriolic discussions
about misogyny, gender roles, stalking, and fidelity.
Alex Forrest—played against type by Glenn Close, who transformed her big-screen
persona from devoted wife/mother into sultry seductress—becomes obsessed with Dan
Gallagher (Michael Douglas) after their illicit weekend. She calls him repeatedly and
even insinuates herself into Dan’s familial space by talking her way into his house—
returning home from work one evening, Dan is shocked to find Alex casually chatting
with his unsuspecting wife, Beth (Anne Archer). As her obsession escalates, she spies on
the family, threatens to expose Dan, and finally breaks into the Gallagher house and
kills the family’s pet rabbit by boiling it in a large pot. As the film draws to an increas-
ingly intense conclusion, Alex takes Beth and her daughter prisoner in their own home.
Violently attacking Beth, Alex is finally killed by the aggrieved wife. Interestingly, early
versions of the script called for Alex to kill herself at the end of the film; but audience

167
Fatal Attraction

Scene from the 1987 film Fatal Attraction, directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Glenn Close and
Michael Douglas. (Photofest)

responses to a prescreening of the picture with that ending were largely negative—
viewers, it seems, felt that Beth should have her revenge.
Although critics pointed out the obvious similarities between Fatal Attraction and
Clint Eastwood’s 1971 offering Play Misty for Me—most suggested that Eastwood
had done it better—audiences flocked to theaters to see the 1987 picture and it became
the second-highest-grossing film of the year. Reactions to Fatal Attraction from film
scholars, especially feminist scholars, were not as favorable, however. Many argued that
the film was explicitly misogynistic, implying that Dan had been lured into the situa-
tion by the wily Alex. When he repents of his sins—evidently absolved—he is merci-
lessly put upon by an increasingly psychotic force. Further, the family structure that
Dan had helped to shake appeared to be threatened only by the unbalanced Alex;
and Beth, who should quite naturally be outraged by her husband’s behavior, suppor-
tively welcomes him back into the fold and ultimately defends him with her life.
Ironically, some feminist critics saw something quite different in the character of
Alex: instead of reading her as just another filmic stereotype of a crazed woman who
is used and discarded by another irresponsible man, they saw her as a strong and inde-
pendent figure standing firm against patriarchal oppression. This latter interpretation
of Alex seems problematic in its own way, suggesting as it does that female strength

168
 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

and independence can only be expressed by way of hysterical behavior. Equally trou-
bling was the reaction of many men, who appeared to see nothing wrong with the
way Dan’s behavior was characterized in the film but saw him as a cautionary figure
meant to warn them about the dangers of unscrupulous women lurking around every
corner—make one little mistake, and you could lose everything you worked so hard
to accomplish!
See also: Male Gaze, The; Women in Film

References
Ellis, Kate. “Fatal Attraction, or the Post-Modern Prometheus.” The Journal of Sex Research
27(1), 1990: 111–21
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992.
Merck, Mandy. “Bedroom Horror: The Fatal Attraction of Intercourse.” Feminist Review. 30,
1988: 89–103.
Park, William, and Gilberto Perez. “The Mad Woman in the Loft: Fatal Attraction.” The Hudson
Review. 41(1), 1988: 197–202.
—Michael Faubion

FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF. Released in June 1986, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was
an enormous hit for Paramount Studios and writer/director John Hughes, taking in
roughly $70 million at the box office, as well as launching the career of star Matthew
Broderick. The film marked the end of a spectacular streak of creativity for Hughes, who,
between 1984 and 1986, directed a string of era-defining teen films, including Sixteen
Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986).
The film opens with scenes of high school junior Ferris Bueller (Broderick) lying in
bed and pretending to be sick while trying to convince his parents (Cindy Pickett and
Lyman Ward) that he should stay home from school. Ferris’s sister, Jeanie ( Jennifer Grey),
annoyed by her brother’s charmingly manipulative ways—and the fact that he gets away
with everything—sets out to derail his scheme. Ferris once again gets his way, however,
and after a number of establishing shots of the beautiful spring day that awaits, puts the
case to the audience: “How can I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?”
The adventure begins with Ferris coaxing his hypochondriac friend Cameron Frye
(Alan Ruck) to drive over to Ferris’s house—you got the car, reasons Ferris, I only got
a computer. Meanwhile, Ferris’s nemesis, Dean of Students Edward R. Rooney ( Jeffrey
Jones), realizing that his wayward charge is not coming to school, hatches a plan to “put
one hell of a dent” in the young Bueller’s future by catching him in his tenth act of tru-
ancy. Ferris’s plan to include girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) in his day-off high jinks, hits a
snag, forcing Ferris and Cameron to steal the prized possession of Cameron’s father, a
mint-condition, 1961 red Ferrari—which, it seems, means more to the senior Frye
than does his own son. With Chicago as the backdrop and the pounding rhythms of
an eclectic soundtrack, featuring the likes of Yello and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, driving
them along, Ferris and Sloane set off to show Cameron “a good time.”

169
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Scene from the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, directed by John Hughes and starring Matthew
Broderick. (Photofest)

Significantly, one could point to any of Hughes’s films that appeared in the mid-1980s
as exemplary of the era’s dystopic Reagan-era zeitgeist; all are characterized by representa-
tions of absentee parents, the obsession with aesthetic superficiality, male pubescent fan-
tasy, dialogue inflected by pop culture references, and the division of high school students
into caste categories such as the “jock,” the “geek,” the “criminal,” and the “prom queen.”
The teenagers in these films—most of whom feel abandoned by their own families—turn
to each other in order to forge surrogate families that they hope will keep them safe and
secure. Such is the case with mother and father figures Ferris and Sloane, who offer guid-
ance and tough love to their overly introspective and anxious “son” Cameron. Interest-
ingly, however, although the trio’s jaunt through the city of Chicago defines an act of
measured rebellion, at the end of their adventure, Ferris and Cameron still take comfort
in returning home—Pretty in Pink makes a similar case for the comfort of home—where
their parents maintain a sense of ethical authority and well-being.
Although the film plays out on its surface as a teen comedy—the rascal Ferris
involved in his cat-and-mouse game with his nemesis Rooney, and by extension, with
his sister—on a deeper level, the film may be read, like all of Hughes’s best pictures—
as a moving, and often tender, character study. The relationship between Ferris—a sort
of latter-day, charismatic, big-hearted rebel without a cause—and Cameron is particu-
larly affecting. Cameron—anxious and disillusioned by being cut adrift from his
family, and especially his father, in the midst of the consumer culture of the 1980s—
appears to have nothing more than his relationship with Ferris. Interestingly, Ferris
attempts to overturn Cameron’s existential torpor by guiding his friend through a

170
 Few Good Men, A

veritable tour of ’80s material excess—the greed of the Chicago Trade Mart; the arro-
gance of the Sears tower; the child’s game played by high-priced professional athletes;
the fancy eatery (Chez Quis). Some have suggested that the rebellious activities of this
film’s characters represent an act of play that “constitute[s] training for success in a
bureaucratized, corporatized, high-tech society” (Traube, 1989)—so prized in Reagan’s
1980s America. But this seems to miss the largely anticorporate, profamily sensibilities
that mark Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Although it is certainly emblematic of 1980s films—
Hughes’s offerings included—that explore the alienation and anguish of the decade’s
struggles with issues of class and status, it may be argued that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
defines a reimagining of sorts for the notion of teenage rebellion, as here the seemingly
dispossessed teenagers ultimately return to the comfort of their own homes.

References
Moffatt, Michael. “Do We Really Need ‘Postmodernism’ to Understand Ferris Bueller’s Day
Off? A Comment on Traube.” Cultural Anthropology 5(4), November 1990: 367–73.
Rutsky, R. L., and Wyatt, Justin. “Serious Pleasures: Cinematic Pleasure and the Notion of
Fun.” Cinema Journal 30(1), Autumn 1990: 3–19.
Traube, Elizabeth G. “Reply to Moffatt,” Cultural Anthropology 5(4), November 1990: 374–79.
Traube, Elizabeth G. “Secrets of Success in Postmodern Society.” Cultural Anthropology 4(3),
August 1989: 273–99.

—Kenneth Shonk

FEW GOOD MEN, A. For many moviegoers, Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992)
is one of the best courtroom dramas ever made, and it is (not coincidentally) his most
commercially successful film to date. Adapted from Aaron Sorkin’s stage play of the same
name, A Few Good Men can claim not only consistently memorable performances, but it
can also boast of an iconic tagline—“You can’t handle the truth”—uttered with character-
istic vehemence by Jack Nicolson, whose character (Colonel Jessup) is a tone-perfect por-
trait of a military hero gone slightly mad. Like Sorkin, Reiner has become known for his
advocacy of liberal causes and fervent support of the Democratic Party; yet, in crafting
this film, he manages to temper his political biases with a hint of respect for the values
of a military establishment he otherwise subjects to scathing analysis.
The plot of A Few Good Men is really two stories in one. The first story, which occu-
pies center stage, is the court-martial of two young marines who are accused of “con-
duct unbecoming” after their hazing of a fellow soldier (a “Private Santiago”) leads to
his death. Whether they were ordered to do so by their superior officers—an action
referred to in marine parlance as a “code red”—or took it upon themselves to punish
an uncooperative comrade is the question that sets this courtroom drama in motion.
Beyond that purely legal issue, however, is the larger and more ambiguous issue of
the limits of power, and on that point A Few Good Men takes a decisive stance. Colonel
Jessup, whose command position at the Guantanamo Naval Base places him at the
center of moral conflict, at first lies about his involvement in this incident, and it is

171
Few Good Men, A

Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, 1992. (Photofest)

only under relentless cross-examination that he finally admits to having ordered a code
red, without ever acknowledging any responsibility for the needless death he has
caused. As played by Jack Nicolson, Jessup is part warrior, part patriotic windbag,
and his demeanor on the stand makes it clear that, in his eyes, the authority he wields
is nearly absolute, and certainly beyond legal challenge. For Reiner, Jessup’s arrogance
is both institutional and personal, and his ultimate humiliation then becomes a victory
for political accountability as well as military justice.
The second, behind-the-scenes plotline focuses on the inner struggle of the film’s
chief protagonist, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise. As his character
traits unfold, we soon realize that Lt. Kaffee is still living in the shadow of his deceased
but celebrated father, who once served as the Navy’s Judge Advocate General. The pre-
vailing view of the younger Kaffee is that he has inherited nothing of his father’s skills
or integrity, and as the trial begins he is obviously distressed that he cannot persuade
the accused to take a plea bargain and avoid a court trial altogether. In fact, conflict
avoidance seems to be the hallmark of his professional and personal life, and in the
course of this drama we watch as Kaffee acquires both a backbone and a deeper sense
of commitment to the law than one would have thought possible. Although in the
end, he cannot prevent the court from drumming his clients out of the Corps with dis-
honorable discharges, Kaffee at least has the satisfaction of having brought down the
truly guilty parties—Colonel Jessup and his equally surly subordinate, Captain

172
 Few Good Men, A

Jonathan Kendrick (played by Kiefer Sutherland)—and having restored some measure

of accountability to the chain of command.
Complicating Kaffee’s story of personal growth and self-redemption is the presence
of two supporting characters whose influence on him is decisive and transformative:
Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway (played by Demi Moore) and Lieutenant
Colonel Matthew Markinson (played by J. T. Walsh). Galloway’s presence on Kaffee’s
prosecutorial team is Sorkin’s and Reiner’s rather conspicuous gesture toward the issue
of gender politics, as her superior rank is not sufficient to entitle her to serve as first
counsel. It’s a man’s navy, she is repeatedly told, and as a woman she can expect only
to play a subordinate role in the legal process. Ironically, she is the one who stiffens
Kaffee’s spine and finally convinces him to pursue Jessup in the interests of justice.
Shrewdly, Reiner refused to turn her into Kaffee’s love interest (which would surely
have trivialized her role), though the casting of Moore would almost seem to invite that
plot development.
As for J. T. Walsh’s Commander Markinson, his principal function is to serve as a
foil to both Jessup and Kaffee. As Jessup’s second-in-command, he feels both guilt
and remorse for Santiago’s death—emotions that Jessup is too arrogant to feel—along
with an unforgiving sense of having dishonored the Corps by having become complicit
in a lie; his suicide ultimately becomes a poignant gesture of contrition in a culture that
scarcely allows for such gestures. By pointing Kaffee in the direction of a key piece of
evidence, he all but insures the conviction of his commanding officer and reminds an
otherwise cynical Kaffee that there are things worth living and dying for that have
nothing to do with one’s self-image or career.
In filming A Few Good Men, Reiner faced the same challenges that any director faces
when adapting a theatrical work to the screen: how to remain reasonably faithful to the
dramatic text without creating something unbearably static, i.e., a form of “canned”
theatre. In this film, that means moving beyond the proscenium arch, occasionally tak-
ing his camera outdoors, while at the same time shooting the courtroom scenes from a
variety of angles, employing mainly middle or close-up shots, thereby creating feelings
of spatial and emotional intimacy. This technique is particularly evident when Colonel
Jessup is on the stand and Kaffee is doing everything he can to provoke him into a self-
condemning rage. The sparring match that ensues between Jack Nicholson and Tom
Cruise provides exactly the kind of psychological suspense these scenes demand. And
when, in these climactic scenes, the narrative arc and the arc of character development
converge, Reiner achieves that perfect fusion of storytelling and emotional truth-telling
to which all psychological dramas aspire.
See also: Nicholson, Jack; War Film, The

References
Ebert, Roger. “A Few Good Men.” Chicago Sun-Times, December 11, 1992. Available at
www.rogerebert.com.
Sorkin, Aaron. A Few Good Men. New York: Samuel French, 2010.
—Robert Platzner

173
Fiddler on the Roof

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. Based on the Broadway musical of the same name, the
film version of Fiddler on the Roof achieved as much success as its stage counterpart.
The musical opened in 1964 and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. It
swept the 1965 Tony Awards, winning for best musical, actor, supporting actress, pro-
duction, costume design, librettist, composer, and lyricist, and Jerome Robbins won
for best director and choreographer. The inspiration came from stories by
nineteenth-century writer, Sholom Aleichem, from which Joseph Stein adapted a play,
originally released under the title Tevye and His Daughters. Fiddler on the Roof is an
amalgamation of several of Aleichem’s stories, which helped to develop a style of Jewish
“shtick,” Yiddish for comic stage routines, in America that had been incorporated into
American theater long before the opening night of Fiddler on the Roof (Knapp, 2005).
The musical marked the end of what is considered America’s “Golden Age of Broad-
way” (Patinkin, 2008).
Like the stage production, the film tells the story of Russian Jews in the small town of
Anatevka. Set in 1905, the story centers on Tevye (Topol) and his family. As a milkman
with no dowry to offer his daughters, Tevye finds himself pressured into finding suitable
husbands for his three eldest, Tzeitle (Rosalind Harris), Hodel (Michelle Marsh), and
Chava (Neva Small), and constantly argues with his wife, Golde (Norma Crane), about
their suitors. The story illustrates a clash between traditional Jewish customs and more
modern ideas in a changing world. For example, even though Tevye promises Tzeitle to
the butcher Lazar Wolf (Paul Mann), he allows Tzeitle to marry Motel (Leonard Frey),
the young tailor, with whom she is in love. He must then convince Golde of the match
and devises a dream where Grandma Tzeitle (Patience Collier) insists that Tzeitle and
Motel were matched in heaven, and where Lazar Wolf ’s deceased wife, Fruma Sarah
(Ruth Madoc), curses the marriage if it takes place. Hodel also marries for love; however,
instead of asking Tevye’s permission to marry Hodel, Perchik (Paul Michael Glaser), the
progressive university student and revolutionary hired to teach Tevye’s two younger
daughters, only asks for Tevye’s blessing. One tradition, though, that Tevye cannot allow
his family to break, regardless of a changing world, is that of a marriage outside the Jewish
faith. He disowns his third daughter, Chava, after she elopes with Fyedke (Raymond
Lovelock), a Christian. In the end, the anti-Semitic Czar cleanses Russia of all Jews, forc-
ing Tevye and his family to leave for America. The film incorporates themes of change,
including marrying for love instead of money; feminism; and intermarriage between dif-
ferent faiths and races. The filmic examination of these themes not only foreshadowed
the breaks with tradition that the family will face in their new home, but also spoke to
contemporary 1970s American audiences who were dealing with the sea changes occur-
ring in the United States in the wake of the civil rights and feminist movements of the
1960s (Knapp, 2005).
Released in 1971, the film incorporates all of the stage musical’s original songs:
“Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “To Life,” “Sunrise, Sunset,”
and of course, “Tevye’s Dream.” Even though Robbins choreographed the film version
of West Side Story, the Mirisch Brothers believed that he lacked the ability to adapt to
the tempo and style required in filmmaking (Jowitt 2004). Thus, the Mirisch Brothers
had Tom Abbott adapt Robbins’s choreography for the film and hired Norman

174
 Finding Nemo

Jewison to direct. Because of the

difficulty caused by actor Zero
Mostel’s constant improvisation
in the Broadway production, the
Mirisch Brothers decided to cast
the Israeli actor, Topol, who
played Tevye to great acclaim in
the London production ( Jowitt,
2004; Patinkin, 2008). The film
was nominated for eight Oscars,
including Best Film, Best Direc-
tor, Best Actor, and Best Support-
ing Actor; and won three, for Best
Cinematography, Best Sound,
and Best Music, Scoring Adapta-
tion, and Original Song Score.
See also: Music in Film; Musi-
cal, The

References
Jowitt, Deborah. Jerome Robbins: His
Life, His Theater, His Dance. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
Knapp, Raymond. The American
Musical and the Formation of
National Identity. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005.
Patinkin, Sheldon. “No Legs, No Joke, Poster for the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof, directed by
No Chance”: A History of the Norman Jewison. (Photofest)
American Musical Theater. Evans-
ton, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008. 372–75.
Suskin, Steven. Opening Night on Broadway: A Critical Quotebook of the Golden Era of Musical
Theatre, Oklahoma! to Fiddler on the Roof. New York: Schirmer Books, 1990.
—Jennifer K. Morrison

FINDING NEMO. Following the success of Toy Story (1995), Disney invested more
time and money into computer animation, building its relationship with Pixar Stu-
dios. Since that time, Disney-Pixar has produced a number of memorable films,
including A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters Inc. (2001), and The Incredibles (2004). While
all have enjoyed critical and commercial success, perhaps Disney-Pixar’s most recogniz-
able film is Finding Nemo (2003). Despite Disney president Michael Eisner’s

175
Finding Nemo

skepticism about the project during production, Finding Nemo won the 2004 Acad-
emy Award for Best Animated Feature.
The story follows a clown fish named Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks), an overpro-
tective father who, as a result of losing his wife and most of his unborn children to a
shark, is generally scared of his surroundings. The only surviving child, Nemo (voiced
by Alexander Gould), is all he has left, and he vows never to let any harm come to his
son. Frustrated and embarrassed by his father’s overprotective actions on his first day of
school, Nemo swims out beyond the boundaries of the coral reef and is captured by a
diver. Marlin unsuccessfully tries to chase down the diver’s boat, which speeds away
with his son. Distraught, Marlin eventually meets Dory (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres),
who, despite suffering from the frustrating yet endearing disability of short-term
memory loss, agrees to help Marlin find Nemo. Luckily, one of the things that Dory
does remember is a Sydney, Australia, address that she happened to read off of a pair
of goggles. As it turns out, it is to this address that Nemo has been taken.
During their perilous journey to Sydney to rescue Nemo, Marlin slowly begins to
realize that his overprotective parenting may actually be harming his son, preventing
Nemo from experiencing all that life has to offer. “You never really know,” the wise
old sea turtle Crush (voiced by Andrew Stanton) tells Marlin about children becoming
their own people, “but when they know, you’ll know.” Marlin vows to change his ways
should he ever find his son.
Meanwhile, Nemo is living in a dentist’s fish tank in Sydney. There he meets Gill
(voiced by Willem Dafoe), another ocean fish who is obsessed with escaping from his
watery prison. During his time in the tank, Nemo gains the confidence he lacked as
a result of his father’s overprotective ways, eventually becoming the focal point of Gill’s
escape plan. The stakes are raised as Nemo is set to become a birthday gift for the den-
tist’s niece, Darla (voiced by LuLu Ebeling), who is notorious for (unintentionally)
killing fish. While the escape does not go as planned, Nemo manages to free himself
by following Gill’s advice: remember, “all drains lead to the ocean, kid.”
After reuniting with his son, Marlin’s resolution to allow him to be more indepen-
dent is quickly tested when, to his father’s horror, Nemo swims into a fishing net in
order to save Dory. Using skills he learned from Gill, Nemo is able to save Dory and
to emerge from the incident unhurt. Both father and son, it is clear, are changed by
the harrowing experience. The film ends back at the reef where Nemo is successful at
school, Marlin is proud of his son and relaxed with the other parents, and Dory is a
member of the Friendly Sharks Club. Things even work out for the fish back at the
dentist office, as they, too, eventually escape to the harbor.
A classic coming-of-age film, Nemo presents viewers with a nontraditional story: a
single father and his son, both of whom must negotiate the complexities of the
parent-child relationship. Unable to understand his father’s abiding love for him, or
his hopes and dreams, and especially his fears—do our parents really struggle with
their own fragilities?—Nemo resents Marlin’s overprotective ways; while for his part,
Marlin, blinded by the tragic loss of nearly all of his family, cannot understand his son’s
need to make his own way in the world. Once they are both cast onto the path of their
Joseph Campbell-like “hero’s journey,” however, both come to understand the other.

176
 Flags of Our Fathers

While critics of the film argued that the narrative flow of the picture reinforced the idea
that the status quo should be conserved at all costs—after all, as soon as Nemo leaves
the safety and security of the reef, disaster strikes—it may be argued that just the oppo-
site is true: although life can, indeed, be frightening outside the protective barriers set
in place by our families and communities, it is only by venturing beyond these borders,
by exploring the diversity of the world in which we live, that it becomes possible for us
to grow as individuals. A valuable lesson, it seems, for our children—and for us—to
learn.
See also: Animation; Coming-of-Age Film, The

References
Budd, Mike, and Max H. Kirsch, eds. Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
Stewart, James B. DisneyWar. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005.

—Sean Graham

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers is a filmic

companion piece to his Letters from Iwo Jima. Released in 2006, these two films re-
present Eastwood’s attempt to reimagine the traditional World War II combat picture.
Unique in that they explore the experiences of members of both the American and
Japanese military, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima present audiences with
a very different look at the horrors of war.
By the time he made Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood had already won a Best Direc-
tor Oscar for his 1992 revisionist western, Unforgiven. In that film, Eastwood had pre-
sented audiences with a new type of western, one that sought to deconstruct the myth
of the West and the western hero. Seeking to do something similar in Flags of Our
Fathers, Eastwood created a combat picture in which he attempted to trope the myth
of the American war hero. Unlike Unforgiven, which relates the story of a fictitious
gunslinger who has outlived his usefulness, Flags of Our Fathers explores the real-life
drama that surrounded the publication of Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of the
American flag being raised on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima.
The Battle of Iwo Jima lasted for 35 bloody days, stretching from February 19 to
March 26, 1945. The invasion and conquest of Iwo Jima was considered an essential
component of the U.S. strategy of “island-hopping” across the Pacific toward the
Japanese mainland. Taking Iwo Jima, with its airfields, reasoned U.S. military
commanders, would allow B-52 bombing missions on the Japanese mainland to be
carried out more effectively; it would also limit further kamikaze missions against
American battleships from being carried out by Japanese pilots.
Taking the island proved extraordinarily difficult, as the Japanese commander, Lieu-
tenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had ordered his soldiers to construct a series of
heavily fortified underground bunkers connected by miles of interconnected tunnels.
After 74 days of unrelenting bombing of the island—which proved to have little effect

177
Flags of Our Fathers

Scene from the 2006 film Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood. (Photofest)

on the Japanese positions—American Marines launched a massive assault along the

Iwo Jima beaches. The first Marines who went ashore were met with an eerie silence,
as Kuribayashi had ordered his men to withhold their fire until the American troops
had moved well inland. American forces eventually faced withering machine-gun fire,
which cut their battle lines to pieces. In the end, although they were successful in tak-
ing the island from the Japanese, over 6,000 Americans died on Iwo Jima, with U.S.
casualties numbering over 23,000—more than during the D-Day invasion at Nor-
mandy. Of the more than 22,000 Japanese soldiers who were defending the island
when the Americans landed, a mere 212 were taken prisoner; the rest either died or
were declared missing.
Five days into the fighting, on February 23, 1945, orders were given that an American
flag be raised on Mount Suribachi. Photos were taken of this initial flag raising by Louis
R. Lowery. As fate would have it, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal arrived on the
beach below Suribachi shortly after the flag was raised. Impassioned as he stood watching
the flag blowing in the wind—the first American flag planted in Japan—he demanded
it for himself. Believing that the flag belonged to the men of the Marine 2nd Battalion,
who had captured this section of the island, Colonel Chandler Johnson ordered Sergeant
Mike Strank to raise a replacement flag on the mountain. Strank, of course, followed
orders, and along with Ira Hayes, Franklin Sousley, John Bradley, Rene Gagnon,

178
 Flags of Our Fathers

and Harlon Block, he lifted a substitute flag into place later that day. It was this second,
largely unremarkable act of flag raising that was captured in Rosenthal’s famous
photograph.
War-weary Americans cheered the photo when it appeared on the front pages of
almost every newspaper in the United States. The myth that surrounded the image,
the release of which helped to convince the American people that the heroic struggle
must go on, had begun to be spun almost immediately after the photo was devel-
oped—the six men in the picture had risked their lives to raise the flag after they and
their combat brothers had fought their way to the top of Mount Suribachi. In reality,
although the Marines who reached the top of Suribachi that day had encountered spo-
radic fire from a few Japanese soldiers, their ascent of the mountain had been relatively
uneventful.
Tragically, Strank, Sousley, and Block died on Iwo Jima; Hayes, Gagnon, and
Bradley—whose son wrote the book from which Eastwood adapted the film—made
it off the island alive, however, and were shipped back to the United States before their
tours of duty ended. Heralded as conquering heroes, the three were enlisted by
President Franklin Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau,
to help sell American war bonds. Just before he died, Roosevelt had Morgenthau
arrange what came to be known as the 7th War Bond Tour. After Roosevelt’s death
in April 1945, members of the Truman administration—including the President him-
self—pressured Hayes, Bradley, and Gagnon into travelling the country in order to
raise money for the war effort. Along the way, as it turned out, they also ended up sell-
ing the myth of the flag raising.
Eastwood does an admirable job portraying the unsettling experiences suffered by
Hayes (Adam Beach), Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), and Gagnon ( Jesse Bradford), who
are hustled from venue to venue by a fast-talking member of the Treasury Department,
Bud Gerber (John Slattery). None of the three sees himself as particularly heroic—
indeed, all go to great pains to point out, repeatedly, that it was the men who died
on Iwo Jima who were the real heroes, their self-effacing attitudes, ironically, making
them seem all the more heroic. Perhaps Hayes is the most tragic of the three figures.
An American Indian, his victory tour is marked by his having to endure disturbing
remarks about his ethnic heritage and descents into discomforting bouts of drunken-
ness—at one point Bradley must even rescue him from being taken to jail after he is
refused service in a bar and causes a ruckus. In the end, Hayes, who in real life became
an embarrassment to the military, is shipped back to the Pacific, where he remains
during the last few months of the war. After the war, he was forced into menial jobs,
supplementing his income by posing for people eager to have their picture taken
with a real live war hero; wandering the country, he is eventually found dead from
“exposure.”
Rene Gagnon, the handsome, poster-boy figure of the group seems to enjoy all of
the adulation—including offers from starstruck businessmen—but he ultimately
becomes “yesterday’s hero.” Although the real-life Gagnon attempted to turn his celeb-
rity into a movie career (he appeared in a government-funded documentary, To the
Shores of Iwo Jima, and briefly in John Wayne’s 1949 film Sands of Iwo Jima), he ended

179
400 Blows, The

up marrying his cloying girlfriend, who turned into a media darling during the tour,
and living out his life bitterly drifting from job to job until his all-too-early death at
the age of 54. For his part, Bradley, the only one who actually seemed to understand
just how disturbing the whole mythic situation really was, remained haunted for the
rest of his life by the loss of a combat buddy who was tortured and killed by the
Japanese on Iwo Jima. On his deathbed, he tells his son a story about the American
soldiers being allowed to swim in the ocean surrounding the island: “After we planted
the flag,” says Bradley, “we came down off the mountain and they let us swim. It was
the funniest thing . . . all this fighting, and we were jumping around in the water like
kids.” An absurd scene, Bradley seems to be saying, revealing both the futility of war
and also the horrible consequences of mythmaking.
See also: Eastwood, Clint; Letters from Iwo Jima; War Film, The

References
Bradley, James, with Ron Powers. Flags of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam, 2000.
Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Suid, Lawrence. Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

—Claire Puccia Parham

400 BLOWS, THE. The first feature-length film by 27-year-old François Truffaut,
The 400 Blows (Les Quatres-cents coups) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to
immediate acclaim in 1959, the so-called annus mirabilis of the French New Wave.
Twenty-four French directors made their initial features that year (followed by 43
others in 1960)—a tidal wave of fresh filmmaking talent who stormed the French film
industry, and whose influence shortly thereafter washed over the shores of America.
Truffaut’s film almost immediately became the international emblem of French
New Wave aesthetics. It embodied the principles of “Camera Stylo” (theorist Andre
Astruc’s notion that the camera should be as fluid an instrument of self-expression
for a film director as a pen is for a writer); it was shot on the streets of Paris and sur-
rounding environs in an improvisatory fashion (Truffaut used handheld cameras and
natural lighting); and it communicated emotion to the audience not by means of
sculpted dramatic dialogue but through scenes that recorded ordinary, daily situations.
What The 400 Blows lacked in “traditional” polish it gained in immediacy: it seemed to
herald a cinema of feeling and thought, made without studio contrivance—a cinema,
in short, that could capture an artist’s particular sensibility.
In Truffaut’s case the sensibility was delicately lyrical. While The 400 Blows is about
a child edging toward delinquency and institutionalization (the film grew out of Truf-
faut’s own troubled youth; the title is taken from a vernacular phrase meaning “to raise
hell”), its impact lies not in any shocking exposé of child abuse or criminality, but in
Truffaut’s ability to make small moments seem representative of the universal

180
 400 Blows, The

experience of childhood loneliness and pain. Even though Truffaut’s autobiographical

protagonist suffers through the neglect of his parents and the obdurate policies of the
French educational and juvenile justice systems, The 400 Blows isn’t a thesis film trying
to make a social point. Rather, Truffaut wants us to experience Antoine Doinel’s feel-
ings: the embarrassment of being caught clowning; the joy of playing hooky; the isola-
tion of hearing parents argue; the sting of the public slap in the face. Antoine’s
emotions are conveyed, paradoxically enough, through the documentary quality of
the black-and-white CinemaScope cinematography, which suffuses the film with a ten-
der, subjective intimacy: For instance, the streets of Paris shine with life and possibility
during Antoine’s night out with his parents; later, when he is turned over to the police
for theft, those same streets, seen from the back of a police van transporting him to
detention, seem to shimmer through eyes of tears.
Truffaut’s main actor, 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, became associated not only
with the character of Antoine Doinel (he played Doinel again in Truffaut’s three
feature-length films that completed the character’s saga, Stolen Kisses [1968], Bed and
Board [1973], and Love on the Run [1979]), but with Truffaut himself, serving as a
kind of cinematic alter ego of the director. Léaud’s often whimsical, romantic, and
softly ironic screen persona, developed over a 20-year career, seems in retrospect oddly
dissimilar to the unsettling impression with which he leaves audiences at the end of
The 400 Blows. Having escaped from a work farm, Antoine Doinel is followed in a
long tracking shot as he jogs to the sea. With nowhere left to run, he turns to the cam-
era as Truffaut moves to a close-up and then freezes the frame. Doinel himself seems to
challenge us to ponder his fate.
This startling final shot of The 400 Blows embodies at once the vibrant humanism
and conscious self-reflexivity of the New Wave sensibility that rejected studio para-
digms of closed or happy endings while allowing for obvious manipulations of cin-
ematic techniques in otherwise realistic narratives. Such effects would be borrowed
and extended throughout the New American Cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, most nota-
bly in the seminal Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which the producers originally hoped to be
directed by Truffaut. Truffaut said no, but the impact of his film was clear: he had
shown the world that film artists could shoot on location, work quickly, and eschew
not only in theory but in practice the creaky storytelling and moribund production val-
ues of studio films in order to champion a cinema of spontaneity and personal vision.
See also: Auteur Theory; French New Wave; Truffaut, François

References
Cook, David. A History of Narrative Film, 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
1990.
De Baecque, Antoine, and Serge Toubiana. Truffaut: A Biography. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000.
Kauffmann, Stanley. A World on Film. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
—Robert Cowgill

181
Frankenstein

FRANKENSTEIN.
The 1931 film Franken-
stein was the second of
Universal Studios’ fam-
ous “Monster” films. It
followed the release of
the 1930 picture Dracula,
starring Bela Lugosi. The
former film was based on
the classic 1818 Gothic
novel, Frankenstein, Or
the Modern Prometheus,
written by 19-year-old
Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley, the young girl-
friend—and eventually
wife—of the poet Percy
Bysshe Shelley and
daughter of early feminist
Mary Wollstonecraft.
Legend has it that the
original story, portraying
a scientist who attempts
to discover the secret of
life by fashioning a crea- British actor Boris Karloff poses as the Monster in a promo-
ture from pieces of cadav- tional portrait for director James Whale’s film Frankenstein.
ers, was the result of a (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
contest between the
Shelleys and their friend
the poet Lord Byron to determine who could produce the most horrifying tale. The young
Mary won.
Frankenstein was the second big-screen adaptation of the Shelley story. The first was
written and directed by J. Searle Dawley and produced by Thomas Edison’s Edison
Studios. The Dawley film, not unexpectedly, was a shorter, silent version, lacking the
depth of writing, acting, and “special effects” that would make its successor so legen-
dary. Produced by Carl Laemmle Jr., with a script co-written by Francis Faragoh and
Garrett Fort, with assistance from Robert Florey and John Russell, the Universal
project was directed by James Whale. In perhaps his greatest screen triumph, Boris
Karloff, aided by the makeup artistry of Jack Pierce, gave an immortal performance
as “the Creature.” The film’s title character—frequently thought to be the creature
himself—was played by Colin Clive, whose performance as the mad Dr. Henry
Frankenstein has become nearly as immortal as Karloff ’s. The cast also included
Edward Van Sloan, who followed his success playing the legendary Van Helsing in
Dracula with another great performance in Frankenstein.

182
 French Connection, The

The filmmakers took a great deal of dramatic license in adapting Shelley’s master-
piece. Looking much more like the nineteenth century stage plays that had preceded
it, the story begins in medias res, with the mad doctor already having begun his collec-
tion of cadavers. His assistant, Fritz—a creation of the stage plays, not having appeared
in the original novel—breaks into the local university, stealing a brain for his employer.
Unfortunately, after accidentally destroying the “brilliant” brain he was sent to pro-
cure, Fritz steals instead an “abnormal” brain, which, when inserted into the creature,
gives rise to his violent nature and lack of intelligence. After the creature kills Fritz,
who has taken great delight in torturing the monster, Henry Frankenstein decides that
his creation is a lost cause, and leaves to go back to his family villa to prepare for his
pending marriage to his fiancée, Elizabeth, played by Mae Clark. When the creature
escapes and disrupts the ceremony, Henry leads the local citizenry on a hunt for the
monster. Finding him, Henry falls victim to the creature, who knocks him unconscious
and takes him to a local windmill. As the angry mob sets fire to the windmill, the crea-
ture throws Henry from the top of the structure, apparently killing him. (Fans learned
in the sequel that Dr. Frankenstein actually survived his fall.) As the picture ends, the
creature appears to die within the burning structure.
Frankenstein cemented Universal’s monster movie franchise. Soon, the creature out-
shone Dracula as “king of the monsters.” Depression-era Americans could relate to the
poor creature, confused about where he has come from or where he should go, and
uncertain as to whom he could trust. This story resonated with pre-New Dealers. By
the time of World War II, however, the creature had gone from a sympathetic character
to a marauding monster, the stuff of nightmares. This, too, was important to his time,
as Americans with family members fighting overseas needed fictional nightmares to
distract them from what they were seeing on newsreels.
Today, images from Whale’s film remain elemental within American culture.
Though depictions of Frankenstein’s monstrous offspring had existed for more than a
century before the picture was made, the idea of the creature that Karloff brought to
life on the big screen clearly remains the most popular today. Producers of numerous
films, television series, cartoons, commercials, and Halloween costumes have imitated
the film version of the monster, making the figure iconic not only in America but
worldwide. In the hearts and minds of millions, the monster lives!

References
Curtis, James. James Whale. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982.
The Frankenstein Files: How Hollywood Created a Monster. Frankenstein: The Legacy Collection.
Universal DVD, 2004.
—Richard A. Hall

FRENCH CONNECTION, THE. The French Connection (1971) offers a con-

servative response to the 1960s, as the law and order of the first Nixon administration
was brought to film. Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman), the film’s unsympathetic

183
French Connection, The

Actor Gene Hackman (wearing hat) takes notes at a bar in a still from the film The French Connection,
directed by William Friedkin, 1971. (Twentieth Century-Fox/Courtesy of Getty Images)

and mostly despicable antihero who makes his own rules—we never see him reading a
suspect his Miranda rights, for instance—has no hard evidence of a crime and little to
confirm the conspiracy he imagines. His intuition alone sets up the story, and the viewer
is forced to accede to Doyle’s gut feelings and therefore becomes implicated in the mess
that follows.
William Friedkin directed this wildly popular and critically acclaimed adaptation
of Robin Moore’s screenplay based on the book of the same name, which recounted
the adventures of New York City narcotics policemen Eddie Egan and Sonny
Grosso. In the film, Doyle and his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) follow a
hunch and unravel a heroin deal with French origins. Doyle pursues his suspects
with little respect for the law and with an unflagging, often destructive, desire to
punish them. The rough and gritty feel of the film is accentuated by shooting on
location and long handheld camera shots of the bitter cold, New York winter. The
weeks Friedkin, Hackman, and Scheider spent following Egan and Grosso, not only
witnessing drug busts but participating in them as well, further heightens this sense
of realism. Along with its popular success, The French Connection won Academy
Awards for Best Picture (the first R-rated film to win this award), Best Director, Best

184
 French Connection, The

Actor (Gene Hackman), Best Editing (Jerry Greenberg), and Best Adapted Screen-
play (Ernest Tidyman). The film also received nominations for Best Supporting
Actor (Roy Scheider), Best Cinematography (Owen Roizman), and Best Sound.
And if there were an award for best chase scene that year, it would have won for that
as well.
The story follows Doyle and Russo as they stumble onto a plot to bring heroin into
New York via a French connection. While unwinding at a nightclub after an under-
cover arrest, the two begin watching patrons with suspected mob ties. They decide to
follow one of these men home and discover that he lives beyond his means. Supposing
a link to illegal drug activity, Doyle and Russo bust a bar in their neighborhood to find
that nobody possesses any drugs of substance. While interrogating a man who turns
out to be an informant, Doyle learns that a shipment of heroin is expected soon. His
gut tells him his mob connected nightclub patrons must be the source, and he and
Russo begin a long and difficult stakeout with FBI assistance.
French heroin smuggler Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) detects he is being followed
through the streets of New York and dispatches his assistant to kill Doyle. Surviving the
attempt, Doyle chases his assailant in what would become one of the most famous car
chases in movie history and shoots him. In the meantime, police find an imported car
they suspect contains drugs. While initial searches turn up nothing, Doyle and Russo
tear the car to pieces to find the heroin stashed in the car’s rocker panels. They replace
the drugs, repair the car, and give it back to its owner. The planed drug deal transpires,
but with police surveillance, and as Charnier drives away, police attempt to intercept
him, and he flees. In Doyle’s obsession to catch the Frenchman, he accidentally shoots
and kills the federal agent helping with the case. It seemed Charnier was trapped, but
ultimately, he escapes. Most of those caught serve no or very little time in prison. This
unsatisfying ending only adds to the film’s discomforting sense that criminals in even
Nixon’s law-and-order America get off too lightly.
In the end, Doyle and the viewers are left feeling frustrated as the violence and
Doyle’s doggedness lead to few important arrests. The film fits well in the late Vietnam
War period as it blurs the line between criminality and righteousness. Doyle, as the
antihero, is flawed. He breaks the law to uphold the law. Subsequently, he and the
viewers are left very unsatisfied. The less critically acclaimed sequel, however, brings
us right back to the action.
See also: Friedkin, William; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The

References
Friedkin, William. “Anatomy of a Chase,” DGA Quarterly 2(3), Fall 2006. http://www.dga.org/
news/dgaq_1006/feat_frenchconnection-1006.php3.
Mintz, Steven, and Randy Roberts, eds. Hollywood’s America: United States History through Its
Films, rev. ed. St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1993.

—Chad H. Parker

185
Friday the 13th

FRIDAY THE 13TH. Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980) inaugurates
perhaps the most enduring of horror franchises, where variation is conceived of more
as a hindrance than a virtue. In terms of sheer volume, no horror series has shown
the durability of this one, which presently includes 11 sequels, or reimaginings. It
may be, however, that these successive features have diluted the distinctive elements
of Cunningham’s original film, allowing his vision to become merely formulaic. Fash-
ioned by Cunningham to capitalize on the extraordinary success of John Carpenter’s
Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th brought innovative complexities to the horror film
genre. In crafting a film scenario in which the antagonist, Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy
Palmer), is revealed to be a middle-aged mother who mercilessly strikes down teenagers
who continually violate the strict social and sexual mores at Camp Crystal Lake, Cun-
ningham offers us a cautionary tale that succeeds in warning against sexual impropriety
even as it fetishizes violent transgression.
While Cunningham recycles much of the killer’s subjective, and inherently voyeur-
istic, point-of-view camera compositions that epitomized Halloween, here gender
ambiguity is a vital new detail. Because Cunningham avoids revealing anything about
the psychotic killer beyond the fact that the figure is dressed in men’s gloves and boots,
audiences assume that the slayer is a man. Playing on this, Cunningham skillfully
directs our attention toward any number of socially awkward male townies who appear
in the film’s first few scenes. Whereas Halloween’s twist locks the viewer into the pre-
supposition of a maniacal adult killer in the film’s opening, only to reveal rather too
quickly that Michael Myers is a bewildered child, Cunningham sustains the eerie inde-
terminacy of the killer’s age, social status, and gender deep into his film. The use of this
cinematic process of abstraction allows the film to linger over the ambiguous nature of
evil until ’sits climactic last act. Only then does he reveal that the killer is actually
Mrs. Voorhees and that she is possessed of her own twisted logic: because she cannot
forgive a group of wayward teens who, fixated on their own, highly inappropriate sex-
ual activities, allowed her son, Jason, to drown in the waters of Camp Crystal Lake dec-
ades before, she is seeking to prevent further losses, even if only in her own mind, by
slaughtering the newly arrived teens who are attempting to reopen the camp.
Significantly, the film, and the series as a whole, provides audiences with images of
teenagers escaping from the confines of parental authority, smoking marijuana, and
engaging in promiscuous sex. Even Alice (Adrienne King), the protagonist of Friday
the 13th, serves as a counterpoint to the “Final Girl” archetype of horror films: while
most of the young female protagonists who appear in these films tend to be tomboy-
ish and reject the sexual activities engaged in by their friends, Alice is not only sexy
but sexual. Yet, while the film seems to imply that teenage sexual relationships are to
be condoned, even valorized, because they represent adolescent moments of antiau-
thoritarian rebellion, in the Friday the 13th series, the teenagers who commit these
sins of the flesh are systematically hunted down and disposed of in ritualistic fashion.
It may be argued, then, that Friday the 13th exhibits a certain sense of antisexual
Puritanism.
Oddly, while sexuality is punished in Friday the 13th, violence is glorified. Indeed,
Cunningham seems to revel in creating violent moments that are infused with a certain

186
 Front, The

fetishistic glee. Even Alice gets into the act, as after her friends are massacred, she
decapitates Mrs. Voorhees with her own machete. After fleeing the scene in a rowboat,
audiences are provided with a final scare when Alice is apparently attacked by Mrs.
Voorhees’s drowned man-child Jason, who surfaces from his watery grave in Crystal
Lake in order to drag our protagonist to her death. When she is revived, doctors assure
Alice that no such villain exists. Though Cunningham has admitted that this scene was
merely an afterthought, added to provide viewers one last moment of fright, it has
become the linchpin for the subsequent series entries.
Unfortunately, other directors who have helmed certain of the Friday the 13th
sequels have refashioned Cunningham’s original vision in a disturbingly uninspired
way. The films in the series, it seems, have become nothing more than rote narratives
about teenage sex and slaughter.
See also: Slasher Films

References
Bracke, Peter. Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th. London: Titan
Books, 2006.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Magistrale, Tony. Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film. New York:
Peter Lang, 2005.

—Paul D. Petrovic

FRONT, THE. The Front, released in 1976, was the first major motion picture to
address directly the topic of the entertainment industry blacklist. Starring Woody
Allen and directed by Martin Ritt, the film was a pointed critique of the anticommun-
ist hysteria that affected film and television workers from the late 1940s through the
early 1960s. Its release represented a “thaw” of the cultural Cold War, and it helped ini-
tiate a dialogue regarding the blacklist that continues today.
The Front was conceived by Ritt and screenwriter Walter Bernstein, both of whom had
been barred from working in the entertainment industry in the 1950s. Other notable
members of the film’s cast and crew had been blacklisted also, including actor Zero Mostel,
who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an unfriendly wit-
ness. Mostel’s character in the film, Hecky Brown, experiences an embarrassing episode at
a nightclub in the Catskills in which the club pays Brown only a small percentage of his
traditional fee, because the club manager knows that Hecky cannot find work. The episode
was drawn directly from Mostel’s own experience as a blacklisted actor.
But most of the film’s plot devices derive directly from the real-life experiences of
Walter Bernstein. Desperate for work in the 1950s, he began writing under fake
names, but Hollywood studios and television networks quickly caught on to this prac-
tice. He devised the “front” system, under which blacklisted writers employed other
writers to put their names on the scripts. In The Front, Woody Allen’s character,

187
Front, The

Howard Prince, serves as the front for his friend who has been named as a communist
sympathizer.
The Front straddles a line between drama and comedy, and between biopic and fic-
tion. The film begins with a montage of newsreels that show Senator Joseph McCarthy,
Marilyn Monroe, the Rosenbergs, and soldiers in the Korean War, in order to establish
the historical basis of the story. But although Bernstein’s script is peppered with details
from his own experiences, such as a depiction of how blacklistees and their fronts dis-
cussed how to report income on their tax forms, the narrative’s emphasis on Woody
Allen’s character lends the film a satirical edge.
Howard Prince is naive, selfish, and uninterested in the politics of the early Cold
War era. Working as a front is a way for Prince to earn money to pay off his gambling
debts, and to impress women with his sudden apparent talent for writing television
scripts. The film thus follows Prince’s development of a social conscience, until he
finally takes a principled stand against the McCarthyist witch hunt at the conclusion
of the film.
Bernstein’s Oscar-nominated screenplay deftly weaves together the film’s separate
threads. Hecky Brown becomes increasingly pressured to name names or to forfeit
his career. As Prince’s star rises, he becomes further entangled in the dangerous world
of the Red Scare, and he develops a close relationship with Brown. We also get
glimpses inside the workings of the Freedom Information Service, a business that
maintains the blacklist in New York City, and which is modeled after the real-life
organization American Business Consultants. But another subplot, in which Prince
woos a television story editor who is under the assumption that Prince is a gifted writer,
suggests that the film may be considered more of a Woody Allen comedy than a com-
mentary on McCarthyist America. Although it brought the film an audience, Ritt
would later express regret over the casting of Allen.
The release of The Front roughly coincided with that of a biography of blacklisted
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, as well as a documentary called Hollywood on Trial,
and helped to foment a public dialogue about the blacklist that had not existed prior
to the mid-’70s. But Ritt said that he would have liked to make another movie about
the entertainment industry blacklist, a movie that was more dramatic and less comedic.
However, the reescalation of the Cold War in the late 1970s and ’80s made the climate
in Hollywood less hospitable to such a film. It would not be until 1991’s Guilty by Sus-
picion, which was directed by Irwin Winkler and starred Robert De Niro, that a major
film would again tackle the entertainment industry blacklist.
See also: Hollywood Blacklist, The; HUAC Hearings

References
Bernstein, Walter. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner. Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Tele-
vision, 1950–2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Fox, Julian. Woody: Movies from Manhattan. London: BT Batsford, 1996.
—Andrew Paul

188
 Full Metal Jacket

FULL METAL JACKET. Full Metal Jacket (1987) is the last of a trio of antiwar
films that Stanley Kubrick partially wrote and directed, and in many ways it is the most
complete and complex statement of Kubrick’s vision of war. Based on a 1979 novel by
Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers, Kubrick’s film attempts to capture Hasford’s sense
of the comic absurdity and brutality of modern warfare, while providing a largely
satirical view of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Like Paths of Glory (1957) and
Dr. Strangelove (1964), which preceded it, Full Metal Jacket combines naturalism and
surrealism in the service of sharp political commentary. Though frequently compared
with Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), Kubrick’s war movie maintains a greater ironic dis-
tance from both its characters and its setting than Stone’s more melodramatic account
of lost innocence.
Viewed structurally, Full Metal Jacket is really two films in one: the first part, a
composite portrait of Marine Corps basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina,
and the second, an up-close account of combat in Vietnam leading up to the North
Vietnamese attack on the city of Hue in 1968. In each of these segments, Kubrick
focuses on the thoughts and emotions—occasionally expressed through voice-over nar-
ration—of one principal character, Private James T. Davis, better known by his nom de
guerre as “Joker” (Matthew Modine). Joker’s relentless sarcasm creates an ironic dis-
tance between himself and the institutionalized madness of the warrior culture of
which he has become a part, while his ambivalence toward the Corps and toward the
war itself, neatly symbolized by the juxtaposed peace button and inscription “Born to

Scene from the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, directed by Stanley Kubrick. (Photofest)

189
Full Metal Jacket

Kill” that appear on his helmet, quickly becomes the defining perspective through
which everything and everyone is seen.
Viewed thematically, the two “acts” of this film are tied together by an ongoing
satirical meditation on the nature of modern warfare and on a belief in the “killer
instinct” that lies at the heart of every military culture. In order to turn ordinary young
men into effective soldiers, the Marine Corps has to accomplish a virtual metamorpho-
sis of the civilian personality, and appropriately the opening scene of the film shows a
group of fresh recruits getting sheared to the tune of “Good-Bye Darling, Hello
Vietnam”—the first stage in a radical transformation that entails shedding one identity
and assuming another. In the scene that follows immediately after, these same recruits
are subjected to a torrent of abuse from their drill sergeant (R. Lee Ermay) (incongru-
ously named Sergeant “Hartman”) that not only robs them of their dignity but also
deprives them of their names: from this moment on they will be known strictly by
their appointed nicknames, names like “Joker,” “Cowboy,” and “Snowball.”
At first, the opening sequence on Parris Island resembles, to a degree, similar
sequences in what are generally termed “service comedies”—movies in which the trials
and tribulations of boot camp are played mainly for laughs (Stripes, 1981, for example).
In Full Metal Jacket, however, this comedy of errors soon turns into a nightmare of per-
secution, as one particular recruit—a hapless and overweight young man of limited
intelligence and fragile emotions, nicknamed “Gomer Pyle” (Vincent D’Onofrio)—
becomes the special target of Sergeant Hartman’s ire and abuse. The horrific climax of
this first part of Kubrick’s film occurs in the barracks’ bathroom, where, having
descended into a condition of self-hatred and homicidal rage, Pyle first kills Sergeant
Hartman and then himself with full metal-jacketed bullets from his government issue
M-14, while Joker looks on in horror, helpless to do anything. Kubrick bathes this scene
in an eerie blue light, and surrounds the action with dissonant musical sounds (com-
posed by Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s daughter), suggesting that his characters are caught
up in a bad dream from which they cannot awaken. Kubrick returns to this hallucina-
tory visual/aural style near the end of the film, when, once again, Joker becomes an
unwilling participant in a mad ritual of murder and revenge.
Part two of Full Metal Jacket shifts abruptly to a sidewalk in Saigon (to the tune of
Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ”), where Joker and his photogra-
pher sidekick, “Rafterman” (Kevyn Major Howard), are set upon by a hooker and then
her pimp, who proceeds to steal Rafterman’s camera. The prostitute’s “Me So Horny”
routine quickly entered popular culture after the film’s release, and became a refrain in
comic skits with audiences who had never seen the movie; but the darker side of this
sequence becomes apparent when one considers that Kubrick’s consistent view of the
South Vietnamese population is that this war was not their war, and that they had
decided to take every opportunity to exploit and betray their would-be American “sav-
iors.” Critics of this film have found this representation of South Vietnamese attitudes
offensive and even racist, but in Kubrick’s defense, it would have been a distortion of
historical reality to have presented the average GI’s view of the war in any other light.
Clearly, Kubrick was determined not to repeat what he saw as the propagandistic
myths of John Wayne’s Green Berets (1968).

190
 Full Metal Jacket

The battle for Hue constitutes not only the climax of Full Metal Jacket’s second
“act,” but also the moment of dramatic truth for the film as a whole; and to ensure
the authenticity of his narrative, Kubrick studied photographs of the city, before and
after the siege. Having purchased what was left of the English industrial town of Bec-
ton and its gasworks, Kubrick proceeded to blow up half the remaining buildings,
and then to stage the key firefights amid the ruins. Using a combination of handheld
and tracking shots, he makes the “fog of war” as kinetically real as any cinematic image
can be, leading up to a moment of self-realization for which Joker has been uncon-
sciously preparing since boot camp. For in the ruins of an abandoned building, from
which an unseen sniper has been picking off one Marine after another, Joker finally
gets the chance to learn whether or not he can put on what Sergeant Hartman called
his “killer face”—and to adopt the “hard heart” that must go along with it if that face
is to mean anything. Now in the building and pinned down by the sniper—who turns
out to be, disturbingly on a number of levels, a teenage girl in pigtails—Joker attempts
to fire his rifle, only to have it jam; in a spasm of terror he assumes a fetal crouch,
unable to fire his pistol even to defend himself. Joker’s life is ultimately saved by
Rafterman, who, mortally wounding the sniper, fails to kill her outright. That task falls
to Joker, and in yet another ritualized killing—one that both resembles and contradicts
the earlier shooting of Sergeant Hartman—Joker kills his would-be assassin, putting
her out of her misery, although, perhaps, insuring that he would long suffer his own.
By committing what is essentially a mercy killing, Joker is compelled to acknowledge
not only the barbarity of war itself, but also the complex savagery of the human heart.
In the final words of Pyle, Joker finds himself in a “world of shit,” but nevertheless
remains determined to retain a remnant of his humanity.
See also: Kubrick, Stanley; War Film, The

References
Devine, Jeremy M. Vietnam at 24 Frames a Second: A Critical and Thematic Analysis of Over 400
War Films about the Vietnam War. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.
Duncan, Paul. Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2008.
Kagen, Norman. The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Continuum, 1987.
—Robert Platzner

191
This page intentionally left blank
 v
G
GATTACA. Being an “outsider” is all a matter of perspective. In a frail world, perfec-
tion is freakish and strange. But in a perfect world, merely being human is to be
marked an outcast. In Gattaca (1997), Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) is an “In-
Valid,” a person born without the interference of bioengineering. In a world where
babies can be genetically designed, like a custom-made car, Vincent’s parents chose
to have him conceived and born naturally. Unfortunately, this “faith birth” produced
a child predestined to have myopia, a heart condition, and a short life span. He is
the new target of futuristic bigotry (“It doesn’t matter where you were born, but how”).
His parents did not make the same mistake twice. Vincent’s younger brother was
planned as a “normal” birth; he would come into the world as a genetically perfect
being. The two grow up as it must be, one frail and vulnerable, the other strong and
durable. Why is it, then, that it is Vincent who outlasts his brother while they are
one day swimming in the surf?
Vincent, who grows up nursing a passionate desire to be an astronaut, leaves home
and goes to work at Gattaca, an aerospace center. But as an “In-Valid,” he does not
stand a chance to become an astronaut. Hope arrives, though, in the form of Jerome
( Jude Law), a genetically perfect specimen who is confined to a wheelchair because
of an auto accident. Jerome sells Vincent his body, so to speak; in other words, he sells
him nail filings, blood and urine specimens, strands of hair—anything Vincent needs
to get past the detectors at Gattaca. So Vincent becomes “Jerome,” at least in the eyes
of his employers at Gattaca. Through sheer perseverance and hard work—he has to
strip naked and scrub his body free of telltale skin flakes every day (a kind of ritual
rebirthing process)—he rises in the ranks and is soon chosen to go on a space flight
to Titan, a moon of Jupiter.
But when a Gattaca executive is murdered, and one of Vincent’s eyelashes is found
at his workstation, Vincent becomes the target of a search. For a while, with the aid of a
lovely young worker at Gattaca, Irene (Uma Thurman), who is also an “In-Valid” who
suffers from a heart ailment, Vincent evades detection. (The murderer turns out to be
the space mission control director [Gore Vidal], who killed out of concern that the
mission might be scrubbed by his superior officer.) But the investigating officer soon

193
General, The

tracks him down and reveals himself to be Vincent’s long-lost brother. He cannot
believe Vincent has evaded detection for so long. After all, Vincent is the frail one.
The brother taunts him to take one last swim, to demonstrate how he, after all, is
stronger than Vincent. The two swim out past the breakers in a nocturnal swim.
“Shouldn’t we turn back,” shouts the brother, after a time, “we can’t see the shore any-
more.” Vincent just forges on. “That’s how I beat you,” he replies, “I swim out with no
thought of saving enough to swim back.” And that’s Vincent’s secret. His perfect, driv-
ing passion ultimately allows him to defy his imperfect body.
Gattaca is a powerfully understated and thought-provoking sci-fi/fantasy film. First-
time director Andrew Niccol served up a beautifully crafted product, a sleek story set in
a vaguely futuristic world bathed in a palette of lemon-yellows and rusty salmons. (The
film was shot by Krzysztof Kieslowski’s brilliant cinematographer Slawomir Idziak.)
The workers are surrounded by vast spaces of metallic reflecting surfaces (using as a
central location Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center) and brilliant blue
skies. No matter that the story is improbable—given the technology, there is no way
that Vincent could have pulled off his deception, nor could his imperfect body have
stood up to the intense training he was forced to endure—it works in the service of
larger issues. Vincent’s dream of transcending his bodily limitations is a metaphor for
humanity’s dream of breaking the bonds of earth’s boundaries.
Thus, Gattaca brings an ironic twist to an enduring motif in science fiction films. As
historian David J. Skal has pointed out, physical disability has long played a vital role
in the yearnings and questing of the mangled and afflicted mad scientists, from
Metropolis to Dr. Strangelove. They believed the next step in human evolution would
be a human perfection, one that would lead ultimately to the shedding of human flesh
altogether. Gattaca, by contrast, locates human perfectibility not in technological per-
fection but in the spiritual rebellion against science and rationality
See also: Science and Politics in Film; Science Fiction Film, The

References
Brosnan, John. Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978.
Skal, David J. Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. New York: W. W. Norton,
1998.

—John C. Tibbetts

GENERAL, THE. The General (1927) is one of Buster Keaton’s masterpieces. Keaton,
a true renaissance man of the early cinema—he wrote, directed, edited, produced,
and acted in films—made dozens of pictures during a career that spanned almost
50 years. Along with Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, Keaton helped to shaped
the figure of the antihero in motion pictures—the bumbling, unwitting, childishly
charming savior of the day. Many have argued that The General is a nearly perfect
film, with its physical comedy seamlessly interwoven into the picture’s overarching
narrative structure.

194
 General, The

The General is based on a real event: On April 12, 1862, in the midst of the Civil
War, a group of Union Army spies, led by James J. Andrews, stole a locomotive named
The General in Big Shanty (now Kennesaw), Georgia, while the crew and passengers
were having breakfast in a nearby hotel. Andrews and his men drove the train north
toward Chattanooga, Tennessee, doing as much damage to the Western and Atlantic
Railroad lines as possible—tearing up track, sabotaging switches, and burning bridges.
They were eventually caught before reaching their destination and later executed.
Keaton and his longtime writing partner Clyde Bruckman (who received both writer
and director credits for the film) were inspired by the exploits of William Allen Fuller,
the real-life conductor of The General, who pursued his stolen train on foot, by handcar,
and on three other trains, picking up Confederate troops along the way. Keaton’s film,
which privileges comedy and romance over historical accuracy, tells the story of Johnnie
Gray (Keaton), who, as an early title card announces, loves both his engine and the lovely
Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). When the citizens of Marietta, Georgia, learn that Fort
Sumter has been fired upon—the event that initiated the Civil War—Annabelle’s father
(Charles Henry Smith) and brother (Frank Barnes) immediately join the Confederate
Army; Johnnie, though, is turned away because his work is more important to the
Southern cause, leaving Annabelle and her family thinking he is a coward.
Johnnie finally has a chance to prove himself a year later when the Yankee spies steal
his train. He does not know Annabelle is onboard. On her way to visit her wounded
father, she returns to the train looking for something she has left behind and is cap-
tured by the enemy. Johnnie chases on foot and by handcar, bicycle, and train, acciden-
tally uncoupling the cars carrying Confederate soldiers. He makes his way into enemy
territory, poses as a soldier, rescues Annabelle, and steals another train to head home
and warn of the impending Yankee attack. Johnnie eventually is declared a hero, made
a lieutenant, and embraced by his sweetheart.
Although retaining the broad historical brushstrokes of the actual event, in The
General Keaton and Bruckman exploit each fateful turn of Johnnie’s experience for
the sake of slapstick. One of the most physically gifted actors in film history, Keaton
gives Johnnie several inspired bits of business during the train chase. For instance,
Johnnie hooks a small car carrying a cannon to The Texas, the train with which he
has absconded; when he lights the fuse, the cannon tilts precariously until it is aiming
at the engine car. When he tries again, his foot accidentally catches in the coupling, and
he inadvertently fires the cannon at Yankee troops as the train careens around a curve.
Keaton also found opportunities to give expression to a different, romantic type of
humor. After Johnnie rescues Annabelle and The General, the train quickly runs low
on firewood. Annabelle, failing to understand the seriousness of their predicament,
throws away a piece of wood simply because it has a hole in it. When she tosses twigs
into the engine’s burner, Johnnie can stand it no longer; grabbing her, he suddenly
begins to choke the surprised Annabelle. Just as suddenly, however, Johnnie turns the
assault into a wonderfully romantic kiss, providing audiences with one of cinema’s
most iconic moments.
The most elaborate stunt comes when Johnnie sets a wooden bridge on fire, and
The Texas, with the Yankees in pursuit, plunges into the river below. Rather than

195
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

employ miniatures, Keaton used a real train tumbling off a real bridge, making the
$42,000 stunt the most expensive in Hollywood history to that point. The director’s
perfectionism and the cost of shooting on location in Cottage Grove, Oregon, which
still had the essential narrow-gauge railroad tracks in place, drove the film’s budget to
a then-astronomical $760,000. When audiences failed to respond to The General,
Keaton’s career went into a tailspin, and his descent into alcoholism became increas-
ingly problematic.
By the 1950s, critics and audiences had rediscovered The General, and since that
time it has appeared on many lists of the greatest films ever made. Despite the slap-
stick, it has also been noted as an unusually realistic portrayal of the Civil War. Orson
Welles, among others, compared Keaton’s images to those in the Civil War photo-
graphs produced by Mathew Brady.
See also: Keaton, Buster; Silent Era, The

References
Carroll, Noël. Comedy Incarnate: Buster Keaton, Physical Comedy and Bodily Coping. Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Rubinstein, E. Filmguide to The General. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.
Sweeney, Kevin W., ed. Buster Keaton: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

—Michael Adams

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES. Directed by Howard Hawks, Gentlemen Pre-

fer Blondes featured Marilyn Monroe in the lead role as “Lorelei Lee.” One of the films
that established Monroe as perhaps the screen’s most famous “blonde bombshell,” the
1953 musical was a film adaptation of the 1925 novel by Anita Loos, which had
already been made into a silent picture in 1928. Lorelei is a gold-digger, whose single
goal is to marry the richest man she can find. The film begins with a scene in which
a huge diamond engagement ring is presented to Lorelei by Gus Esmond Jr. (Tommy
Noonan), who is under the spell of his powerful “Daddy” (Taylor Holmes). Lorelei
concocts a scheme to get Gus to Europe, where, far from the clutches of Gus’s father,
they can be married in peace. In order to carry out her plan, Lorelei enlists the help
of her girlfriend, “Dorothy Shaw” (Jane Russell), whose main responsibility seems to
be to keep Lorelei out of trouble, a task that proves nearly impossible to fulfill. The
story ends happily, with Lorelei winning over Daddy with displays of her uniquely
charming logic: “I don’t want to marry your son for his money, I want to marry him
for your money.”
The film suffers from a somewhat predictable plot—the gorgeous blonde, seem-
ingly without a brain in her head but cunning enough to capture her man, and her
brunette sidekick, girls “from the wrong side of the tracks,” who are successful because
of Lorelei’s stunning good looks and Dorothy’s skill in navigating difficult situations—
the film was still a crowd-pleaser. Featuring wonderfully choreographed musical

196
 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

numbers, the picture allowed

Monroe and Russell to demon-
strate how truly multitalented
they actually were. Russell treated
audiences to a comic-poignant
rendition of “Is There Anyone
Here for Love?” while dancing
among a team of muscular, almost
effeminate-looking Olympic-style
athletes who wear nothing but
skin-tight, flesh-colored shorts;
while Monroe wowed viewers
with her iconic performance of
“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best
Friend,” sung as she moved seduc-
tively among dozens of tuxedo-
clad gentlemen.
Reflecting the cultural sen-
sibilities of the times, the picture
concludes with a double wedding
on the return trip to the United
States, allowing Lorelei and
Dorothy jointly to enter into the
safe haven of marriage. Display-
ing their diamonds—Lorelei’s so Actress Marilyn Monroe performs the musical number “Dia-
large it borders on the crass, monds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” from director Howard
Dorothy’s so small it almost dis- Hawks’s film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953. (Hulton
appears—the scene seems to be Archive/Getty Images)
saying that happiness is inti-
mately connected to wealth. Lorelei’s ring reflects her decision to marry for money,
Dorothy’s her decision to marry for love.
Interestingly, while some feminist films critics (Turim, 1990) understand Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes as yet another text that commodifies women—in this case, trading on
their looks or their feminine wiles while they bargain themselves away in exchange
for the security of diamonds—others (Arbuthnot and Seneca, 1990) claim that
Lorelei’s “logic,” because it enables her to mark out a position of power within the eco-
nomic space defined by a male-dominated system of market exchange, allows the film’s
female protagonists to act together, as collaborators instead of as competitors; as what
Luce Irigaray calls “this sex which is not one” (Irigaray, 1985). The women, then,
become the film’s narrative focus, while the men are pushed out onto the margins,
becoming no more than eye candy, good for gazing at but easily discarded when the
women have had their fill.
See also: Feminist Film Criticism; Hawks, Howard; Male Gaze, The

197
Giant

References
Arbuthnot, Lucie, and Gail Seneca. “Pre-Text and Text in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” In Erens,
Patricia, ed. Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990, 112–25.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Turim, Maureen. “Gentlemen Consume Blondes.” In Erens, Patricia, ed. Issues in Feminist Film
Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, 101–11.

—Karen A. Ritzenhoff

GIANT. Based on Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel, George Stevens’s Giant (1956) is a
sprawling epic marked by grand themes, a vast Texas landscape, and a years-to-tell nar-
rative. Although there are a number of important elements woven through this densely
layered film—children wanting to live their own lives instead of the lives their parents
want for them, the struggles of a new wife trying to adapt to the complex relational
dynamics that characterize her new husband’s family, the contrasts between the gentri-
fied East and the rough and tumble West, the decline of cowboys and cattlemen and
the rise of oil barons—it is the theme of prejudice that is at the heart of this sweeping
melodrama.
Although Giant touches on the issue of gender bias—Leslie Benedict (Elizabeth
Taylor) is made to understand in no uncertain terms that women are not welcome to
join men when the latter are discussing politics—the film focuses on the problem of
racial intolerance. Within the film’s first few minutes, for instance, Leslie, new wife
to the wealthy landowner Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson), realizes that socializing with
Mexican Americans who serve as laborers and house servants breaks existing taboos
against racial intermingling. The Mexican American infant of a house servant that
Leslie helps by insisting he be visited by a local doctor, grows to manhood, joins the
military as World War II begins, and is one of the town’s first causalities. At his grave-
side, as the flag covering the coffin is given to the grieving mother, an officer offers her
a touching sentiment: “I am proud to present to you the flag of our nation which your
son defended so gallantly.” Bick—along with Leslie the only non-Hispanic mourners
present—then hands the members of the family a neatly folded Texas flag. The scene
ends with a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, sung by Mexican American altar
boys, with the American and Texas flags blowing in the Texas wind, silhouetted by a
billowy Texas sky. As the anthem continues, the scene changes to the arrival of the Ben-
edicts’ first grandchild by their daughter, followed by a second scene of the arrival of a
second grandchild by their son’s Mexican American wife. This close shot of the two
babies, one very white and the other very Hispanic, is repeated in the last scene, where
they both, now toddlers, share a playpen, their commonality dominating their
differences.
While the storyline of Giant seems somewhat dated, its continuing strength lies in
the look of the film, especially in Stevens’s ability to craft individual scenes that seem
to work as well alone as they do when they are joined together into a whole.

198
 Gladiator

Interestingly, Stevens was a cameraman before becoming a director, and some of

Giant’s most powerful images—the burial of a Mexican American soldier under a
U.S. flag and a bright blue Texas sky; a drunken, dream-shattered oil tycoon broken
in front of those whose admiration he seeks; a café scene that so powerfully captures
the ugliness of prejudice it inspired a book-length poem—are as moving today as they
were to audiences back in 1956.
Stevens initially wanted Grace Kelly to play Leslie Benedict, but supported Hudson’s
wish that Taylor should play the role. Already a household name after star turns in East
of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, both of which had been released in 1955, James
Dean was cast as the brooding, self-destructive ranch-hand turned oil tycoon, Jett Rink,
a role that earned him an Oscar nomination. Dean had a difficult working relationship
with many members of the cast, however, most notably with Stevens and Hudson.
Stevens had tried to push Dean beyond what he had learned in acting school, but Dean
bristled at his direction and created continual problems on the set by arriving late and
once even urinating in front of all present. Taylor was one of the only members of the
production who was close to Dean, suggesting that most of the young superstar’s prob-
lems grew out of his insecurities. Unfortunately, shortly after filming for Giant was
completed, Dean was killed in a head-on collision as he drove his Porsche 550 Spyder
back to California. Even though he had made only three feature films before his
untimely death, Dean became one of Hollywood’s iconic figures.
Released just two years after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Edu-
cation decision was handed down, and one year after Rosa Parks refused to give up her
seat on a bus, was arrested, and helped initiate the Montgomery Bus Boycott, there
were those in Texas who thought that distributors should not release Giant in their
state. As it turned out, though, Texans were, for the most part, proud of their portrayal
in the film. As Stevens suggested, they were not simply caricatures of one-dimensional
racists, but exhibited complex and evolving reactions to their changing world.
See also: Melodrama, The; Taylor, Elizabeth

References
Crowther, Bosley. “Giant.” New York Times, October 11, 1956.
Moss, Marilyn Ann. Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2004.
—Rick Lilla

GLADIATOR. Gladiator (2000), directed by Ridley Scott and written by David

Franzoni, revived the genre of the epic film after a hiatus of over 30 years. At a produc-
tion cost of $103 million, the highest ever for the then-new DreamWorks Studio,
Gladiator went on to gross over $400 million worldwide. It was nominated in 2001
for 12 Oscars, winning five—Best Picture, Best Actor (Russell Crowe), Best Costume
Design, Best Sound, and Best Visual Effects.

199
Gladiator

Scene from the 2000 film Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe. (Photofest)

Gladiator offers up a grand spectacle—bloody battles, elaborate costumes, and the

proverbial cast of thousands. The film centers around the relationship between Roman
General Maximus (Crowe) and Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) and the
Emperor’s son and daughter—Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) and Lucilla (Connie
Nielsen). After winning a battle against the barbarians, the Emperor asks Maximus
to become “Protector of Rome” upon the Emperor’s death. This request comes despite
the fact that Maximus longs to return home to his own family, and Commodus,
Maximus’s rival, is the true heir to the throne. Commodus soon murders his father
and attempts to kill Maximus, who escapes only to find his family murdered. Maximus
is captured by slave traders and then sold as a gladiator. At first reluctant, Maximus
becomes a willing participant in the gladiatorial fights and eventually finds vengeance,
as well as his own death, at the Coliseum.
Costume is used to transition the characters in Gladiator through their relationships
and the narrative. This is especially true for Lucilla, daughter to Emperor Marcus
Aurelius. Upon her father’s death, Lucilla returns to Rome with her brother Commodus.
Lucilla’s wardrobe changes to reflect their uneasy relationship, which is based on her fear
and his threat of sexual violence. Early in the movie, in happier times, Lucilla is seen in
rich and luxurious furs. As the movie progresses, she is gradually tightly wrapped in
vibrant color and texture. As she becomes less able to extricate herself from her brother’s
grip, her clothing becomes simple and ties are used to restrain and envelop her, tightly
bound behind her shoulders and cinched securely around her body. This is apparent in
each of the scenes between Lucilla and Commodus, effectively symbolizing the “house
arrest” from which she cannot escape.

200
 Glory

Throughout the film, costume is also significant in expressing the experiences of

other characters. About to be murdered by Commodus, the Emperor approaches his
son on his knees, dressed in loose white clothing reminiscent of burial shrouds.
He seems to offer himself to Commodus as if asking for final forgiveness. When
Commodus challenges Maximus in the Coliseum, the Emperor’s son is dressed in
white including his armor and cloak. Again, the symbolism here is death, as Maximus
kills Commodus.
In the words of Ridley Scott, the character of Maximus has “a great deal of human-
ity.” Maximus is a charismatic leader, strong and purposeful in battle, and loyal to the
Emperor, his leader and father-figure. There are other sides to this epic hero: Maximus
is sensitive, a tough family man, at home in battle or on the farm. He prays to his
ancestors to keep his family safe and carries their effigies with him. Before each battle
or gladiatorial fight, he bends down to scoop up a handful of soil, smelling it, rubbing
it into his hands, taking strength from the earth and reminding himself of his life as a
farmer. From the opening scene where we see a hand gently stroking stalks of wheat in
a wind-blown field, we realize that Maximus’s vision of his own death has brought the
viewer through the movie. At the end of the film, with his death, a door opens to bring
him back home, once again united with his family, and finally granted the rest from
battle for which he has longed.

References
Arenas, Amelia. “Popcorn and Circus: Gladiator and the Spectacle of Virtue.” Arion 9(1), 2001:
1–12.
Cyrino, Monica Silveira. Big Screen Rome. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005.
Nelmes, Jill, ed. Introduction to Film Studies, 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2003.
Winkler, Martin M., ed. Gladiator: Film and History. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004.

—Vicky Bach

GLORY. Edward Zwick’s 1989 film Glory presents a stirring account of bravery and
the challenge of racial integration during the U.S. Civil War. It depicts the develop-
ment, formation, and courage displayed by the members of the 54th Massachusetts,
an all-black regiment utilized by the Union forces during the war.
The film follows Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick), the son of prominent
Boston abolitionists (an historical figure, some of whose letters are archived at
Harvard), who was committed to the Union effort and served at Antietam in 1862.
The film depicts Shaw as behaving less than heroically during that terrible battle. Sur-
viving the battle, he is asked to take command of the 54th; although hesitant, he agrees
to the assignment. The black soldiers in Shaw’s unit are a diverse group, made up of a
majority of illiterate former slaves and a small number of well-educated, free blacks
from the North. The film focuses on the experiences of an older former slave, John
Rawlins (Morgan Freeman); a young, recently escaped slave, Trip (Denzel

201
Glory

Washington); a young free black from Tennessee, Jupiter Sharts (Jihmi Kennedy); and
a well-educated free black, Thomas Searles (Andre Braugher). Essential to the dynamic
flow of the film is the depiction of the relationships that develop between free blacks
and former slaves.
After training has commenced, Shaw learns that the Confederacy has announced that
any former slave wearing a Union uniform will be summarily executed; the same goes for
whites leading black soldiers. Even though an offer is made to grant discharges, and
Shaw fully expects half the regiment to leave, not one man abandon’s the unit. Shaw’s
men are paid less than white soldiers and are deprived of many necessities; and it also
appears they will never see military action, as they are used only in auxiliary roles.
In the summer of 1863, however, Shaw leads the 54th south, believing that he and
his men will finally see action against Confederate forces. Instead, the unit is placed
under the command of an officer who shows proper respect for neither the black sol-
diers nor the customs of war. Thereafter, Shaw’s men are only used for manual labor.
Only after Shaw threatens to expose his corrupt superior is the regiment given an
opportunity to fight. The 54th then bravely participates in the Battle of Sol Legare
Island. After their success as Sol Legare, Shaw volunteers his unit to lead the charge
at the Battle of Fort Wagner. In stark contrast to his actions at Antietam, Shaw bravely
leads his men into battle, dying in the process. Dispelling the idea that black soldiers
are not capable of fighting the good fight, the members of the 54th battle courageously,
a great number of them losing their lives at Fort Wagner. In one of the film’s most
poignant scenes, Shaw is shown being buried with his troops in a mass grave.
Many American films have sought to depict the haunting stain of racial prejudice
that marks the fabric of the nation’s past, but few have done it more effectively than
Glory. Admittedly, the film was criticized for its liberal use of artistic license in its
depiction of the Civil War and the participation of black troops in the conflict. The
film implies, for instance, that the 54th Massachusetts was the first all-black regiment,
which it was not; Shaw was also not the man he was portrayed to be, as his letters reveal
him to be more of a racist than he appears to be in the film—while he is offered and
accepts the command of the all-black unit on the same day in Glory, he actually resisted
taking the position until his family pressured him into agreeing to lead the regiment;
and although the majority of the soldiers in the filmic 54th were portrayed as being
former slaves who had escaped from Confederate states, most were actually free blacks
from the North. The list goes on, but perhaps in the end this is not what is most
important about Glory. Rather, because the film “promises to rescue for the large public
that goes to the movies an almost lost lesson in American history,” it has much to teach
us about race in America, both during the time of “this great Civil War” and as we con-
tinue to struggle with this issue today (Bernstein, 1989).
See also: African Americans in Film; Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Filmmaking;
War Film, The; Washington, Denzel
References
Bernstein, Richard. “Heroes of ‘Glory’ Fought Bigotry Above All Else.” New York Times, 1989.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html.

202
 Godfather Trilogy, The

Emilio, Luis F. A Brave Black Regiment: A History of the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer
Infantry: 1863–1865. New York: Da Capo, 1995.
Glatthar, Joseph. “ ‘Glory,’ the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, and Black Soldiers in the Civil
War.” The History Teacher 24(4), 1991: 475–85.

—Michael L. Coulter

GODFATHER TRILOGY, THE. The Godfather trilogy, directed by Francis Ford

Coppola, follows the story of three generations of the Corleone crime family. The pic-
tures include The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1972), and The Godfather
Part III (1990). The original film was based on Mario Puzo’s 1969 best seller of the
same name. Although very different from a work like Martin Scorsese’s “gangster film”
Mean Streets, which was released around the same time, The Godfather is considered by
many the preeminent cinematic work about organized crime families.
The Godfather opens with the wedding of Don Vito Corleone’s (Marlon Brando)
daughter, Connie (Talia Shire), to Carlo (Gianni Russo). Don Vito and his consigliore,
Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), are hearing the requests of friends and associates, as “no
Sicilian can refuse a request on his daughter’s wedding day.” One of the guests at the

The cast of the film The Godfather pose for a family portrait during a wedding scene in a still from
the 1972 film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on the novel by Mario Puzo. (Getty
Images)

203
Godfather Trilogy, The

wedding is Vito’s godson, the famous singer (a Frank Sinatra-like figure) Johnny
Fontane (Al Martino), who requests that Don Vito help him get a part in a movie in
order to revitalize his career. Hagen flies to California to convince studio boss Jack
Woltz (John Marley) to give Johnny the part. In a scene that defines the new
business-oriented approach of the crime family, when Woltz reacts forcefully to
Hagen’s request—“Johnny Fontane will never get that movie. I don’t care how many
dago guinea wop grease ball goombas come out of the woodwork”—Hagen remains
perfectly calm—”It’s not personal. It’s business.” Woltz is finally convinced when he
awakens to find the head of his prized stud horse in his bed.
Later, Don Vito is asked by Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) to attend a
meeting in order to discuss the possibility of the Corleone family involving itself in
heroin trafficking. Demonstrating the oddly perverse set of ethics that characterize
the families, Don Vito refuses to get involved with the sordid business of drug traffick-
ing, as it not only may affect his political influence but is ultimately beneath him. As a
result of his refusal, an assassination attempt is made on his life. Upon hearing of the
near death of his father, Vito’s youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino), considered a “civil-
ian” by the other organized crime families, rushes home and finds his father’s hospital
room unguarded. Michael decides to meet Sollozzo, who ordered the hit, and a New
York City policeman at a local restaurant. Returning from the bathroom, where he
has retrieved a secreted gun, Michael shoots both of the men, sealing his fate as a
member of the Corleone family. Fearing for Michael’s life, his brother Sonny (James
Caan) sends him to Sicily until things “cool down.” Once there he meets a woman,
falls in love, marries and begins a life with her, until she is killed by a car bomb.
Returning to the United States, Michael reunites with Kay Adams (Diane Keaton),
his non-Italian future wife, and begins his ascension toward the position of Godfather.
It may be argued that The Godfather is essentially a film about a violent and repre-
hensible realization of the American Dream. As his biographer, Gene Phillips, suggests,
Coppola “wished to show the Italian American community with understanding and
candor, to indicate that Don Corleone . . . was convinced that organized crime was
the passport to the American Dream for downtrodden immigrants” (Phillips, 2004, 91).
In a 1970s America plagued by the lingering conflict in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal,
and what Jimmy Carter called the country’s “malaise,” the possibility of realizing the
American Dream appeared to many like an unattainable goal. According to Phillips,
then, Michael’s seemingly inevitable rise to the position of godfather reflects the sensibil-
ities of a worried nation: in difficult times, people do what they have to do in order to
protect their families and their interests. Significantly, this notion is related to the unique
ethical sensibilities expressed in the Godfather films: As long as one’s actions, whatever
they may be, are carried out “in the name of family,” they are appropriate. Coppola
expresses this idea in a powerfully disturbing way toward the end of the first film, pre-
senting his viewers with an extraordinary montage sequence during which he
intercuts a scene of Michael reciting words of the Catholic baptism ritual, as he becomes
godfather to his nephew, with several other scenes in which murders that he has ordered
are carried out by his hit men, clearing the way for his final rise to power as Godfather of
the family.

204
 Godfather Trilogy, The

The Godfather Part II, which opened on December 12, 1974, is a much darker film
than its predecessor. Two narrative lines, out of time, run parallel to each other. The
first continues the story of Michael Corleone in the role of the godfather; the second,
shown in a series of flashbacks, follows the story of Vito Corleone as a young man
(Robert De Niro). Michael’s story opens during a First Communion celebration at
the family’s vacation house in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Here, Coppola neatly reflects the
opening wedding sequence in The Godfather and extends the montage sequence of
the family at the baptism gathering that he placed at the end of the first film. Late that
evening an assassination attempt is made on Michael, and he tells Tom Hagen that he
must leave for a while. He entrusts the business affairs of the family to Hagen. He
believes that Frank Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), the capo who took over following
Peter Clemenza’s (Richard Castellano) death, was responsible for the assassination
attempt. After listening to his drunk ramblings, Michael comes to understand that it
was actually his own brother, Fredo (John Cazale), who betrayed him. Michael tells
Fredo, “You are nothing to me now. Not a brother, not a friend, nothing.” He instructs
Al Neri to have Fredo killed—but only after their mother has died. The film ends with
Michael in the Lake Tahoe residence, sitting in contemplative silence.
In the parallel storyline, the rise of Vito Corleone is chronicled. In the first flashback
scene, a young boy (Vito) and his mother are at a funeral procession for the young
Vito’s father, Antonio Andolini, whose death was ordered by the local Mafia chieftain,
Don Ciccio (Giuseppe Sillato). During the procession, Vito’s older brother, Paolo, is
also killed because he swore revenge on the Don. Vito’s mother begs Ciccio to let
young Vito live and sacrifices her own life so that he may escape. These events are
the catalyst for Vito’s rise to power, as he returns to Sicily 24 years later to plunge a
knife into the heart of the elderly Ciccio.
Initially, Coppola was not interested in shooting a sequel to his award-winning film.
However, many critics felt that although The Godfather was brilliant, it had been too
redemptive, especially in regard to Michael Corleone. Italian Mafia culture, declared
critics, had been sentimentalized; a sequel was needed to expose Michael’s true charac-
ter, and by extension, the truly brutal character of gangster culture in general. In the
second Godfather film, then, Michael is shown desperately trying to hold onto his fam-
ily, being betrayed by his own brother, and finally deciding that he must destroy the
family in order to save it. By the end of The Godfather Part II, only Michael and
Connie remain of the original Corleone family. Michael is rejected by Kay, the non-
Italian outsider who may be the only one who understands the truth about the
Corleone family; and even the ethnic traditions that have bound the family together
seem to be crumbling—witness the jarring juxtaposition of Coppola’s opening “family
celebration” sequences in the two films. Thus, what the audience saw with The
Godfather Part II was a world in transition, where the “romance” of a successful
immigrant achieving the American Dream is replaced by the secrecy of lawyers and
the onslaught of family betrayal.
The Godfather Part III completes the story of Michael Corleone, now 20 years older,
who feels the weight of tremendous guilt brought on by the events of his life, the cor-
rupting power of ambition, the loss of Kay, and the haunting memory of his role in his

205
Godfather Trilogy, The

brother’s murder. In an attempt to right some of his past wrongs (and bring dignity
back to the Corleone family), Michael sets up a charity in memory of his father, the
Vito Corleone Foundation. At a ceremony for the foundation, Michael is granted
the title of Commander of the Order of St. Sebastian, granted by Archbishop Gilday
(Donal Donnelly). At a party following the ceremony, Michael has an awkward reun-
ion with Kay, who informs him their son, Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio) wants to drop
out of law school to pursue his passion: opera. Michael initially refuses to support the
decision, but eventually acquiesces, and decides to try to encourage his son’s ambitions.
At the same party, Michael meets his brother Sonny’s illegitimate son, Vincent
Mancini (Andy Garcia). After witnessing Vincent get into a vicious fight with Joey
Zasa (Joe Mantegna), who mockingly calls his uncle a gangster, Michael, moved by
his extreme loyalty, agrees to take his nephew under his wing.
At the same time, Michael is becoming more closely involved with Archbishop
Gilday and the Church. He agrees to help the Archbishop climb out of debt by trans-
ferring $600 million into the Vatican’s bank, to be invested in Immobiliare, an
international real estate company. When news of Michael’s deal finds its way to the
other mafia crime bosses in New York, they want in. Michael gives each of them a gen-
erous payoff, leaving Zasa with nothing. Outraged, Zasa storms out of the room and
suddenly a rain of machine-gun fire comes down through the ceiling, killing all of
the mob bosses, except for Michael and his bodyguard, Al Neri. Vincent, who has
begun a romantic relationship with his cousin, Mary (Sofia Coppola), swears revenge
on Zasa and kills him during a street fair. Michael is afraid for his daughter’s life
and, repeating his own exilic moment in The Godfather, takes Mary to Sicily for his
son’s operatic debut. Assassins are sent to the Teatro Massimo to kill Michael, but they
end up killing Mary instead. Dying in her father’s arms on the grandiose front steps of
the opera theater, she calls out Michael’s name. The film’s final shot is of Michael as an
elderly man, seated in a rocking chair in front of his Sicilian villa. In a scene reminis-
cent of his father’s death, an orange drops from Michael’s hand as he slumps over in
his chair. Unlike his father, however, Michael Corleone dies completely alone.
The Godfather Part III was not well received by fans, who felt that Michael’s sudden
remorse over his previous transgressions did not “fit” with the other Godfather films.
Critics also found the film disappointing, suggesting that it simply repeated, and glo-
rified, the systematic violence of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. Literary
scholar Phoebe Poon argues that while audiences and critics are justified in their criti-
cisms of the third film, there is a great deal about the picture that can help provide
insight into Michael’s character and the destruction of his family. She argues that,
“While the revision of Michael’s character may be read as the most disappointing of
the film, it may also be seen . . . as the strongest feature, adding an extra dimension to . . .
the leader of the Corleones, whose grief . . . identifies us with his sacrifice of moral integ-
rity out of filial love and duty to the family” (Poon, 2006, 67). This notion of unwaver-
ing obligation to the family even as the family is being destroyed, says Poon, is a theme
that Coppola carried through the entire Godfather series.
The Godfather series continues to be a force in American popular culture. It has
been released on DVD three separate times, the most recent incarnation entitled

206
 Going My Way

The Godfather-the Coppola Restoration. Released September 23, 2008, this rerelease
features high-definition visuals and bonus footage, including new commentaries and
interviews. The Godfather was released as a PC game in 1991 and became a best-
selling console video game in 2006, released for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 with sep-
arate versions for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in 2007 (The Godfather: The Don’s
Edition), PlayStation Portable (The Godfather: Mob Wars), and the Nintendo Wii
(The Godfather: Blackhand Edition). The American Film Institute places The
Godfather as the #1 gangster film of all time with The Godfather Part II coming in
at #3. The AFI also listed The Godfather as the #3 movie on its Top 100 films of
the last 100 Years list.
See also: Brando, Marlon; Coppola, Francis Ford; Gangster Film, The; Pacino, Al

References
The Internet Movie Database. “The Godfather III.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099674.
Messenger, Chris. The Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became “Our Gang.”
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
Phillips, Gene D. Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2004.
Poon, Phoebe. “The Tragedy of Michael Corleone,” Literature Film Quarterly, January 2006.
Shadoian, Jack. Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
—Jennie Woodard

GOING MY WAY. Going My Way won seven Oscars in 1945, including those for
Best Picture and Best Actor Bing Crosby, who played Father Charles Patrick Francis
O’Malley. Secretly assigned by his bishop to assume the pastorate at financially
troubled St. Dominic’s parish, “Father Chuck” clashes immediately with the current
pastor, the curmudgeonly Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald, who won the Oscar
for his supporting role). In a storyline driven by characterization rather than plot, it
is the dynamic between these two protagonists that provides the central narrative struc-
ture of the film. In the end, Father Fitzgibbon remains in charge of St. Dominic’s, but
his “old-world” ways have been challenged and, presumably, mitigated by the ministra-
tions of the more modern Fr. O’Malley.
The ambiguity of the movement suggested in the title (who is going whose way?)
points to a reading of the film as a parable of Catholic life in mid-twentieth-century
America. After more than a century of suspicion about the social location of what
was predominantly an immigrant faith, Catholicism was beginning to emerge into
the Protestant-dominated mainstream culture. While second- and third-generation
Catholics were obviously more Americanized—and thus less “foreign”—than their
immigrant ancestors had been, the larger culture was simultaneously becoming more
inclusive toward non-Protestant expressions of faith. Poised on the brink of the Cold

207
Going My Way

War against “atheistic Communism,” Americans and Catholics were able to identify a
common enemy that helped to eliminate old prejudices.
This double movement may be seen in the generational conflict between the older
“brick and mortar” style of the immigrant priesthood—represented by Father
Fitzgibbon—and the more people-oriented style of Father O’Malley. Clothing sym-
bolizes this distinction in style: Father Fitzgibbon is rarely without his clerical garb,
often including his biretta; while Father O’Malley first appears wearing a jaunty straw
hat, and, due to an accident, must meet Father Fitzgibbon for the first time while wear-
ing football sweats. While Father Fitzgibbon dreams of new buildings that will serve
only to sustain the isolating mentality of the economically declining parish, Father
O’Malley transgresses the self-imposed boundaries of the immigrant church through
his former associations in the entertainment industry. Indeed, it is Father O’Malley’s
songwriting skills, and not Father Fitzgibbon’s fidelity to tradition, that brings the nec-
essary support—both financial and otherwise—to the parish.
In similar ways, the film transgressed some of the boundaries of popular culture that
made Catholicism an exotic “Other” in Protestant-dominated America. While Chuck
O’Malley was not the first Catholic cleric depicted in American cinema, Crosby’s por-
trayal of the congenial priest became the face of the Catholic priesthood to most
Americans, both Catholic and non-Catholic alike, in the immediate aftermath of
World War II. Although priests in cassocks and collars still appeared to be alien and
even suspect figures to many Americans, Crosby’s own devout objections to mimicking
any sacerdotal activities in the film ironically redefined the role of the priest as liturgi-
cally ambiguous—and thus less threatening—to those outside the Roman Catholic
Church. Thus, a theologically vague “Crosby Catholicism” took its place as one of
the accepted ways of being religious “American style” at the beginning of the postwar
religious revival, when phrases such as “In God we trust” and “under God” would
make their way into the official American political lexicon.
The popularity of Going My Way led writer and director Leo McCarey to produce
an immediate sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), in which Father O’Malley matched
wits with a headstrong nun played by Ingrid Bergman. Although the plot was some-
what redundant and the chemistry between the two protagonists less satisfying, the
depiction of a children’s nativity pageant made The Bells of St. Mary’s the quintessential
holiday film of mid-century American Catholicism. By the 1960s, the United States
had elected a Catholic as president, and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council
encouraged Catholics to embrace such cherished American values as ecumenical co-
operation, religious liberty, and the separation of church and state. Going My Way pres-
aged these developments, and contributed in its own way to the coming of age of
American Catholicism.
See also: Religion and Nationalism in Film

References
Keyser, Les, and Barbara Keyser. Hollywood and the Catholic Church: The Image of Roman
Catholicism in American Movies. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1984.

208
 Goldfinger

Mazur, Eric Michael. “Going My Way: Crosby and Catholicism on the Road to America.” In
Prigozy, Ruth, and Walter Raubicheck, ed. Going My Way: Bing Crosby and American Cul-
ture. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007, 17–33.
—Rodger M. Payne

GOLDFINGER. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Ian Fleming, Gold-
finger (1964) was the third James Bond adventure produced for United Artists by
Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli. It set the pattern for the remainder
of the series, introducing plot and visual elements that became staples, and moving
away from the (comparative) realism of the first two films toward outright fantasy.
Goldfinger pits Bond—Agent 007 (Sean Connery) of the British secret intelligence
service—against the title character: a fabulously wealthy international gold dealer
(Gert Frobe) who conspires with agents of the Chinese government to irradiate the
contents of the United States Bullion Repository at Fort Knox. The radiation will ren-
der the gold unusable for 58 years, creating economic chaos in the West (to the benefit

Villain Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) laughs as British agent James Bond (Sean Connery) lies
strapped to a table beneath a laser weapon in a still from the film Goldfinger, directed by Guy Hamilton,
1964. (United Artists/Courtesy of Getty Images)

209
Goldfinger

of China) and raising the worldwide price of gold (to the benefit of Goldfinger). Bond
foils the plan by seducing Goldfinger’s personal pilot, Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman),
whose all-female “Flying Circus” is assigned to incapacitate the guards at Fort Knox
with nerve gas sprayed from a low-flying aircraft. Persuaded to work against her
employer, Pussy replaces the nerve gas with a harmless substitute, enabling the guards
to trap Goldfinger’s men inside the vault. Bond defeats Goldfinger’s lethal Korean
henchman, Oddjob (Harold Sakata), in hand-to-hand combat, and a CIA weapons
expert disarms the bomb. Bond corners and fights Goldfinger aboard his personal air-
craft, which he is forcing Pussy, at gunpoint, to fly to Cuba. A shot from the villain’s pis-
tol shatters a window, and the explosive decompression that follows sucks him from the
plane and kills him.
Goldfinger was, by the standards of the Bond series, realistic. Its principal villain was
motivated by simple greed, not megalomania, and his plan relied on real-world technol-
ogies like nuclear weapons and nerve gas. The massive, metal-cutting laser that Goldfinger
uses to threaten Bond was a fantasy in 1964, but the laser itself had been tested and
patented in 1960. The use of the Chinese as co-conspirators echoed Western anxieties
about China becoming the world’s third nuclear state—which it did in October 1964, a
month after the film’s premiere. Goldfinger’s “hijacking” of his own airplane to Cuba at
the end of the film references a then-new crime that began in 1958 and peaked a decade
later. Bond himself is not the superman he would become: He defeats Oddjob through
luck and cleverness rather than superhuman fighting skills, and he is unable to disarm
the nuclear bomb (a procedure that requires the flipping of a single switch).
The film is remembered, however, not for its realism but for its overtly fantastic ele-
ments. Bond makes his first appearance in a diver’s dry suit, which he strips off—
revealing an immaculate tuxedo—before walking into a fancy party. He drives an
Aston-Martin DB5 sports car, specially modified to include rotating license plates,
twin forward-firing machine guns, retractable tire-cutters, a smokescreen generator,
and an ejector seat. He seduces Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), one of Goldfinger’s min-
ions, and wakes up to find her dead beside him, her nude body completely coated with
gold paint. Oddjob is a master of martial arts, but his signature weapon is a bowler hat
with a steel-reinforced rim that he throws like a discus. Finally, there is Pussy Galore,
whose censor-baiting name eclipsed Honor Blackman’s portrayal of her as (initially) a
formidable, multitalented adversary for Bond. Elaborate gadgets, comic-book-style
henchmen, and beautiful women with improbable names (Plenty O’Toole, Holly
Goodhead, Xenia Onatop) steadily increased in prominence until by the early 1970s
they had become defining elements of the franchise.
Other soon-to-be-stock elements also made their first appearance in Goldfinger.
These include the first request for his signature drink—a “vodka martini, shaken, not
stirred”—the first use of a precredit sequence unrelated to the main action, the first
to feature “Q” as a code name for the secret service’s armorer, and the first of Bond’s
bantering conversations with him. It was also the first Bond film to feature overt
humor as a prominent element. Shirley Bassey’s performance of the title song over
the credits was the first in a series of such performances by leading pop singers and, like
many that followed it, “Goldfinger” became a major hit.

210
 Gone with the Wind

Goldfinger has been repeatedly chosen, by both fans and critics, as one of the best of
the James Bond films. In retrospect, this is hardly surprising: the series came to be
defined by a pattern from which it seldom ventured far, and Goldfinger was the film
that set the pattern.
See also: Bond Films, The

References
Chapman, James. Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001.
Lindner, Christoph. The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 2003.
—A. Bowdoin Van Riper

GONE WITH THE WIND. It may be argued that no other film surpasses Gone
with the Wind (GWTW) as a touchstone of American culture. This is evidenced not
just by its remarkable popularity since it premiered in Atlanta, on December 15,
1939, but also by the amount of critical attention and debate it has generated for
seven decades. Based on Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same
name—the book had clearly captured the imagination of many Depression-era
Americans, topping the best-selling list of 1936 with a million copies sold by year’s
end—the David O. Selznick film was highly anticipated and eventually viewed by
millions.
The ill-fated love triangle of Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), Ashley Wilkes (Leslie
Howard), and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) is at the center of the lavishly produced Civil
War–era epic. Fittingly, the film opens with the O’Hara clan at Tara, the home to
which Scarlett is increasingly dedicated; the action quickly moves to a barbeque at
the Wilkes plantation, Twelve Oaks, where viewers are introduced, in rapid succession,
to Ashley, Rhett, Ashley’s fiancée and cousin Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland)
and several other players, including Scarlett’s future husbands Charles Hamilton
(Melanie’s cousin) and Frank Kennedy. Scarlett, a teenager in love with Ashley, learns
that rumors of his marriage to Melanie are true, and so impulsively accepts Charles’s
proposal before he rides off to war. Rhett also meets and falls for Scarlett during the
course of the gathering, and continues to pursue her throughout the war years and
the subsequent Reconstruction era.
Charles dies early in the war, and Scarlett goes to Atlanta to be with Melanie and
her aunt Pittypat while Ashley is fighting for the southern cause. Here the relationships
are further developed: Scarlett scandalizes Atlanta matrons when, as a widow, she
dances with Rhett at a charity ball; Scarlett again declares her love for Ashley when
he appears for a short leave; war comes to Atlanta while Melanie gives birth to Beau;
Rhett helps the women escape, but leaves them miles from Tara to join the army and
gives Scarlett one of the screen’s most famous kisses. On her return to Tara, Scarlett

211
Gone with the Wind

Vivien Leigh (as Scarlett O’Hara) runs from her stately mansion, Tara, in Gone with the Wind.
(Photofest)

finds her beloved mother dead and her family in disarray. She becomes head of the
household and runs the plantation, before and after Ashley’s return at war’s end, mar-
rying Frank and moving back to Atlanta to keep all from starvation. Eventually Frank
is killed in a raid on Shantytown (in which Scarlett was attacked), and she marries
Rhett and gives birth to Bonnie. Tragedies then occur, one after another: Scarlett falls
and has a miscarriage, Bonnie dies, as does Melanie. In the end, Scarlett realizes her
love for both Melanie and Rhett, but too late. She runs home to tell Rhett she loves
him, but he has decided to leave, departing with one of the cinema’s most famous lines
(in response to Scarlett asking what she will do): “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a
damn.” Scarlett decides to begin anew at Tara, and the film ends on a strong note of
optimism.
Clearly Scarlett’s “gumption” (Mitchell’s word) as she confronts adversity, coupled
with her refusal to accept defeat, resonated with viewers of the 1930s—not surpris-
ingly, star-crossed love stories set in the midst of America’s watershed moments have
always appealed to audiences, before and after GWTW was released. Yet, although it
was applauded for its performances and technical brilliance—the film garnered 10
Academy Awards, with Gable the only major player not to receive one—GWTW had
its critics. Ironically, although many fans of Mitchell’s novel complained that certain
characters and plotlines did not make their way from her book to the big screen, some
reviewers suggested that the picture was overly long at nearly four hours. More impor-
tantly, though, were the cultural criticisms leveled at the film—at the time of its release

212
 Goodfellas

and continuing even today. Reacting to the film’s focus on Confederate characters and
the apparent celebration of their lives and lifestyle, for instance, leaders of the NAACP
were quick to point out the picture’s stereotypical portrayals of African Americans;
while American Communists, objecting to the story’s classism and racism, insisted that
the film critic from the socialist magazine the Daily Worker pan the picture—when he
did not, he was ousted from the Party. Interestingly, some critics rejected the idea that
GWTW should be considered a cinematic classic, suggesting that unrefined, simple-
minded audiences liked the picture only because of its sensual sentimentality—it was
little more than a filmic “soap opera,” they complained. This situation was complicated
by the fact that the audiences who flocked—and continue to flock—to see the film
were largely made up of women. Responding to these suggestions, certain scholars
argued that the critics who made them had only revealed their own gender bias and
deep-seated suspicion of popularity.
Whatever one may think of Gone with the Wind, the film—the phenomenon, one
might say—continues to be popular with American audiences. The picture has been
rereleased numerous time since 1939, and viewers still fill theaters to see it; fans con-
tinue to purchase GWTW memorabilia; and three of its lines appear on the American
Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest quotes, with “Frankly, my dear . . .” ranked number
one. Satires abound in print and on-screen—references to the film have even made
their way into the storylines of The Simpsons, something Margaret Mitchell, it seems,
would never have thought possible when she wrote her novel.
See also: African Americans in Film; Gable, Clark; Melodrama, The

References
Eaklor, Vicki. “Striking Chords and Touching Nerves: Myth and Gender in Gone with the
Wind.” Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture, April 2002. Available at
www.imagesjournal.com.
Haskell, Molly. Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited. New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2009.
Taylor, Helen. Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1989.
—Vicki L. Eaklor

GOODFELLAS. Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) was released the same year as
Francis Ford Coppola’s long-anticipated The Godfather: Part III, but it was Scorsese’s
production that joined the ranks of great American mafia films. The success of Good-
fellas also created a renewed interest in mob films over the next two decades, probably
because the film is graced with subtle, complex, and engaging character studies.
Known as an actor’s director, Scorsese leads his large ensemble to a string of notewor-
thy performances. Scorsese had already worked with both Robert De Niro and Joe
Pesci in Raging Bull (1980), and directs them to memorable performances as gangsters
Jimmy Conway and Tommy DeVito. The Scorsese veterans are surrounded by superb

213
Goodfellas

actors, including Ray Liotta in

the lead role of gangster Henry
Hill, Lorraine Bracco as his
long-suffering wife Karen, and
Paul Sorvino as fatherly mob boss
Paul Cicero. De Niro, Pesci, and
Bracco were nominated for, and
won, various acting awards based
on their work in the film, includ-
ing an Oscar for Pesci as Best
Actor in a Supporting Role.
Goodfellas ranks among Scors-
ese’s finest films, and it includes
various recognizable components
of his directing style: frenetic
editing, the use of popular non-
diegetic music to underscore the
film, naturalistic acting, and an
excessively smutty but almost
poetic, use of language. These ele-
ments work together to tell the
thrilling, dark, and unconven-
tionally redemptive story of real-
life mafia turncoat Henry Hill,
who is played with style and pan-
ache by both Chris Serrone (as a
boy) and Liotta. Scorsese tracks
Hill from his first encounters as
Movie poster for Goodfellas starring Ray Liotta, Robert De an errand boy for local mobsters
Niro, and Joe Pesci, directed by Martin Scorsese. (Warner in the 1950s through a series of
Bros./The Kobal Collection) high points that glorify the excit-
ing life of excess and adventure
that goes along with a life in organized crime. Filmed in the style of a documentary,
with multiple voice-over narration segments by Liotta, Goodfellas also heartrendingly
captures Hill’s terrible fall.
Scorsese begins the film in “medias res” as Hill, Conway, and DeVito pull their car
off the road to deal with strange noises. The problem is Billy Batts (Frank Vincent),
another gangster who has regained consciousness after a beating and has started kick-
ing in the trunk. DeVito and Conway brutally execute Batts, after which Hill closes
the trunk and says in a voice-over: “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to
be a gangster.” This is a shocking line, and Scorsese uses moments like this to show
the extreme paradoxes involved in being a gangster. Henry Hill’s story then unfolds
in a lengthy flashback that shows how he and his crew get to this point. Batts’s status
as a “made man” is revealed, meaning he is supposedly untouchable by other mobsters.

214
 Graduate, The

When the film finally returns to the Batts execution, the new context shows it to be the
beginning of a downward spiral for Hill and his crew.
Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy is the basis for Goodfellas, and both book and film
are often praised for their accurate depiction of mafia life. The actors consulted with
some of the actual gangsters portrayed in the movie, and the entire enterprise had a
veneer of authenticity. Goodfellas also appeared to be a celebration of the mafia life-
style, so much so that the real Henry Hill claimed to be deluged with requests from
other mobsters who wanted their story told as his was. Yet Goodfellas also examines
the dark side of mafia culture, specifically in terms of ethnicity, religion, and race.
Hill’s Irish and Sicilian “mixed” blood means that he can never be a “made man” like
Batts; and his union with Karen is obviously discouraged by their Catholic and Jewish
families. DeVito is overtly prejudiced against blacks, while also expressing disbelief
that a Jewish woman won’t go out with him alone because she is “prejudiced against
Italians.” Cicero’s unified mafia family in Goodfellas seems to be a cohesive fraternity
that subsumes these characteristics in a code of honor, but events show this to be
untrue. In the endgame for Hill’s crew this code is shattered by the ruthlessness of
mafia life: DeVito is executed for breaking the rules, Conway gets greedy and murders
other members of his crew, and Hill turns informant to save his own skin after a drug-
related arrest. Membership in the mob does not save any of the characters, and rather
than a celebration, Scorsese’s Goodfellas turns out to be a detailed indictment of mafia
culture.
See also: De Niro, Robert; Gangster Film, The; Scorsese, Martin

References
Friedman, Lawrence S. The Cinema of Martin Scorsese. New York: Continuum, 1997.
Gilbert, Matthew. “Scorsese Tackles the Mob; Goodfellas Chronicles a Criminal Life.” Boston
Globe, September 16, 1990: B31.
Kelly, Mary Pat. Martin Scorsese: A Journey. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1996.
—James M. Brandon

GRADUATE, THE. The Graduate (1967), Mike Nichols’s coming-of-age satire, is

thought of today as one of the iconic films of its era. Based on a 1963 novel by Charles
Webb, it embodies much of the restlessness and growing alienation of the later 1960s
while offering up a shrewdly observed and often bitingly caricatured view of middle-
class manners and mores.
Nichols’s protagonist, Benjamin Braddock, whose travails lie at the center of this
film, bears a striking resemblance to another rebel without a cause of a decade earlier:
J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield (the adolescent hero of Catcher in the Rye). Both char-
acters appear overwhelmed by the “phoniness” of the adult world around them, and
both are seemingly set adrift in a society whose hypocritical values they reject, but with
one important difference—unlike Holden Caulfield, “Ben” has just graduated, with
honors, from a prestigious Eastern college, and is now expected to continue his

215
Graduate, The

Dustin Hoffman looks over the stockinged leg of actress Anne Bancroft, his seductress, in a scene
from the 1967 film The Graduate. (AP/Wide World Photos)

education with the intent of entering some unnamed profession. Ben’s withdrawal into
silence and sullenness, and the growing realization that his parents inhabit a “plastic”
world of soulless striving, establishes the essential emotional context for the moral
and sexual conflicts that follow.
Ben’s comic-grotesque affair with a middle-aged friend of the family, Mrs. Robinson,
and his pursuit of, and all-consuming love for, her daughter Elaine, quickly occupies the
dramatic center of the film, as Ben struggles to understand his attraction to both women
and attempts to wrest a happy ending from a seemingly hopeless romantic triangle.
Nichols’s wildly improbable but dramatically effective resolution of this tangled plot
consists of Ben’s “rescuing” Elaine from a loveless marriage on her wedding day, culmi-
nating in their sudden flight from the church and departure on a bus going nowhere in
particular. Our hero is once again set adrift, only this time accompanied by a young
woman who is just as lovestruck and confused as he is.
Apart from its antiestablishment attitudes and its relentless ridicule of the suburban
bourgeoisie, The Graduate achieves cinematic distinction on at least two levels: with
extraordinary performances by its key actors and with a visually synchronized sound-
track that provides both context and dramatic continuity to a plot that is often

216
 Grapes of Wrath, The

distractingly episodic. The two principal roles that have drawn most attention are
those played by Dustin Hoffman, as Ben Braddock, and Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robin-
son. Bancroft was only six years older than Hoffman, but through a combination of
makeup and acting craft she manages to convince viewers she is old enough to be his
mother and jaded enough not to care. Her seduction scenes are both consummate
sex farce and tortured self-revelation, moving what might have been crudely comic into
the realm of tragicomedy.
Hoffman’s performance is just as memorable in its way, and in retrospect it was a
performance that nearly didn’t happen. His last-minute casting as Benjamin Braddock
has become the stuff of Hollywood legend, as Nichols briefly considered Warren
Beatty and Robert Redford (among others) for the role before settling on Hoffman,
then a virtual unknown. What Hoffman was able to bring to this role, however, aside
from youthful looks, was a quality of awkward ingenuousness that makes him seem
younger still: the perfect naı̈f for a satiric take on the idea of a sentimental education.
In passing from innocence to experience and back to a kind of innocence, Hoffman’s
performance takes us on an interior journey that is credible only because he is able to
make Ben seem something more than an anguished and neurotic postadolescent.
Nichols’s use of Simon and Garfunkel’s folk-rock score is equally inspired, and some
of the more memorable moments from this film are those that combine a lyrical image
and equally lyrical words in ways that allow one to reinforce the other. One example of
this technique can be found in the opening sequence of the film, where Ben is seen on a
moving walkway at LAX, obviously isolated emotionally from everything and everyone
around him. As the scene unfolds, and the camera pulls back from an initial close-up,
we hear the words of Paul Simon’s “Sounds of Silence,” capturing more perfectly than
any monologue could Ben’s feelings of dissociation and quiet desperation. Long before
a juxtaposition of music and interpretive visual imagery became commonplace in
music videos, Nichols orchestrates revelatory moments in the film’s narrative that allow
Ben—who is largely mute and often inexpressive throughout the film—to speak for
himself through a sung voice not his own.
See also: Nichols, Mike

References
Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.
New York: Penguin, 2008.
Lewis, Jon. American Film: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

—Robert Platzner

GRAPES OF WRATH, THE. Director John Ford and executive producer Darryl
F. Zanuck adapted John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath to the screen in
1940. Henry Fonda starred as Tom Joad, who accompanies his family on a long-distance
journey and difficult adventure rooted in the devastation of the Great Depression.
Returning home from a prison stay, Tom finds his family’s Oklahoma farm aban-
doned after a bank foreclosure. Soon reunited, the Joads load their belongings onto a

217
Grapes of Wrath, The

Still photo from John Ford’s classic 1940 film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath. (Library of
Congress)

truck and head to California, in search of the plentiful jobs and better living about
which they have heard. En route, they meet travelers returning from the Coast who
warn that life ahead will be miserable. The Joads’ journey takes them through a series
of transient camps, each reflecting the poverty and degradation of the era.
The Joads serve, in the novel and in the film, to represent the fate of thousands of
American farm families cast out from their homes during the 1930s. As the nation
plunged into economic crisis, thousands of farmers found themselves unable to repay
the loans they had taken out to finance their operations during the 1920s. Com-
pounding their problems, a drought of epic proportions hit Oklahoma, the Texas
panhandle, and beyond. Irresponsible farming techniques had bankrupted the
region’s land in previous decades. Now, as the overused topsoil blew away into the dust
storms that swept the region, farming became impossible. Opportunistic commercial
growers on the West Coast lured displaced farmers to the region, promising them
employment and housing. But the resulting influx of laborers triggered cycles of lower
and lower wages, bringing profit to the landowners and darkening hopes for the workers.
Struggling to adapt to life in a new region, such “Okies” often met a chilly reception.
Over the course of the film, Tom becomes intrigued by striking workers and expe-
riences a growing consciousness of his role in the world. As workers begin to form
unions and strike, violence mounts. Ultimately, Tom kills a man and must leave his

218
 Grease

family to flee the authorities. He declares his goal of fighting for the rights of the
oppressed. As he departs, he announces, “I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be every-
where. Wherever you can look, wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll
be there. Wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys
yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know
supper’s ready. And when people are eating the stuff they raise and living in the houses
they build, I’ll be there, too.”
In adapting the plot to the screen, Ford made several significant alterations. Most ap-
parent are the changes made to the ending of the story. In the famous final scene of
Steinbeck’s novel, daughter Rose of Sharon loses a baby, and then nurses a starving adult
male. The scene was deemed inappropriate for use in a mainstream American film. But
Ford and Zanuck also softened Steinbeck’s political rhetoric, blurring the edges of his
defense of accused communists with vague and patriotic-sounding dialogue. The film
version also presents a more positive vision of the government-sponsored migrant pro-
grams, where the Joads are pleasantly surprised to find clean and orderly facilities.
The film received multiple prestigious award nominations and accolades from film
critics. Political conservatives, though, argued that even Ford’s rendition of the story
remained too favorable toward unions, workers, and Communists. In its romanticiza-
tion of the Dust Bowl migrants, they argued, the film distorted reality. They insisted
that the film’s technical strengths and human drama remained compelling only in spite
of its political sentiments.
The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best
Actor (Henry Fonda), Best Screenplay (Nunnally Johnson), Best Sound Recording,
and Best Film Editing. It won two Academy Awards, Best Director and Best Support-
ing Actress (Jane Darwell).
See also: Ford, John

References
Dickstein, Morris. “Steinbeck and the Great Depression.” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, Winter
2004: 111–31.
McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001.
Peeler, David P. Hope Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
Pells, Richard H. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the
Depression Years. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
—Ella Howard

GREASE. Grease (1978) is an American film musical directed by Randal Kleiser and
based on the 1972 musical of the same name by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. Among
the highest-grossing film musicals, it incorporated several new songs, including its title
track, plus rock-and-roll hits from the 1950s. Sometimes described as a rock musical, a

219
Grease

subgenre that originated with

Hair (1967), Grease can also be
considered a nostalgia musical
that longingly looks back on the
1950s from the midst of the
political and economic crises of
the 1970s (Everett, 2008).
In 1959, greaser Danny Zuko
(John Travolta), leader of the
T-Birds, returns to Rydell High
School for his senior year follow-
ing an innocent summer romance.
Unbeknownst to him, his summer
sweetheart, straight-laced Sandy
Olsson (Olivia Newton-John),
now attends Rydell. Several of the
Pink Ladies gang befriend her,
but their leader, Rizzo (Stockard
Channing), maliciously engineers
a reunion between Danny and
Sandy. Surprised to see her, Danny
slips out of his greaser persona and
greets her enthusiastically before
remembering his gang is present.
He recomposes his nonchalant
facade and mocks Sandy for
expressing surprise at his sudden
change of attitude. The film
Actors John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John embrace in a then follows the two principals
promotional still for the film Grease, directed by Randal throughout the remainder of the
Kleiser, 1978. (Paramount Pictures/Fotos International/ school year as they try to reconcile
Getty Images) their differences and develop a
relationship.
While its plot is ostensibly about young love, the film explores the personal and
social construction of identity and the pressures placed on individuals to conform.
Sandy is portrayed as fantastically wholesome: during the animated opening credits,
animals help her to dress in a manner reminiscent of Cinderella and Snow White. Rizzo
says Sandy is “too pure to be Pink” and compares her to Doris Day during “Look at
Me, I’m Sandra Dee.” At the same time, Danny pressures Sandy to become involved
physically, while the Pink Ladies urge her to smoke and drink. Danny is obsessed with
being cool and imposes this persona on the impressionable T-Birds, but he is clearly
posturing. The contrasting stories that Danny and Sandy tell in “Summer Nights”
demonstrate this—his lyrics and gestures are much more sexually suggestive—as do
those moments when his tender or pensive sides are visible. The televised National

220
 Grease

Bandstand dance, Rizzo’s possible pregnancy, and various scenes involving boys and
their cars provide further opportunities for characters to posture or reflect on social
expectations. (Even Principal McGee’s facial expressions reveal that she does not really
believe that her students are “fine, bright, clean cut, [and] wholesome.”)
Conformity is fully displayed in the concluding graduation carnival sequence.
Having embraced each other’s expectations, Sandy and Danny finally connect as
boyfriend and girlfriend. Altman argues that the reconciliation of gender oppositions
is central to the American musical, but these represent deeper oppositions in terms
of social values (Altman, 1987). If Sandy stands for those bound by conventional
social expectations (the film focuses primarily on sexual behavior) and Danny
embodies youthful, rebellious individuality, then their reconciliation suggests that
in postwar America, a knowing (if expedient) adult conformity must replace youthful
rebellion.
This is ironic: Sandy seems to change more fully than does Danny, but her transforma-
tion is primarily a repackaging of her image for her own ends. Some have argued that
because of Sandy’s new appearance, Grease encourages young women to change because
their boyfriends are pressured not to date nice girls (Everett, 2008). But the film offers lit-
tle reason to believe that Sandy has abandoned her wholesome character along with her
traditional appearance. Contrarily, Danny’s physical modification at the end is far less
substantial—he even sheds his letterman sweater after seeing Sandy’s more stunning
change in clothing—but his personal transformation goes much deeper. Because of
Sandy, he lettered in track, and unlike the other T-Birds, he passed all of his classes and
is free to spend his summer as he sees fit. Danny has become a man; they are still boys.
Furthermore, Sandy dominates Danny in the end as they sing “You’re the One That
I Want.” The camera positions him behind her, or even behind her and lower to the
ground. For the majority of the movie, it was Danny who moved most freely through
space, as is seen in his triumph in the dance competition, while Sandy fled the frame sev-
eral times when Danny hurt her feelings. In the end, however, Sandy dominates the
physical space, while Danny responds to her. Even lyrics such as “you better shape up,
’cause I need a man, and my heart is set on you” place her in the superior position. Thus
the conventional wields greater influence, and much of the rebelliousness proves to be just
what we thought, mere posturing.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The; Music in Film; Musical, The

References
Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Altman, Rick, ed. Genre: The Musical: A Reader. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Everett, William A., and Paul R. Laird, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 2nd ed.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Smith, Susan. The Musical: Race, Gender, and Performance. London: Wallflower, 2005.
Walsh, David, and Len Platt. Musical Theater and American Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger,
2003.
—Stanley C. Pelkey II

221
Great Dictator, The

GREAT DICTATOR, THE. Premiering on October 15, 1940, before America had
entered World War II, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator was a milestone in the his-
tory of cinema. Already famous for silent films featuring characters such as the Little
Tramp, the film marks Chaplin’s first foray into “talkies.” More importantly, as Nazi
Germany’s dominance of Europe seemed complete in the fall of 1940, The Great Dic-
tator openly mocked Adolf Hitler and his regime and expressed Chaplin’s views on the
malevolence of military aggression and fascism. Interestingly, many years later, Chap-
lin would admit that had he realized the true horror of Hitler and his regime, he might
not have made a film as farcical as The Great Dictator.
Chaplin played dual roles in the film: the innocent Jewish barber and the dictator of
Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel, who was modeled after Hitler. Seeking to expose the
frightening absurdity of the Nazi dictator’s dreams of world domination at a time
when many in America were still willing to provide Hitler the benefit of the doubt,
Chaplin used his cinematic magic to create scenes like that in which Hynkel dances
to the sound of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin’s theme while holding aloft a globe. As
the film’s director, Chaplin was also able to elicit brilliant performances from support-
ing actors such as Jack Oakie as the bombastic dictator of Bacteria, Napoloni

Still photo showing actor Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940). Chaplin, one of the most
instantly recognizable movie icons in the world, was accused of being a communist by Sen. Joseph
McCarthy in 1952 and banned from reentering the United States after a trip abroad. Chaplin didn’t
return to the United States until 1972. (AP/Wide World Photos)

222
 Great Dictator, The

(Mussolini); Henry Daniell as the crafty Minister of Propaganda, Garbitsch (Joseph

Goebbels); and Billy Gilbert, as the obese Field Marshall Herring (Hermann Goering).
The film opens in 1918, during the Great War. Chaplin portrays an unnamed Jewish sol-
dier serving in the army of the fictional country of “Tomania.” Injured while attempting to
rescue an officer named Shultz (Reginald Gardiner), the soldier, suffering from amnesia,
languishes in a hospital for the next 20 years, unaware that Tomania has been taken over
by a fascistic dictator, Hynkel, who has instituted an anti-Semitic regime. Released from
the hospital, and still suffering from his loss of memory, the former soldier attempts to
return to his life as a barber in the Jewish ghetto. Once there, he is shocked to see “Jew”
painted on his shop window. Harassed by Hynkel’s storm troopers, the barber is eventually
befriended by a beautiful young Jewish girl, Hannah (Paulette Goddard), and finally regains
his memory after Shultz recognizes him and talks to him about their WWI experiences.
Meanwhile, Hynkel, who bears a striking resemblance to the barber, is planning the
invasion of the neighboring country of Osterlich (Austria). Seeking to fund his inva-
sion by way of a loan from a Jewish financier, Hynkel eases his persecution of the Jews
in the barber’s ghetto. When the loan falls through, however, Hynkel renews his per-
secution of the Jewish people. In a comical switching of identities, Hynkel is mistaken
for the Barber and arrested by his own soldiers, while the barber is mistaken for Hynkel
and taken to the Tomanian capital in order to make a victory speech before his invad-
ing armies. As the camera focuses on the barber, Chaplin suddenly sheds his character
and addresses his film audiences directly: “Let us fight to free the world, to do away
with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for
a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.
Soldiers—in the name of democracy, let us all unite!” Believing this to be the most
important scene in the film, Chaplin rewrote the speech numerous times. Ultimately,
this final scene took three months to shoot.
The Great Dictator received mixed reviews. Still technically at peace with Hitler’s Ger-
many and clinging desperately to Roosevelt’s isolationist policies, many Americans
believed that the film would antagonize the German leader. Others decried what they
saw as Chaplin’s attempt to manipulate his viewers politically. Indeed, in areas in the
United States with large German populations, such as Chicago, the film was banned; it
was also banned in Germany and other pro-Nazi European countries. Even with the con-
troversy that surrounded it, however, The Great Dictator became Chaplin’s biggest box-
office success. Garnering a slew of Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture,
the film was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 1997.
See also: Chaplin, Charlie; Silent Era, The
References
Asplund, Uno. Chaplin’s Films. Trans. by Paul Britten Austin. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1976.
Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989.
Scheide, Frank, and Hooman Mehran, ed. Chaplin: The Dictator and the Tramp. London:
British Film Institute, 2004.
—Robert W. Malick

223
Great Escape, The

GREAT ESCAPE, THE. Most World War II movies produced before 1963 dealt
with battlefront exploits. A handful of films, however, concerned prisoner-of-war
camps, and many were British films about the British prisoners. The biggest World
War II film about American POWs was Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953), with William
Holden. Oscar-winning epics like Stalag 17 (1953) and The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957) did little to alter the attitudes of studio executives. The big studios saw no profit
in films with an all-male cast set in a German prison camp. MGM’s Louis B. Mayer
cited the conspicuous absence of women as his reason for not making The Great Escape.
But when United Artists released The Great Escape, it became one of the big box-office
hits of 1963 and made Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson, and James
Coburn into international stars.
The Allied fliers in Luft Stalag III spent far less time digging their way to freedom
than director John Sturges did getting The Great Escape onto celluloid. Sturges
struggled for 11 years to produce Paul Brickhill’s autobiographical bestseller The Great
Escape (1949), an account of the largest Allied prisoner-of-war breakout in World War
II. An Australian RAF pilot in Stalag Luft III, Brickhill documented the exodus of 250
British POWs. Brickhill had participated in the two-year long escape plan. He super-
vised the security personnel that shielded the forgers from the German Luftwaffe

John Leyton, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, and James Donald star in John Sturges’s
1963 film The Great Escape. The movie, adapted from a book by Paul Brickhill, centers around an
actual attempt by Allied soldiers to escape from a German prisoner of war camp during World
War II. (United Artists/Photofest)

224
 Great Escape, The

guards who were tasked with exposing escape attempts. British South African pilot
Roger Bushnel, head of the escape committee, envisaged taking out 250 prisoners in
an effort to tie up Nazi manpower behind enemy lines. However, only 76 managed
to flee before the Germans discovered the breakout. Eventually, three escaped, while
the Germans recovered another 23 men. Gestapo agents captured the remaining 50,
including Bushel, and the Gestapo executed the 50 by firing squad. The problem that
Sturges encountered when he pitched the idea to various producers, among them
Samuel Goldwyn, was the tragic ending. “What the hell kind of escape is this?” Gold-
wyn bellowed, “Nobody gets away!”
Unlike many POW movies, The Great Escape differed because it told an epic story
with an ensemble cast of characters who portrayed defiant men who proved with their
wits and will that nothing could stop them from accomplishing a virtually impossible
task. The Sturges film depicted in detail the elaborate plans that went into excavating
three tunnels far beneath the ground in order to avoid sound detection from micro-
phones buried in the earth. The POWs considered every angle of this massive enter-
prise. Tailors converted uniforms into civilian clothing. Forgers duplicated passes,
permits, and identity cards. Not only did tunnels have to be excavated, but the POWs
also had to dispose of the soil without arousing suspicion. The engineering feats in con-
structing these tunnels under the worst conditions, effecting the escape, and tying up
German soldiers made The Great Escape the apex of all World War II POWmovies. Ulti-
mately, the film condemned the barbarism of the Gestapo for murdering
the 50 POW escapees and hammered home the necessity for destroying the Third Reich.
“There will be no escapes from this camp,” Luftwaffe Colonel Von Luger (Hannes
Messemer) announced to Group Captain Ramsey (James Donald), the Senior British
Officer in charge as the Germans haul truckloads of British and American POWs into
the new Luft Stalag III. “We have, in effect, put all our rotten eggs in one basket and
we intend to watch this basket carefully.” The British and American fliers locked up
in the camp would prove Von Luger wrong. Authentic as The Great Escape was, the
filmmakers took some liberties with history. Since it was aimed primarily at an American
audience, Sturges had to put Americans into the story, when in truth all of the Americans
had been transferred before the escape. The biggest change was the highlight of the film
when Captain Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) made his mad dash for freedom leaping his
motorcycle over a barbed-wire fence.
The Great Escape marked the zenith of John Sturges’s career. Ironically, despite its
military narrative, the film emerged as the most antiauthoritarian big studio film of
the day, foreshadowing pictures such as Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Dirty Dozen
(1967), and Easy Rider (1969).
See also: Sturges, John; War Film, The

References
Lovell, Glenn. Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2008.

225
Great Train Robbery, The

Mirisch, Walter. I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2008.

—Van Roberts

GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, THE. The Great Train Robbery (1903) is a seminal
film produced by the Edison Company and directed by Edwin S. Porter. The film is
740 feet in length and runs about 11 minutes—long by 1903 standards. Its 14 scenes
depict a gang of ruthless bandits systematically taking over and robbing a train and its
passengers before escaping on horseback, only to be hunted down and killed by a
posse. An action-chase adventure, it features a fight on top of a moving train, several
murders, explosives, and a great deal of gunplay. The final scene (or sometimes the
first, depending on the whim of the exhibitor) shows a close-up of the bandit leader
raising his gun and firing directly into the camera. Thrilling audiences of the time, it
is the film’s most famous moment and it has inspired many similar scenes since,
including those at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Martin Scorsese’s
Goodfellas (1990), and Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (2007).
Older film histories often suggest that the film is more original than it actually was,
misattributing a number of “firsts” to it. It was not, for example, the first “narrative” film

A woman kneels over the bound and gagged telegraph operator in a scene from The Great Train
Robbery. Filmed in 1903, the movie is an innovative landmark; the first film western, it set the stan-
dard for years to come. (Corbis)

226
 Great Train Robbery, The

(Georges Méliès’s “Le voyage dans la lune” [1902] and Porter’s own “The Life of an
American Fireman” [1903] are only two of several important earlier examples), nor was
it the first “one-reeler.” Even the storyline seems to have been inspired by multiple sour-
ces, including a stage play of the same name and several movies, most notably two Brit-
ish imports directed by Frank Mottershaw (A Daring Daylight Burglary and Robbery of
the Mail Coach) released earlier the same year. Ironically, these erroneous “firsts” some-
times obscure the truly remarkable nature of this film, in terms of both its production
and its impact on the American film industry. At the time of its release it was one of
the most ambitious American films yet made, making use of and popularizing a number
of recently pioneered cinematographic techniques. These included matte shots (of a
train passing by a window and scenery passing by an open door) and innovative camera
positioning (an oblique angle shot, a panning shot, and the shot on the moving train). It
was also the first film to use “parallel editing,” in which the action moves back in time to
follow a different, simultaneous story thread (the scenes in which the telegraph clerk
bound and gagged in scene one is discovered and the subsequent assembly of the posse).
Beyond its technical significance, the movie also left other lasting impressions on
the American cinema. An early and influential example of the crime drama, it was
also (despite being produced in New Jersey) the first important western, spawning
countless imitations and launching the career of the first western film star, Broncho
Billy Anderson (Max Aronson), who played several roles in the film. Anderson would
later parlay his success into the creation of Essanay Studios, one of the major early
film production companies. Among the many Hollywood luminaries the film influ-
enced was the future movie mogul Adolph Zukor, a theater operator who credited
his careful observations of audience reactions to the film as his inspiration for bring-
ing longer, more action-filled movies to the public. This ultimately led him to found
the company that became Paramount Pictures and to hire Porter as his first Director-
General.
The first major hit movie in the United States, it also helped to revive an industry
that had been flagging as the novelty of early, simpler films had begun to wear off.
The introduction of longer-form narrative films in 1902 and 1903 began to reverse
this trend, and The Great Train Robbery—with its exciting story, constant action, and
compelling final scene—attracted crowds of early moviegoers wherever it was shown.
It remained the single most popular film in the United States for a decade, and the
many other films it inspired expanded and defined the early American cinema.
See also: Western, The

References
Casty, Alan. Development of the Film: An Interpretive History. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1973.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston, and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. A Short History of Film. New Bruns-
wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
Macgowan, Kenneth. Behind the Screen: The History and Techniques of the Motion Picture.
New York: Delacorte, 1965.

227
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Wexman, Virginia Wright. A History

of Film, 7th ed. Boston: Allyn &
Bacon, 2010.
—Kevin F. Kern

GUESS WHO’S COMING TO

DINNER. Guess Who’s Coming
to Dinner explores the challenges
of interracial marriage in a 1960s
America marked by significant
racial tensions. Released in 1967
and directed by noted filmmaker
Stanley Kramer, the film emerged
at a time when African Americans
were still struggling to gain their
civil, economic, and educational
rights in the United States. While
these struggles had yielded some
positive results, at the time that
the film began shooting, interra-
cial marriage was still illegal in
Actor Sidney Poitier with actors Spencer Tracy and Katharine 17 states and there was still a sig-
Hepburn in a still from director Stanley Kramer’s film Guess nificant social taboo against inter-
Who’s Coming to Dinner. (Columbia TriStar/Getty Images) racial marriage throughout the
country in general.
The film’s action spans a single
day. The opening shots, tonally framed by Billy Hill’s uplifting 1936 hit “The Glory of
Love,” find Dr. John Prentice (Sidney Poitier) and Joanna “Joey” Drayton (Katharine
Houghton) working their way through the San Francisco airport and then to the
well-appointed home of Joey’s parents. The taxi driver’s discomfort with the interracial
couple portends the action to come.
The couple is met by Joanna’s mother, Christina Drayton, played by Katharine
Hepburn, who won an Academy Award for her performance in this film. Mrs. Drayton
is excited to see her daughter, but shocked to learn that she is now engaged to Dr. Prentice—
someone she met in Hawaii just 10 days earlier. Soon, Mr. Matt Drayton arrives. Played
by the iconic Spencer Tracy, who died shortly after he shot his last scenes for this picture,
Mr. Drayton is also shocked when he hears the news about his daughter and Dr. Prentice.
Scheduled to leave on an evening flight, the couple is hopeful that Joey’s parents will quickly
bestow their blessing on them.
Dr. Prentice, without Joanna present, tells the Draytons that if they object to the mar-
riage, he will not pursue it, as he does not want to cause any conflict between Joey and her
parents. Mrs. Drayton soon accepts the inevitability of the marriage, but Mr. Drayton

228
 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

does not. The Draytons are eventually joined by their friend Monsignor Ryan, who
defends the marriage. Also present is Matilda “Tillie” Banks, the African American house-
keeper who has been with the family since shortly after Joanna’s birth. Tillie criticizes
Prentice for what she believes is undue social climbing—for not knowing his place,
it seems. The drama only intensifies when Dr. Prentice’s parents arrive for dinner.
Mr. Prentice and Mr. Drayton are strongly opposed to the marriage, while the mothers
recognize that although the union will surely be fraught with difficulties, it will also be
filled with love.
There are two important scenes near the end of the film. John Prentice and his
father have a heated argument during which the father seeks to convince his son not
to go through with the marriage. Dr. Prentice tells his father that although he sees him-
self only as a “colored man,” the doctor sees himself as a “man.” Later, after having
heard the arguments and comments of his wife, Dr. Prentice’s mother, and Monsignor
Ryan, all of whom favor the marriage, as well as those of Mr. Prentice and Tillie,
both of whom disapprove of it, Mr. Drayton makes a climactic speech about the
psychic drama of the day. In the end, he accepts and even encourages the marriage,
while acknowledging that the couple will face both explicit and hidden racism
because of their marriage. Mr. Drayton even says that Mr. Prentice will come to
accept it.
Interestingly, although today the film is remembered by many as a landmark cin-
ematic statement on the racial issues of the time, the picture has often been criticized
for presenting audiences with characters lacking any real depth. Dr. Prentice, for in-
stance, seems too perfect—the idealized “negro” who represents no threat to the
white world, a charge that, ironically, Poitier also faced; he is a graduate of presti-
gious colleges, a physician, an important contributor to international health pro-
grams and sexually restrained with Joanna. He is also a far too sympathetic
character, as he is free to marry Joey only because he lost his wife and son in a tragic
accident eight years earlier. Further, the Draytons are depicted as a wealthy, open-
minded, nonreligious couple from San Francisco—how could they not support the
union?; the priest is portrayed as a kindly, nonjudgmental, liberal-minded member
of the modern Catholic clergy; and Tillie is caricatured as the stereotypical
“mammy,” loyal to her “masters” to the bitter end. Director Stanley Kramer, how-
ever, defended the way that the characters were portrayed, explaining that the depic-
tion of Dr. Prentice and the liberal Draytons as near-perfect representatives of
enlightened American virtue was necessary in order to allow viewers to focus entirely
on the question of interracial marriage—Dr. Prentice had successfully assimilated
into the progressive, upper-class white world of the Draytons, and thus the only
thing that could possibly be wrong with the marriage was that it would unite a
mixed-race couple. And Tillie, even though she has long served as a devoted, inti-
mately related employee of the Draytons, is far from an acquiescent mammy; rather,
she acts as a crucial element in the film’s social consciousness, expressing to audi-
ences through her quiet strength and dignity that integration is just as difficult for
blacks as it is for whites.

229
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

See also: African Americans in Film; Hepburn, Katharine; Poitier, Sidney

References
Hunt, Dennis. “Review: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Film Quarterly 21(19), 1968.
Richardson, Brenda L. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Celebrating Interethnic, Interfaith, and
Interracial Relationships. Berkeley: Wildcat Canyon Press, 2000.
—Michael L. Coulter

230
 v
H
HALLOWEEN. John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) launched the slasher subgenre
of the horror film. Starring a young Jamie Lee Curtis in her first major film role,
Halloween made close to $50 million on a budget of only $320,000. Its box-office suc-
cess revealed a new market for horror that would lead to dozens of sequels, remakes,
and rip-offs.
Originally entitled The Babysitter Murders, Halloween was conceived when Irwin
Yablans, distributor of Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), approached Carpen-
ter about making a horror movie for his company, Compass Pictures International.
With his partner and producer Debra Hill, Carpenter wrote a script that confined
the majority of the action to a small town on a single night.
Halloween starts with a brief tableau, set in Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween
night, 1963. In a very long take from what is clearly the killer’s point of view, we see
a young woman get stabbed to death; then a reverse shot reveals a small boy holding
a large knife. Following a cut to black, new titles show that it is October 30, 1978.
Michael Myers (Tony Moran) escapes from the mental institution where he has been
incarcerated since murdering his sister 15 years earlier. A psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis
(Donald Pleasance), suspects Myers will return to Haddonfield to kill again. Through-
out the following day, Myers stalks Laurie Strode (Curtis), staring at her from outside
her school and house. That Halloween night he kills several teenagers while Laurie
babysits in a nearby house. When Laurie goes to find out what happened to her
friends, Myers attacks, but she manages to escape. She runs back to the house where
she is babysitting, tells the children to run and get help, and Myers attacks her again.
Finally, after a prolonged struggle, Dr. Loomis arrives and shoots Myers repeatedly
until he falls out a second-story window. When Loomis and Laurie look for the body,
however, it is gone.
Part of Halloween’s success stems from its artful blending of classic and contempora-
neous influences. Clearly, Halloween owes a major debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
(1960). The character of Michael Myers is a psychotic killer with a big knife similar
to Psycho’s Norman Bates. Dr. Loomis is named after Sam Loomis, a character in
Psycho, and Halloween’s star, Jamie Lee Curtis, is the daughter of Psycho’s star, Janet

231
Halloween

Actor Tony Moran, as masked killer Michael Myers, wields a knife in a still from the horror film
Halloween, directed by John Carpenter, 1978. (Fotos International/Courtesy of Getty Images)

Leigh. Halloween also draws from popular 1970s horror films like The Exorcist (1973)
and The Omen (1976), which rely on supernatural evil to evoke terror. Dr. Loomis
emphasizes this repeatedly when describing Myers as, “purely and simply evil.” In addi-
tion, Myers’s survival after multiple gunshots underscores his supernatural power.
While Halloween borrowed from classic and contemporary horror, it also intro-
duced many innovations that have since become staples of the slasher film. The teen-
agers who are murdered in Halloween smoke, drink, and, most crucially, engage in
premarital sex. Laurie, by contrast, is chaste. She is the paradigmatic “final girl,” the
heroine who is virtuous and resourceful enough to defeat the killer. While Carpenter
has said he never intended a moralistic reading of the film, many critics interpreted it
as a conservative backlash against the loose morality of 1970s youth.
Beyond its narrative innovations, Halloween is also a stylistic masterpiece, making
extensive use of the Panaglide handheld camera system in long tracking shots. Often,
as in the opening tableau, Carpenter uses the Panaglide to suggest the killer’s subjective
point of view; but throughout the film the moving camera follows characters, sug-
gesting the presence of an omniscient stalker. In addition, Carpenter’s minimalist
score, consisting mainly of piano notes played in a 5/4 time signature, is both memo-
rable and evocative, alerting viewers to Myers’s presence, even when he is unseen.
Along with the many sequels it generated for its own franchise, Halloween spawned
numerous imitations that share an emphasis on body count, a faceless immortal killer
who prefers knives or sharp objects to guns, and strong female characters who fight

232
 Harold and Maude

back. The film particularly influenced Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980),
which was specifically made to capitalize on Halloween’s success. It is also referenced
in Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) where characters watch Halloween to learn “the rules”
for surviving a horror movie. Because of its cultural significance, the Library of
Congress selected Halloween for preservation in the United States National Film Regis-
try in 2006.
See also: Horror Film, The; Slasher Films

References
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
McCarthy, Todd. “John Carpenter: Out of the Fog.” Film Comment 16(1), 1980: 17–24.

—Joseph Christopher Schaub

HAROLD AND MAUDE. Directed by Hal Ashby, Harold and Maude (1971) is a
dark comedy that is perhaps most notable for a stellar performance by veteran film
and Broadway actor Ruth Gordon. Gordon plays the irrepressible Maude, a 79-year-
old free spirit who befriends 19-year-old Harold (Bud Cort), helping him to find free-
dom and meaning in his life. The Colin Higgins screenplay was originally intended to
be made as a short for Higgins’s master’s thesis film, but was purchased by Paramount
after Higgins expanded it to feature length. Higgins also wrote a novelization of the
screenplay, which was published in 1971. The film was made on a $1.5 million budget,
and was filmed entirely on location in the San Francisco Bay Area. It features a sound-
track by Cat Stevens, which includes two songs written specifically for Harold and
Maude, “Don’t Be Shy” and “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out.”
At the film’s outset, Harold is living a life of wealth and privilege. Alienated from his
disengaged yet incongruously controlling mother (Vivian Pickles), Harold apparently
has no sense of connection with the society of which he is a part. Obsessed with death,
he spends his time staging suicides—self-immolation, hara kiri, hanging, drowning—
to provoke some reaction from his mother, all to no avail, and attending the funerals of
strangers. It is at one such funeral that he meets Maude, whose life-affirming refusal to
play by the rules is obvious from the start. Although Harold is at first a bit taken aback
by her anarchism, he is also drawn to the freedom that Maude represents. Their friend-
ship develops against the backdrop of Harold’s mother’s attempts to push Harold into
her version of adulthood. These attempts include looking for a wife through a comput-
erized dating service—she fills out the questionnaire—and having his uncle Victor
(Charles Tyner) try to persuade him to join the Army. As Harold and Maude grow
closer, and as their relationship evolves into a highly unusual romance, Maude introdu-
ces Harold to a world of sensuality and joy, simultaneously drawing him away from the
living death that his mother’s choices for him would entail and toward an authentic life
filled with meaning. In one telling sequence, Maude persuades Harold to help her

233
Harold and Maude

Scene still from the 1971 comedy Harold and Maude, starring Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon. Like
other films of the decade, it explored social issues such as gender and age stereotypes, death, and
the Vietnam War. (John Springer Collection/Corbis)

“liberate” an ailing city tree and transplant it in a Marin County forest. Unlike Harold,
whose fascination with death is boyish and ingenuous, Maude is well acquainted with
real suffering—she bears the tattooed number of a concentration-camp survivor on her
arm—yet she has chosen life.
Harold and Maude was only Ashby’s second directorial effort, and was one of a
number of his films (Shampoo, Coming Home, Being There) in which he explored
themes such as free love and antiwar protest that became popular with the 1970s-era
counterculture. The film systematically ridicules the “Establishment”—as embodied
in the military, law enforcement organizations, religious institutions, and psycho-
therapy—and offers as an alternative an ethic of choice, joy, and love of life.
Harold and Maude originally received mixed reactions from critics, many of whom—
including Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby—saw the film as morbid and grotesque; it
also did not impress at the box office. However, Gordon’s and Cort’s performances
earned them Golden Globe nominations as Best Actress and Best Actor in a Musical
or Comedy Film, respectively, and the American Film Institute ranked the film 45th
on its 100 Funniest Movies of All Time list in 2000, and ninth on its Top Ten Romantic
Comedies list in 2008. It was also chosen in 1997 for inclusion in the National Film
Registry of the Library of Congress. Perhaps most significantly, Harold and Maude has

234
 Harry Potter Series, The

enjoyed a long life as a cinematic cult favorite, and continues to generate interest and
comment among new generations of film fans.

References
Canby, Vincent. “Harold and Maude and Life.” New York Times, December 21, 1971.
Ebert, Roger. “Harold and Maude.” Chicago Sun-Times, January 1, 1972.
Shedlin, Michael. “Harold and Maude.” Film Quarterly 26(1), Autumn 1972: 51–53.
—Judith Poxon

HARRY POTTER SERIES, THE. The Harry Potter films, based on J. K. Rowling’s
series of novels, currently comprise the second-highest-grossing film series of all time,
behind the perennially successful James Bond franchise. Rowling sold the filming
rights to Warner Bros. in 1999 for a reported one million pounds, stipulating that
the cast be kept British and that the films remain as faithful as possible to the books.
Rowling has remained both consistently supportive of and involved in the films as they
have been released.
Each of the films corresponds to one of the novels: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone (2001); Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002); Harry Potter and the Pris-
oner of Azkaban (2004); Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005); Harry Potter and the
Order of the Phoenix (2007); and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009). The
exception to this is the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which
will be released in two feature-length segments, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Parts I & II.
Though popular primarily for its high entertainment value rather than its intellectual heft,
the series posits a complicated view of racial prejudice in the modern world—ultimately
offering a critique not only of prejudice and discrimination generally, but also of extremist
views on race and equality in contemporary society. Equally important, the movies offer
young viewers a world in which their own choices and actions can actively confront and even
defeat that prejudice.
The films recount the life of the title character, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe),
during his years at Scotland’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Over the
course of the films, as Harry transforms from awkward adolescent to confident, power-
ful young wizard, he and his companions are embroiled in a war of ethics, race, and
class that transforms the very world around them.
From the very beginning, the Harry Potter universe is one in which racial difference
and subsequent prejudices are the issues around which characters define themselves.
Harry, through whose eyes the story is understood, is from the outset defined by issues
of prejudice and discrimination. Orphaned as an infant, his “Muggle” (nonmagical)
relatives despise him for what they view as his “freakish” differences, and the 11-year-
old Harry to whom the audience is first exposed bears the marks of their prejudice:
he is malnourished, small for his age, living a life of forced servitude, and has become

235
Harry Potter Series, The

accustomed to verbal and physi-

cal abuse. Harry is rescued from
his veritable prison with the
revelation of his Wizarding
ancestry. He eventually leaves to
attend school, but though at
Hogwarts he is at last surrounded
by equally magical peers, his
world is by no means purged of
prejudice. Indeed, it is in the
magical world, which provides
the films’ primary backdrop, that
Harry is introduced to the true
ugliness of racial and class dis-
crimination.
The Wizarding world, he
soon finds, is divided between
two kinds of wizards—pure-
bloods and those of Muggle
descent (derogatorily termed
“mudbloods”). Contention over
whether the latter should be
treated equally in society has
twice resulted in devastating
war, the more recent of which
ended with the death of Harry’s
parents and his own orphaning.
Promotional poster for the 2007 film Harry Potter and the In this, the most recent war, an
Order of the Phoenix, directed by David Yates based on the army of pure-blooded wizards,
popular Harry Potter book series. (Photofest) led by the racist and xenophobic
Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes)
(himself hypocritically a half-blood), sought to eradicate Muggle-borns from Wizard-
ing society, and to enslave the nonmagical population of Britain entirely. Voldemort
and his “Death Eaters” were nearly successful in achieving their goals, as the Wizarding
Ministry’s attempts to address their threat through bureaucratic means proved insuffi-
cient. Significantly, the most successful counterpoint to Voldemort and the Death Eat-
ers is an underground cabal of individual wizards and witches of various magical and
Muggle ancestry led by the Headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore (Richard
Harris; Michael Gambon after Harris’s death in 2002). Under Dumbledore’s com-
mand, the mysterious “Order of the Phoenix” worked methodically to undermine Vol-
demort, eventually securing his temporary defeat, though only at extreme cost to
themselves: Harry’s parents are killed, the Longbottoms (parents of Neville, Harry’s
friend) tortured into madness, Sirius Black wrongly imprisoned, and Remus Lupin
forced to live a life of poverty.

236
 Harry Potter Series, The

With the disappearance (assumed death) of Voldemort and the dissipation of his
followers, the war is nominally over, and a relieved Wizarding populace returns to
the status quo. However, the events of the films make Harry forcibly aware that though
the War may have ended, the underlying causes remain, and no amount of willful
amnesia about the past can change that reality. In each film, these issues of equality, dif-
ference, and discrimination stand out in starker and starker relief, as Voldemort returns
(film four), and the Wizarding world moves closer to a second war.
As Voldemort gains power (both before and after his return in Goblet of Fire), each
of the characters (protagonists and antagonists) are forced to confront the reality of
racial difference and prejudice, and to make a choice about where they stand. More
than simply emphasizing the importance of the coming conflict to Harry’s develop-
ment, or to the development of the films’ narrative arcs, these choices fundamentally
inform the lives of the central characters, and through them, the worlds of both wiz-
ards and the audience more broadly.
Harry is the most obviously transformed by difference, and his choices are the most
central, as the audience experiences the Wizarding world (and its wars) through his
point of view. Significantly, he is a protagonist who is literally and figuratively marked
by prejudice: aside from the physical and mental damage left by his abusive childhood
with the Muggle Dursleys, Harry has been “marked” by Voldemort himself, whose
failed attempt to kill him as an infant—driven, Dumbledore explains, by his maniacal
hatred of the tolerance for which Harry’s parents have fought—leaves Harry with a
lightning-bolt shaped scar. The scar is Harry’s most oft-mentioned feature, immedi-
ately and viscerally identifying him with both Voldemort’s racism and his parents’ sac-
rifice to end that racism, and a constant reminder of the importance of his continuing
opposition to Voldemort’s aims.
Harry’s scar, we find out in film five, is conferred to him by Voldemort through the
dual strains of destiny and choice. Voldemort is destined to choose his own opposition,
and he acts on the information of spy Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) to mark Harry,
inadvertently creating his own downfall: “the one with the power to vanquish the Dark
Lord approaches. . . and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have
power the Dark Lord knows not . . . and either must die at the hand of the other for
neither can live while the other survives.” More so even than the scar itself, the exis-
tence of the prophesy marks Harry as Voldemort’s opposition, establishing him as
the unlikely David to Voldemort’s (and, more broadly, racial prejudice’s) Goliath.
On the surface, the revelation of the prophesy in film three (Prisoner of Azkaban)
complicates the series’ emphasis on individual choice regarding racial difference, since
its existence suggests that Harry opposes Voldemort only because he must. However,
the films make explicit that Harry is Voldemort’s naturalized opposition, rather than
his natural opposite; their upbringing, we see in films four, five, and six, are exception-
ally similar—both orphaned and considered freaks for their magical abilities by their
caretakers, they are gifted with the unusual (and taboo) ability to speak with snakes,
and are summarily shunned. They are both powerful and alternatively envied and
resented for that power, which they each abuse at various times in their tenure at Hog-
warts. These similarities (which are frequently pointed out to Harry by Voldemort

237
Harry Potter Series, The

himself ) lead Harry to doubt the purity of his own principles and thus his ability to
truly defend them, even in the face of temptation and, eventually, death.
Despite all of this, Harry chooses at every turn to maintain the principle of tolerance
over the ease and seeming logic of prejudice. His hatred of the Dursley’s does not stop
him from saving his horrid cousin Dudley’s life at the expense of his own school career
in Order of the Phoenix; the abuse he suffers at the hands of his schoolmates when they
believe he is the Heir of Slytherin (Chamber of Secrets) and later lying about Volde-
mort’s return (Order of the Phoenix, Goblet of Fire) does not stop him from risking
his life to stop Voldemort from taking over Hogwarts and killing students; his own
desire to fit in and be “normal,” desires that would be easily granted by accepting the
friendship of Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), does not stop him from recognizing Draco’s
arrogance and prejudice and befriending the poor and picked-on Ron Weasley (Rupert
Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), instead; his superior magical ability
ultimately does not lead him down the path toward racial superiority—he befriends
wizards and beasts whose abilities and species differ from his own, including a house-
elf, a half-giant, several Muggle-borns, centaurs, and goblins. Significantly, these deci-
sions are the results of Harry’s humanity rather than his magic; it is not his status as
Voldemort’s equal that governs his life, but his decisions as an empathetic human boy
that lead him to make what the audience can repeatedly identify as the correct moral
choice. As Dumbledore remarks to Harry in films two and four: “It is our choices,
Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities”; and these choices
are often between “what is right and what is easy.” As Harry himself tells Voldemort
when he expels the Dark Lord from his mind at the conclusion of Order of the Phoenix,
“You’re the weak one—and you’ll never know love or friendship. And I feel sorry
for you.” Here, Harry identifies the reason for his own inevitable triumph over
Voldemort’s prejudice not as magic, but as an ability to empathize and love; an ability
that transcends the artificial trappings of race or class.
The emphasis on choosing to embrace tolerance and confront prejudice extends
beyond the experiences and characterizations of Harry; indeed, for the other major
characters on both sides of the ideological divide, these choices are similarly a defining
feature, and the barometer by which the audience is encouraged to judge them.
Albus Dumbledore, for example, perhaps the single greatest champion of Muggle
rights and general equality in the series, is far from uniformly portrayed, and as the
movies progress, his character becomes less and less unambiguously positive. Indeed,
Dumbledore’s position as “the great liberal” is jeopardized by both his implicit tolera-
tion of slavery (the servitude of House Elves at Hogwarts). Similarly, despite his mov-
ing speech about the importance of inter-House (and intercultural) unity at the
conclusion of Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore endorses the continuation of the House sys-
tem, which characterizes each student by their “traits” and separates them into one of
four like-minded communities. Finally, Dumbledore reveals to Harry that it is his
own mismanagement of Tom Riddle that led to the rise of his alter ego, Voldemort
(and, in the seventh book-cum-movie, he is revealed to have encouraged the develop-
ing anti-Muggle ideology of the earlier Dark Wizard, Grindlewald). He is twice-
absolved of these sins, first by his death in Half-Blood Prince—an ultimate sacrifice

238
 Harry Potter Series, The

echoing that made by Harry’s parents—and by Harry’s explicit forgiveness. This for-
giveness is symbolic of the shift in moral authority that occurs over the course of the
films. Though Dumbledore is the adult, and the original bearer of wisdom, in the
end it is Harry, by virtue of his decisions to recognize difference and to incorporate
those differences into his definition of equality, rather than to allow them to stand in
opposition to it, who has gained moral authority. In the end, while forgiveness is liter-
ally granted by Harry to Dumbledore, his redemption transcends any absolution
Harry can provide. Dumbledore, too, chooses to let go of his prejudices and to fight
first his erstwhile companion Grindlewald, and later his pupil, Voldemort, and thus,
despite his many suspect moral choices, remains a positive character on the whole.
On the other side of the war, two characters stand in complicated relationship to
racial prejudice as well, but are ultimately “redeemed” in the eyes of the audience by
virtue of their choices. The first, Severus Snape, is alternatively the ultimate wrongdoer
and Harry’s protector throughout the series. At the culmination of film six, Snape kills
Dumbledore, rather than letting Draco Malfoy do it, but in Deathly Hallows, he is
entirely redeemed by Harry, and the viewer, as it is revealed that he did so on Dumb-
ledore’s orders. In a series of memories and overheard conversations, it is further
revealed that Snape, out of love for Harry’s “Muggleborn” mother, Lily, has made the
conscious choice to turn away from the prejudiced views of Voldemort and his fol-
lowers. Not only does Snape change sides, but he also frequently puts his life in danger
to save Harry and the rest of the students, several times upsetting the plans of
Voldemort’s (true) followers. Finally, Snape’s death makes him a martyr, and for his
sacrifice, he receives the ultimate honor from Harry—Harry gives his name to his sec-
ond son, Albus Severus.
Another “dark” character, Draco Malfoy, Harry’s childhood rival and son of
Voldemort’s right hand, Lucius is the first character in the books to introduce the term
“Mudblood,” and he is characterized as terrible from the start, embracing both racist
and classist ideology. Moreover, in Half-Blood Prince, Malfoy is ordered by Voldemort
to kill Dumbledore, a task before which he displays doubt, and in a series of moments
chronicling his preparation for this task, we see not a cold-blooded killer or a staunch
believer in racist principles, but a scared young man who, Dumbledore reminds Harry
and the audience, is, after all, still a boy.
The responsibility and importance of choice in Harry Potter falls equally on the
shoulders of adults and children—a significant and deliberate detail, given the films’
largely young audience and its simultaneously fantastic and realistic settings. Ultimately,
the choices to embrace difference and work toward tolerance even in the face of seemingly
impossible opposition made by various characters encourage viewers to acknowledge the
necessity of acknowledging difference and working to move beyond intolerance in their
own world, regardless of their age, and even without the aid of magic.

References
Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan. “Harry Potter and the Fidelity Debate.” In Aragay, Mir-
eia, ed. Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, and Authorship. New York: Rodopi, 2005.

239
Heaven’s Gate

Gupta, Suman. Re-Reading Harry Potter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Mendlesohn, Farah. “Crowning the King: Harry Potter and the Construction of Authority.” In
Whited, Lana A., ed. The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenome-
non. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.

—Caitlin Gallogly

HEAVEN’S GATE. In the spring of 1892, Wyoming witnessed a violent standoff

between rival groups of homestead settlers and hired gunmen. Known as the Johnson
County War, the incident was one of dozens of western range wars that pitted indepen-
dent ranchers and small property owners against wealthy cattle owners. Such range
wars have long been a staple of Hollywood westerns, and the Johnson County War
has been a particularly popular subject. Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) is a
provocative retelling of that event, and its infamous production debacle ultimately
changed the way Hollywood studios would operate.
Heaven’s Gate was the third major Hollywood film loosely based on the Johnson
County War. In that legendary conflict, homesteaders and small cattle operators were
targeted as “rustlers” by large stockowners affiliated with the Wyoming Stock Growers
Association (WSGA). The politically powerful WSGA, whose profits were threatened
by overproduction and competition from homesteaders, was implicated in the killings
of James Averill and Ellen Watson (a.k.a. Ella Watson) and later hired armed vigilantes
to hunt down alleged rustlers. The settlers fought back in two violent clashes that killed
four people before the U.S. Cavalry intervened and negotiated a surrender.
The Johnson County War was first immortalized in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The
Virginian. In this account and subsequent film versions, the Virginian hero is a hired
hand of the cattlemen who hunts down the rustler villain and tames the West for civ-
ilization. In 1953, Shane revisited the conflict but cast Alan Ladd as a gun-toting
drifter who defends the beleaguered Wyoming homesteaders from greedy cattle bar-
ons. Heaven’s Gate perpetuates this neopopulist view, but with a new twist. In Cimino’s
hands, the homesteaders are transformed into impoverished Eastern European immi-
grants who unwittingly settle on Wyoming rangelands controlled by wealthy British
and American cattlemen. Viewing the immigrant homesteaders as “thieves, rustlers
and anarchists,” the cattle association launches an invasion that is aided and abetted
by the U.S. Cavalry at every step. The U.S. government is thus complicit in the capi-
talist takeover of the West, and the plight of the homesteaders is aggravated by their
identity as racial outsiders in an Anglo-controlled region. In reality, however, the
immigrant dimension is fictional, as is the vaunted love triangle among Nate Cham-
pion, Averill, and Watson (the latter two were actually lynched in 1889—two years
before the vigilante action). Moreover, the ultraviolent battle scene at the TA Ranch
vastly exaggerates what was actually a three-day standoff with only two casualties.
Heaven’s Gate can be seen as a post-1960s allegory of western conquest, a fictional
story that anticipated many themes of the New Western History that was emerging
in the 1980s—racial and ethnic tensions, class conflict, and the vital role of women.

240
 High Noon

Condemning the capitalist exploitation of the West, the film highlighted the racial and
class conflicts that fueled the range wars and other battles over western lands and re-
sources. Reflecting the new feminist sensibilities of the 1970s, the film also offered
women more instrumental roles, with Ella Watson and other frontier women bran-
dishing rifles and fighting alongside the men.
Ultimately, the film’s convoluted plot and disastrous production made it a colossal
cinematic flop. Cimino—flush from his success with The Deer Hunter (1978)—had
insisted on dramatic scenery (filming was done in Kalispell, Montana, and Glacier
National Park), elaborate sets, and complex crowd and battle scenes that resulted in
unprecedented time and cost overruns. The initial release ran more than three-and-a-
half hours and cost a record $40 million, more than three times its approved budget.
When the film opened, it was savaged by the critics and closed after only a week. A
shorter version released a few months later did not fare much better. The financial
debacle for United Artists forced its sale to MGM and brought about stricter studio
control over directors and their budgets. The violent battle scene and accompanying
abuse of horses and other animals also stirred complaints by film crew members and
a protest by the American Humane Society. Thereafter, it would become standard
practice to have all films monitored by the Humane Society to ensure that no animals
were harmed during production. Finally, the disastrous experience of Heaven’s Gate was
a death knell to the already anemic western genre, which declined steadily until a mini-
revival in the 1990s.
See also: Western, The

References
Bach, Steven. Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film That Sank
United Artists. New York: Newmarket Press, 1999.
Johnson, Marilynn S. Violence in the West: The Johnson County Range War and Ludlow Range
War: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford Books, 2008.
—Marilynn S. Johnson

HIGH NOON. Fred Zinneman’s High Noon (1952) is considered by many to be

one of the most important westerns in American film history. It has been included in
the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and placed on several “best
films” lists issued by the American Film Institute. Although it would go on to become
an iconic American western, however, the picture proved controversial when it was
released in 1952, as it was caught up in the Cold War politics of the day. Indeed,
director Howard Hawks, who would make Rio Bravo as both a filmic and political
response to High Noon, claimed that Zinneman’s film, with its screenplay by Carl
Foreman, was nothing more than an “unpatriotic,” cinematic attack on the HUAC
hearings and the blacklisting of members of the Hollywood community, one of whom
was Foreman.

241
High Noon

Promotional image for the 1952 film High Noon, directed by Fred Zinnemann. Pictured are (from
left) Katy Jurado, Grace Kelly, Gary Cooper, and Lloyd Bridges. (Photofest)

Unusual for its time, the film’s narrative is bounded both temporally and spatially,
unfolding over a few hours in the fictional town of Hadleyville. Although ostensibly
an “action movie,” the film is really more of a character study, as its story revolves
around the existential struggle engaged in by Sheriff Will Kane, played by Gary
Cooper. As the picture opens, we find a contented Kane readying himself for retire-
ment and a peaceful domestic life with the beautiful Amy (Grace Kelly), a Quaker
pacifist. Just before leaving town, however, he learns that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald),
a murderer whom Kane had previously arrested and who has been rotting away in jail, is
returning to town in order to exact his revenge.
Convinced that he has already fulfilled his responsibilities as Hadleyville’s Sheriff,
Kane heads out of town before Miller arrives. His powerful sense of duty gets the better
of him, however, and he returns to Hadleyville in order to fight the good fight. Assum-
ing that his fellow townspeople will rally to the cause of defending their home, Kane
sets about gathering together a group of deputies. Much to his dismay, he discovers
that his faith in the community has been misplaced, as man after man refuses to be
deputized. Even the man who has actually been serving as his deputy claims that the
risk is too great. After listening to his explanation for why he won’t fight, Kane simply
responds, “Go on home to your kids, Herb.”

242
 Hoop Dreams

Agreeing to meet with town leaders to talk about the situation, Kane enters a
church where the men are gathered. We quickly learn that although he is righteous,
Kane is not a particularly religious man. As the minister steps aside, then, the town
leaders convene their meeting, effectively changing the church from sacred space to
political civic center. Thanking Kane for his previous work, and acknowledging that
the quality of life in Hadleyville has improved dramatically since he became sheriff,
the leaders declare that the cost of preserving law and order is now too great, and they
insist that Kane leave town. They will submit to Miller’s demands in order to save
their lives, even if it means giving up some of the civil liberties they seem to hold
so dear.
At another point on his existential journey, Kane encounters Helen Ramirez (played
by the wonderful Mexican actress Katy Jurado), hotel owner and perhaps Kane’s old
lover. Having built up her business and made it successful, Helen encourages Kane
to confront Miller and preserve the law-and-order sensibility that would keep her live-
lihood intact. Helen and Amy share one of the film’s most memorable exchanges.
When Amy decides to leave town without Will, Helen derisively says to her: “What
kind of a woman are you? How can you leave him like this? Does the sound of guns
frighten you that much?” Not backing down an inch, Amy shoots back: “I’ve heard
guns. My father and brother were killed by guns. They were on the right side but that
didn’t help them any when the shooting started.”
Even though being on the right side may cost him his life, however, Kane decides to
face down Miller and his gang. In the film’s climatic scenes, during which all of the lit-
eral “western action” takes place, Kane defeats Miller—interestingly, it is Amy who
saves her husband’s life, taking up a gun, good Quaker that she is, and shooting down
one of Miller’s henchmen. Having once more made Hadleyville safe for its cowering
residents, Kane rips the badge from his chest and disgustedly flings it down on the
dusty street. Mounting a buckboard wagon with Amy, he and his betrothed head into
the sunset.
See also: Western, The

References
Burton, Howard A. “ ‘High Noon’: Everyman Rides Again.” Quarterly of Film Radio and Televi-
sion 8(1), 1953: 80–86.
Byman, Jeremy. Showdown at High Noon: Witch-hunts, Critics, and the End of the Western.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004.
Drummond, Phillip. High Noon. London: British Film Institute, 2008.

—Michael L. Coulter

HOOP DREAMS. In 1987, three young filmmakers, Steve James, Peter Gilbert,
and Fred Marx, scraped together $2,500 to make a half-hour documentary about
Chicago high school basketball. Seven years later, its budget now expanded to
$75,000 and the length of the film to three hours, Hoop Dreams won the Audience

243
Hoop Dreams

Promotional image for the 1994 documentary film Hoop Dreams, directed by Steve James. Pictured
is William Gates. (Photofest)

Award at the Sundance Festival, opened the New York Film Festival (the first docu-
mentary ever to be accorded that honor), and, after netting more than $8 million in
theatrical grosses, went into video release through New Line Home Video. Its con-
spicuous omission from the nominations for the 1994 Motion Picture Academy’s Best
Documentary category only garnered it more publicity, making it one of the most
talked-about movies of that year. Its most vocal and enthusiastic champion, critic
Roger Ebert, declared it “one of the best films about American life that I’ve ever seen.”
Virtually overnight the filmmakers and their subjects became celebrities, and the term
“hoop dreams” quickly passed into the national vernacular.
In an important sense, Hoop Dreams was never a finished film, but a work in
progress. During the protracted and tedious process of shooting it, James says he and
his collaborators sometimes felt like they were “living inside an unfolding novel.”
Rather than imposing closure and tidy resolutions onto its materials, in the manner
of a standard narrative film, it attempts, to borrow a memorable phrase from cinéma
vérité filmmaker Chris Marker, “to capture life in the process of becoming history.”
Thus, it joins the ranks of other vérité classics from the last 40 years—David and
Albert Maysles’s Salesman (l960), Chris Marker’s Le joli mai (l963), D. A. Pennebaker’s
Don’t Look Back (l965), Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA (l976), Bruce Sinofsky’s
Brother’s Keeper (l993), and the Up series of Paul Almond and Michael Apted—that
chase the ongoing present, whose dramatic shape, meaning, and consequence continu-
ally reconfigure themselves. Hoop Dreams is dedicated to the proposition that history is
never fixed, that in its unmediated flow and raw stuff reside the world’s greatest stories.

244
 Hoop Dreams

Fresh out of grammar school and living in the Chicago housing projects, 14-year-
old African Americans Arthur Agee and William Gates are “hoop dreamers.” Gifted
basketball players, they think only of breaking out of the ghetto into the big time of
professional athletics. They receive partial scholarships to the prestigious St. Joseph
High School, which is renowned for its basketball program. The boys, however, are
ill prepared, socially, academically, and physically, for the environment in which they
find themselves. Their fifth-grade education levels place them at the bottom of their
classes; they are out of touch with the lifestyles of the middle-class, white-dominated
population; and on the hard court they find themselves challenged by the relentless
pressures and demands of Coach Gene Pingatore.
The careers of William and Arthur radically diverge after they are enrolled at St.
Joseph. William quickly establishes himself on the varsity team and, as a result, garners
additional financial support from an enthusiastic backer, allowing him access to aca-
demic tutoring. Becoming a star, he suffers a serious knee injury during his junior year
and is forced to undergo several operations. Eventually he makes a comeback; and at
the end of his senior year he accepts a scholarship from Marquette University in Wis-
consin. Arthur, on the other hand, has not only failed to satisfy Coach Pingatore’s
demands (he is relegated to the freshman squad), but his mother has been unable to
keep up with the tuition payments at St. Joseph. The scenes of Agee rising before dawn
to make the long trek aboard the train to the prestigious school and of his mother dis-
cussing his precarious future there are particularly unsettling. In the end, lacking the
talent he needs to attract a backer such as the one who supported Gates, Arthur is
forced to transfer to Marshall Metro High School, an inner-city school that is pre-
dominantly black. Although his career blossoms under the black coach at Marshall,
Luther Bedford, Arthur’s grades and ACT scores make him ineligible for Division
One college scholarships. He finally accepts a scholarship to Mineral Area Junior
College in southern Missouri.
In the almost five years that pass during the making of the film, both boys change
tremendously. No longer basketball fanatics gazing raptly at televised images of NBA
superstars, dreaming of their own glory and future riches, they are now young men
who have endured defeats and frustrations; uncertain of their basketball prospects, they
are prepared to consider the career alternatives with which they are necessarily faced.
Other characters in this story are driven by dreams of their own. Coach Pingatore—
nicknamed “Ping”—is haunted by the glory days when he coached the fabulously tal-
ented Isaiah Thomas, who went on to become a Hall of Fame player with the Detroit
Pistons. Driven by the desire to win another state championship, Pingatore cannot let
go of the past, repeatedly showing his present charges videos of games in which
Thomas played—he desperately hopes that Gates will turn out to be another Isaiah
Thomas—and going so far as to place a life-sized cutout of Thomas in the locker room
as a constant reminder of what he believes might be accomplished with hard work and
dedication.
Ironically, and sadly, the great hope for a life free from the despair of the Chicago
inner city that William and Arthur hold out for the other members of their families
seems to have left these fragile people broken and bitter. William’s mother Emma, a

245
How Green Was My Valley

loving and caring woman who was abandoned by her husband several years before,
unfairly fixes her hopes on her teenage son; so too William’s older brother Curtis, once
a collegiate prospect but now a chronically unemployed idler, who fiercely lives out his
frustrated aspirations through William—“I see all my dreams in him,” says Curtis.
Arthur’s father, Bo—whom Arthur seems to love and loath in the same moment—is
a smooth-talking charmer whose good intentions for his family are destroyed by his
addiction to crack. Arthur’s mother Sheilah, who is also a loving and committed
parent, struggles to keep her family together in the face of chronic unemployment
and welfare cuts, all the while pursuing her own goal of a nursing career.
Unraveling the strands of their daily lives, the camera crosscuts restlessly among the
homes, the locker rooms, the classrooms, the streets, and the hard courts. Poignant
moments abound in this disturbing film: Arthur’s glee at being introduced to his hero,
Isaiah Thomas; William’s frustration as he struggles to recover from his painful knee
injury; Sheilah’s celebratory dance when she learns that she has passed her nurse’s certifi-
cation exams; Bo buying drugs on a local playground where Arthur practices; Coach
Pingatore gathering his team together to pray moments after he has brutally demeaned
them.
The acclaim of the festivals and the notoriety garnered from the Academy’s snub
made Hoop Dreams into a cause célèbre. David Letterman joked about the situation
during the Oscar ceremony and the partisan audience voiced its support. Tom Brokaw
featured the film on Dateline; and, in an event dubbed by the press “Hoops to the
Chief,” President Clinton went to the University of Arkansas to play some highly pub-
licized “one-on-one” with Arthur Agee. Agee autographed a basketball for his distin-
guished guest. Top Hollywood brass took notice. “It was pretty funny,” said co-
director James. “Typically, a guy would come up to us and say, ‘Your film was so amaz-
ing. It moved me. I want to remake it.’ Or somebody would say: ‘Guys, I can smell this
film; and it smells like something I want to do!’ Of course, I haven’t seen it yet. . . .”
See also: Documentary, The

References
Mamber, Stephen. Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1974.
Tibbetts, John (as “Jack Ketch). “Beyond the Camera: The Untold Story Behind the Making of
Hoop Dreams.” The World and I 10(10), October 1995.
—John C. Tibbetts

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY. In the sentimental drama How Green Was My
Valley (1941), director John Ford offered moviegoers the story of a Welsh coal-
mining community, including the close-knit Morgan family, caught in the upheaval
of economic transformation and labor unrest. Although Ford, who inherited the film
after original director William Wyler failed to meet Darryl Zanuck’s budget, was best

246
 How Green Was My Valley

known for his westerns, the movie was a critical success and earned him his third Oscar
for Best Director in the span of six years. More notably, How Green Was My Valley also
captured Best Picture honors for 1941, trumping two of the most acclaimed films in
Hollywood history: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon.
Ford’s story of community crisis and change struck a chord with audiences poised
between the dislocations of depression and war, but over the years commentators have
offered vastly differing interpretations of the movie’s legacy. The film’s champions
hailed Ford’s visual poetry, insisting that the movie was imagistically poignant enough
that it could be watched and understood without any sound at all. Harsher critics con-
cluded that the film was saccharine and unrealistic, making it one of the most overrated
productions of Hollywood’s “Golden Age.”
Adapted by screenwriter Philip Dunne from Richard Llewellyn’s best-selling novel
of the same title, How Green Was My Valley is one of Hollywood’s quintessentially nos-
talgic films. The story is the recollection by an aging man of the formative events and
people of his childhood. Because the film’s narrative is built around the memories of a
child, it is inherently wistful. At the same time, the film is a somber essay on the
destructive power of progress and the high cost of modernity. Time and change are
intruding on the idyllic mining community, bringing with them wage cuts, labor
unrest, and unionization. Shorn of its nostalgic gloss, the film is sometimes as dreary
as the black coal dust shrouding the Welsh hills in which it takes place.
The film is centered on young Huw Morgan (Roddy McDowall)—the audience
never sees the adult Huw, narrator of the film. Too young to join his father, Gwilym
(Donald Crisp), and his five older brothers in the mines, young Huw instead spends
time with his mother, Bess (Sara Allgood), marking the changes that occur around
him and taking stock of the tensions that accompany them. His earliest memories
include the budding but doomed romance between his sister Angharad (Maureen
O’Hara) and the town’s new preacher, Mr. Gruffyd (Walter Pidgeon). There is no short-
age of tragedy in Huw’s life, as he must overcome paralysis, a sadistic schoolmaster, and
several deaths, including that of his father who is killed in a mining accident.
Other memories recount the growing tension between father and sons as labor tur-
moil envelops the mines and Huw’s siblings resist and then finally revolt against their
father’s conservative values. Filming while the labor question was paramount in
America, Ford could easily have made How Green Was My Valley a radical film about
the labor movement, closer in spirit, for example, to The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Yet
Ford largely eschewed radical politics, choosing instead a tempered, centrist message,
defending the right and responsibility to organize but going little further. Ultimately,
the film was less about labor politics than it was about the disintegration of a way of
life and of a family. It is a film filled with longing for a time gone by, about a father’s
loss of control over his home and sons, and about values warped by progress.
Still, the film provides a nostalgic gloss to one of the great tensions of the twentieth
century: coupling the deep longing for what was with a faith, often childlike, and
always uncertain, in progress. Even as the green hills of the valley are blackened, the
Morgan family perseveres, finding strength in each other and in their memories.

247
How Green Was My Valley

How Green Was My Valley embraces the tensions at the story’s core, navigating radical
politics and mainstream values. In sum, it is a work indicative of Ford’s own conflicting
liberal and conservative instincts as well as his faith in America’s promise and ability to
overcome hard times.
See also: Ford, John; Melodrama, The

References
Dixon, Wheeler Winston, ed. American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1999.
McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001.
—Nathan M. Corzine

248
 v
I
IN THE COMPANY OF MEN. “The world of Neil LaBute is a battleground of
carnage between the sexes,” wrote critic Roger Ebert. “Men and women distrust one
another, scheme to humiliate one another, are inspired to fearsome depths of cruelty”
(Ebert, 2003). Nowhere is this more evident than in LaBute’s breakout film, In the
Company of Men (1997). There is a bone-hard, scalpel-clean precision to this film that
makes its cruelties even harder to bear; and even though the film proceeds from a
misogynistic plot hatched by two angry men, the ensuing tragic consequences know
no gender lines—pain, it seems, makes us all equal.
In the Company of Men revolves around Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt
Malloy), longtime office colleagues and friends who have gone on a six-week business
trip to a branch office of the corporation for which they work. Both have become dis-
affected after disastrous relationships with women, and both feel threatened by what
they regard as the unwelcome incursions of women into the work place. “Never lose
control,” proclaims Chad, “that’s the key to the universe.” On impulse, they decide
to “get even.” Chad, tall, handsome, square-jawed, and immaculate in his shirt and
tie, relates his plan to Howard, round-faced, dumpy, fair-haired: they will find a vul-
nerable woman—preferably disadvantaged or disabled in some way—and, indepen-
dent of each other, woo and win her. At the end of six weeks, after they have both
won her heart, they will summarily dump her and chortle in glee at their victory.
Their target is Christine (Stacy Edwards), a typist in their office building. She has
been afflicted with deafness since she was a young girl. For a time, all goes according
to plan. With all the attention lavished upon her—executed with all the proper gal-
lantries—Christine is an easy target. She is dazzled by her newfound social life, even
as Chad and Howard laugh behind her back, amused at what they refer to as her
“retard” voice, at her difficulty in speaking, at the spit that occasionally gathers at
the corners of her mouth. Weeks pass. Gradually, inevitably perhaps, both men realize
that their quarry is actually quite attractive. Indeed, they are beginning to enjoy
spending time with Christine. What had begun as a vicious game has turned into
something quite different. Now, we wonder, who will be the victim of this wicked
conspiracy?

249
In the Heat of the Night

Interestingly, the men go about their daily rounds in stultifying fashion—in the air-
port on the way to their assignment, in men’s rooms, in their offices, in the boardroom,
in fast-food restaurants, in hotel rooms, they are disturbingly indifferent. They live
bleak, featureless lives, brightened only by the vitality of the bloodthirst that marks
their perverse office sports. There is a terrible unsettling moment when Chad forces
an office underling to drop his pants to see if he “has the right kind of balls” for the
job. The disturbing sexism of their humor emerges in lines such as, “What’s the differ-
ence between a golf ball and a woman’s G-spot?” Answer: “I’ll spend twenty minutes
looking for a golf ball!” Each setup is punctuated by title cards tracing the chronology
of the six weeks, and each title is accompanied by a relentlessly pounding music track
(the only moments during which music is heard). Wisely, the film keeps the ill-fated
Christine at a distance, which emphasizes her subtle allure and enlists our empathy.
Things seemingly unfold in their predictable way, but then Howard falls hopelessly—
helplessly—in love with Christine. When she tells him that she is actually in love with
Chad, Howard goes crazy. In an excruciating scene, he confesses the plot to her. It’s a des-
perate gambit: in a frantic attempt to prove his own love, he must denounce Chad’s.
Christine sobs inarticulately and lashes out at Howard. Later she confronts Chad. Pro-
testing at first, Chad drops all pretense and admits his duplicity. “How does it feel?” he
asks gently, cupping her chin in his hand. She slaps him. Silence. “Is that all?” he asks after
a moment, smiling slightly.
Weeks later, Howard, distraught, sick, lacerated by a guilty conscience, comes to
talk to Chad. At this point, Chad confesses that the girl he claimed had left him had
never really left at all—she’s been with him all along, an unwitting co-conspirator, as
it were. “Then why the game with Christine?” asks Howard, bewildered. “Because I
could do it,” Chad replies callously. In an epilogue, Howard follows Christine to her
new job in a bank. He tries to approach her but is blocked by a barrier in front of
her desk. Helplessly, he shouts out to her. She, of course, ignores him. He shouts
louder, then louder still. Her deafness is her trump card. The film’s final shot is from
her point of view: Howard’s mouth moves noiselessly—a brief moment that defines
the entire film. The very thing that made her vulnerable to the men’s machinations
in the first place, her deafness proves to be the weapon that protects her in the end.

References
Baitz, Jon Robin. “Neil LaBute.” Bomb, 83, Spring 2003.
Ebert, Roger. “The Shape of Things.” Chicago Sun-Times, May 9, 2003.
Lahr, John. “A Touch of Bad.” New Yorker, July 5, 1999: 42–49.
—John C. Tibbetts

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. With race riots igniting cities from Detroit to
Newark and university protests exploding across America, the civil unrest that marked
the late 1960s and early 1970s reached a fever pitch in 1967. While America attempted
to achieve a sense of calm and stability, Hollywood was attempting to sort through its

250
 In the Heat of the Night

diverse group of contenders for the 1968 Best Picture Academy award: Arthur Penn’s
Bonnie and Clyde, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, Richard Fleischer’s Doctor Dolittle,
Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of
the Night. Exhibiting neither the visceral counterculture spirit of Bonnie and Clyde
and The Graduate nor the Production Code-friendly appeal of Doctor Dolittle and
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Jewison’s film, which follows the investigation into the
murder of a wealthy industrialist in Sparta, Mississippi, captured an America in flux.
The first interracial male narrative in which a black protagonist is a symbol of law
and order, In the Heat of the Night, while raising questions about racism in the Deep
South, may properly be understood as a film that is fundamentally concerned with
small-town power politics. When deputy Sam Wood (Warren Oates) finds Virgil
Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), a black man, alone at a train station after the body of Philip
Colbert, a wealthy Chicago investor looking to build a factory in Sparta, appears on
the town’s main street, Wood brings Tibbs to the newly installed police chief Bill Gil-
lespie (Rod Steiger) for questioning. Learning that Tibbs is carrying a large amount of
cash, the deeply racist Gillespie suspects that Tibbs robbed and killed Colbert. After
putting in a call to Philadelphia, he is embarrassed to discover that Tibbs is actually a
well-respected homicide detective who was simply visiting his mother. Grudgingly,
Gillespie seeks Tibbs’s help with the investigation, a decision that leads to numerous
heated exchanges between the two. Pressured to close the case quickly, Gillespie
attempts to pin the murder on one of a number of suspects—including petty thief
Harvey Oberst (Scott Wilson) and, eventually, his own deputy Sam Wood.
Dissatisfied with Gillespie’s efforts, Colbert’s widow (Lee Grant) demands that
Tibbs be allowed to conduct a full investigation. Tibbs’s investigation eventually leads
him to question a wealthy, white plantation owner and Colbert rival, Eric Endicott
(Larry Gates). During the course of their discussion, Endicott slaps Tibbs; undaunted,
Tibbs slaps Endicott back—ultimately dubbed “the slap heard ’round the world”—
much to Gillespie’s surprise. Although he believes that Endicott is indeed involved in
the murder, Tibbs eventually discovers that the killer is actually not Endicott but café
employee Ralph Henshaw (Anthony James)—desperate to secure funds for an abor-
tion after impregnating a local teen, Delores Purdy (Quentin Dean), Henshaw killed
Colbert in a botched robbery attempt. With the investigation complete, Tibbs and
Gillespie exchange terse goodbyes at the train station, seemingly having cultivated a
mutual respect for one another.
Though popular with audiences and admired by the majority of critics, the film had
its detractors. Some argued that its portrayal of the relationship between Tibbs and
Gillespie was unrealistic and covered over the incendiary black/white racial tensions
of the day, especially in deep South states like Mississippi; and further, that the picture
presented a one-dimensional depiction of the South. Poitier, who had starred in
three highly regarded films that year—including To Sir, with Love and another Best
Picture Academy Award nominee, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—was placed in an
untenable position, as he was pressured by the media to speak out about black/white
relations in America and the increase in racial violence that continued to plague the
nation. Resisting these rather forceful entreaties, Poitier may have hurt his chances to

251
Independence Day

capture an Academy Award for any of his performances that year—he failed even to be
nominated. Admittedly, though, it was an extraordinarily competitive year—Poitier
had co-starred with eventual Best Actor winner Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night,
and with screen legend Spencer Tracy, in his last performance, in Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner?, and Dustin Hoffman was also a contender for his work in The Graduate. In
the end, the awards would be split across the powerful films in competition that year,
with In the Heat of the Night earning the Best Picture Oscar. Still respected today, In
the Heat of the Night spawned two sequels, They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (1970) and
The Organization (1971), as well as an eponymous, eight-season-long television series.
See also: African Americans in Film; Melodrama, The; Poitier, Sidney

References
Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New
York: Penguin, 2008.
Levine, Andrea. “Sidney Poitier’s Civil Rights: Rewriting the Mystique of White Womanhood
in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night.” American Literature 73(2),
June 2001: 366–86.
Schickel, Richard, and John Simon, eds. Film 67/68: An Anthology by the National Society of
Film Critics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.
—Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield

INDEPENDENCE DAY. Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) combines

alien invasion, disaster, heroism, and the genius of science—or at least of science fic-
tion. It celebrates American nationalism, while claiming to affirm the glories of the
global community. The story is a simple one: with the United States leading the way,
the nations of the world must put aside their differences and come together to battle
rapacious aliens—who ominously arrive on Earth on the eve of Independence Day.
Emmerich was an inspired choice to direct Independence Day. Having helmed the
Manchurian Candidate-esque Universal Soldier (1992)—in which cyborglike UniSols,
programmed during a covert operation in Vietnam to use their deadly skills as a force
for good, become a threat to the civilized world—and especially Stargate—in which a
scientist and U.S. military troops travel across the universe to a planet where a mad-
man is hatching a plan to destroy the Earth with a nuclear weapon—Emmerich had
a feel for how to make a “the world must be saved” action picture. Interestingly, following
the success of Independence Day, Emmerich would go on to direct Godzilla (1998) (crazed
giant reptile threatens New York City) The Day after Tomorrow (2004) (global warming
becomes a nuclear weaponlike menace that could initiate a new Ice Age, threatening
Earth’s existence); 10,000 B. C. (2008) (a young hunter must travel to the ends of the
Earth to battle evil warlords who threaten the survival of his entire tribe); and 2012
(2009) (a global cataclysm threatens to bring the world to an end).
Of all Emmerich’s films, Independence Day is probably his best—and most jingois-
tic. The story begins on July 2nd, when massive alien battleships suddenly appear

252
 Independence Day

Photo showing the special effects in a scene from the movie Independence Day, released by Twentieth
Century-Fox. The scene shows the White House being blown up in an attack by aliens from outer
space. Independence Day cost $75 million to make and earned $306 million. (STR/AFP/Getty
Images)

above the major cities of the world, coming out of the clouds like a menacing darkness.
Soon after, they begin their attack. With extraordinary special effects, a ship above
New York is shown focusing an enormous death ray on the Empire State Building.
UFO lovers standing atop the building are blown to smithereens, while those on the
streets below run from an inferno of explosions and flying cars. The same thing hap-
pens in Washington D.C., but Air Force One manages to whisk the president of the
United States, Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman), to safety. Accompanying him on
the iconic plane are his daughter and a computer whiz, David Levinson (Jeff Gold-
blum), who happened to be in the White House warning the president about the
impending attack.
The aliens in this film—the ultimate ethnic Others—are the kind that people love
to hate. Slimy, tentacled creatures, they lack mouths and communicate telepathically.
Traveling across the galaxy—much as Hitler blitzkrieged his way across Europe—they
attack and conquer each successive planet they encounter, extracting what resources
they can and leaving death and destruction in their wake. After an alien is captured
on earth, President Whitmore makes an effort to effect some kind of diplomatic
détente. The alien figure wants nothing to do with the president’s attempt at realpolitik
reconciliation, however, rejecting the idea of sharing the earth’s resources and making it
clear that it wants nothing more than to see all humans killed.
This graphic representation of ultimate evil, combined with immense power, works
to unite the peoples of the world in their struggle to survive. The U.S. resistance is led
by President Whitmore, an experienced fighter pilot. Also joining the fight is another

253
Indiana Jones

pilot, U.S. Marine Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith), and Levinson, who works to
disable the alien mother ship’s shields by planting a virus in the ship’s computer.
This film’s theme of uniting against hostile aliens shares features with earlier alien
invasion films—War of the Worlds (1953) and The Thing (1982), for example. As they
were in these earlier films, aliens are portrayed as grotesque and threatening worldwide
destruction. Unlike in those films, however, in Independence Day notions of global
independence are framed by an overarching nationalist vision constituted in relation
to the idea of American exceptionalism. Pivotal decisions concerning global defense
are made in the Oval Office, America’s national monuments are conspicuously dis-
played, American heroes fight the good fight, and President Whitmore gives an impas-
sioned speech proclaiming that only a shared victory can insure that humanity will live
to celebrate a global independence day: “Should we win the day,” declares Whitmore,
“the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the
world declared in one voice, ‘we will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanish
without a fight, we are going to live on, we are going to survive, today we celebrate
our independence day.’ ” Whitmore’s soaring rhetoric works its magic, and the mem-
bers of the earth’s global community—Israeli and Iraqi, Russian and Japanese, all per-
versely united under the banner of American nationalism—come together to make the
world, as Woodrow Wilson warned we must, safe for democracy.
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The; Science Fiction Films

References
Rickman, Gregg, ed. The Science Fiction Film Reader. New York: Limelight, 2004.
Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1997.
Thuerwaechter, Sabine. “National Holiday, National Epic, National Destruction: Second Order
Semiology in Independence Day and Beyond.” Extrapolation 48(3), Winter 2007.
—Susan de Gaia

INDIANA JONES. Dr. Indiana “Indy” Jones (Harrison Ford) is the title character
of a popular franchise developed by film school friends George Lucas and Steven
Spielberg. The series was built primarily on three films: Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade (1989). After a two-decade absence from the big screen, Jones returned in
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). In terms of content, theme,
and style, the Indiana Jones movies demonstrate nostalgia for times of high adventure
and excitement.
The original trilogy takes place before World War II, mimicking the action-packed
tone of movies of the day. Set in 1936, Raiders sees archaeologist Jones pressed by the
U.S. Government to prevent Hitler’s forces from recovering the Lost Ark of the
Covenant. Teaming with lost love Marion (Karen Allen) in Nepal, Indy heads on to
Egypt where he finds the Ark, only to lose it to the Nazis. The wrath of God seems

254
 Indiana Jones

to strike down the Nazis when

the Ark is opened. Indy survives,
but he is disheartened when his
own government takes the Ark,
placing it in a strange warehouse.
Temple of Doom is a prequel of
sorts. This 1935 adventure sees
Indy fleeing Chinese gangsters.
Accompanied by his sidekick
Short Round (Jonathan Ke
Quan) and singer Willie Scott
(Kate Capshaw), Indy is caught
up in a struggle to rescue an
Indian village from a Thuggee
cult. Last Crusade opens with a
1912 adventure for young Indy
(River Phoenix), and then shifts
over to a 1938 battle against the
Nazis. This time Indy must help
his father, Dr. Henry Jones
(played marvelously against type
by Sean Connery), stop the vil-
lains from acquiring the Holy
Grail. Crystal Skull jumps ahead
to 1957 for some Cold War
action against the Soviets. Open-
ing in the mysterious warehouse
from Raiders, the film has Indy
working to prevent the Soviets Scene from the 1989 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,
from discovering the secret to directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Harrison Ford.
the alien skulls. Indy discovers (Photofest)
an unknown son in Mutt Williams
(Shia LaBeouf) and is reunited with Mutt’s mother, Marion.
Filled with daring exploits and adventure, one signature of the franchise is that each
movie has several long action sequences. In Raiders, for example, a tense escape from
the snake-infested Well of Souls leads directly into a thrilling fight on a grounded fly-
ing wing aircraft; this, in turn, is followed by a lengthy chase involving a truck convoy.
Whether menaced by snakes, a bruiser of a flight mechanic, or being dragged behind a
truck from which he has been thrown, Indy is in danger from one moment to the next.
Although the title character is an accomplished archaeologist and university profes-
sor, Indiana Jones is no stuffy academic. Rather, he is perfectly suited for the kinds of
wild situations he often encounters. Iconic in his dusty leather jacket and brown
fedora, with his favorite bullwhip and pistol by his side, Indy is a two-fisted
everyman-adventurer in the classic American mode. He can plan, but he also relies

255
Indiana Jones

on his intuition. Racing off to rescue the Ark in Raiders, he is asked by his Egyptian
friend Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) what his plans are. His famous reply: “I don’t know.
I’m making this up as I go along.” A scrappy fighter, Indy can and often does endure a
great deal of punishment. Both physically and mentally agile, however, he usually
emerges victorious from his brawls. Although he almost always escapes mortal danger
because he is daringly creative, he is also sometimes ridiculously lucky. In Temple of
Doom, for example, Indy, Willie, and Short Round survive what seems to be certain
death by jumping from a crashing plane, just in the nick of time, into an inflatable raft,
which they then ride down a snow-covered mountain into a raging river.
In addition to all the action, the Indiana Jones pictures also incorporate moments of
horror. One signature element of the franchise is that in each film, Indy encounters
large numbers of fear-inducing animals. Phobic when it comes to snakes, his courage
is put to the test in Raiders when he discovers that the Well of Souls, the location of
the Ark, is squirming with countless serpents—”Snakes, why did it have to be snakes!”
Although he apparently suffers no phobias in regard to these vermin—although we
certainly may!—in Temple of Doom our hero must navigate a tunnel of insects; in Last
Crusade, he must find his way through a catacomb overrun with rats; and in Crystal
Skull he must face army ants that devourer human flesh with carnivorous zeal.
Other horrors involve the fates of many of the villains in the films. In Raiders, Nazis
Toht (Ronald Lacy) and Dietrich (Wolf Kahler) essentially melt away when they make
the mistake of looking into the opened Ark, while the head of evil archaeologist Belloq
(Paul Freeman) explodes. Last Crusade sees traitorous Donovan (Julian Glover) die from
super-speed aging when he drinks from a bejeweled cup he mistakes for the Holy Grail,
and in Temple of Doom, Soviet villainess Spalko (Cate Blanchett) is obliterated in a psy-
chic encounter with aliens. Perhaps, though, the most famous horror sequence of the
franchise comes from the latter film. In Temple, Thuggee cult leader Mola Ram (Amrish
Puri) uses his hand to pull the still-beating hearts from the chests of his victims. (Interest-
ingly, public reaction to this special effect inspired the creation of the PG-13 rating.)
The Indiana Jones films implicitly configure the times before World War II as the
last era of great adventure. In a stylistic mode reminiscent of older films (such as the
opening moments of 1942’s Casablanca), Indy travels that world through a montage
that superimposes the mode of transportation onto a red line making its way across a
brown map to places like Egypt, India, and Brazil. Indy is a savvy traveler, wise to
the importance of respecting the local customs. The films are not always as respectful
as Indy himself. Although not all people of color are portrayed as savages, villains from
these “older cultures” often are, especially when they appear in large numbers. The
Thuggee cultists from Temple of Doom and the tribal guardians of the temple in Crystal
Skull are particularly salient examples. Temple of Doom also gives another example of
this “third world” stereotyping: Indy, Willie, and Short Round are guests at a banquet
at which items of food are presented as nothing short of bizarre, and Indy and Short
Round laugh derisively at Willie’s attempts to deal with chilled monkey brains served
right from the animal’s skull.
True villainy in the Indiana Jones universe is clearly equated with the Nazis, how-
ever. Indeed, Indy is twice contrasted with evil archaeologists in the employ of Hitler:

256
 Indiana Jones

Raiders’ Belloq and Last Crusade’s Dr. Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody). Although not a
Nazi himself, Belloq is willing to use Hitler’s ambitions and lead the Nazi expedition to
recover the Ark in order to further his own interests. Indy is disgusted by Belloq’s alle-
giances; although, ironically, it is Belloq who points out that there is little difference
between the two adventurers. Schneider’s Nazi connections are particularly troubling,
as she is also a love interest of Indy. At one point in Last Crusade, Indy and his father
have covertly pursued Schneider to Berlin. Indy confronts her at a book burning rally,
hammering home the point that the Nazis seek to extinguish knowledge. An amusing
aside then sees Indy accidentally meeting Hitler, with the dictator mistaking Indy for
an autograph seeker. In drawing these contrasts, the films seem to gloss over Indy’s
own motives for relic hunting: he thinks items belong in museums for all to see—
not quite the same as returning materials to their native cultures.
Although the moral ideology expressed in the Indiana Jones films is typically made
explicit, the shadowy metaphysical entities that embody that morality are more diffi-
cult to divine. Still, it is clear that higher powers are at work in the films. Opening
the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders, for example, evokes the wrath of some “what,” pre-
sumably the God of the Old Testament (made manifest within a decidedly Christian
context), that rains down in full-force-special-effects-wonder on the Nazis; and drink-
ing from the Holy Grail—the Last Supper cup of Jesus—heals the mortally wounded
Henry and keeps an ancient crusader alive for centuries. In a less religiously miraculous
sense, the Sankara stones in Temple of Doom seem to possess magical powers. In the
final battle with Mola Ram, for instance, the stones burn and appear to provide Indy
with a spiritual strength that allows him finally to overcome his tenacious foe. Interest-
ingly, the films never provide us with definitive answers to the metaphysical questions
they raise. While Henry Jones does believe in something that transcends the finite
world, his son Indy is more pragmatic. Although in each of the films, Indy encounters
something mysterious, he never really pauses to consider what that something might
be. (It may be that Crystal Skull violates these unwritten rules to a certain extent, as
the film provides us with a great deal of exposition and suggests that the skull in ques-
tion could possibly be the product of alien, albeit not divine, beings.)
Two more themes are also characteristic of the Indiana Jones films. The first is intense
yet unsustainable romance. The embodiment of the iconic American hero who must not
be tied down by the things of civilization, Indy never seems to be able to keep a romantic
relationship alive between films; still, as befits our filmic heroes, he is always paired with a
woman he loves and leaves. (Interestingly, Crystal Skull sees an older Indy [and an older
Harrison Ford] finally settling down, as he is reunited with and marries Marion.)
Although missing from Raiders, the films in the series also explore the theme of
fatherhood. (This is familiar thematic territory for collaborators Lucas and Spielberg,
who, in their own individual films, have examined the role of the father, or the
father-figure, as both breaker and redeemer within the family structure.) In Temple of
Doom, for instance, Indy reluctantly serves as a tough yet compassionate father figure
for Short Round; in Last Crusade, Indy and Henry must negotiate their own, tortured
father-son relationship; and finally, in Crystal Skull, Indy is presented with the son he
never knew, and a new family is formed.

257
Insider, The

Never quite ascending to the dizzying merchandising heights of the Star Wars fran-
chise, the Indiana Jones movies have still spawned a frenzy of spin-offs. In addition to
all the individually licensed products, the Indy character has appeared in a variety of
other media: novels, comic books, and videogames. One notable example is The Young
Indiana Jones Chronicles, a television series that debuted in 1992. The series focused on
the adventures of Indy as a child (Corey Carrier), or more often as a teen (Sean Patrick
Flannery). In the show, audiences saw Indy grow into his role as the great adventurer,
as he encountered a host of famous historical figures.
While the Indiana Jones series has not inspired as many cinematic imitators as Star
Wars or Star Trek, the adventurous spirit of the franchise can certainly be seen in mov-
ies like King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and Romancing the Stone (1984). Perhaps the
greatest accomplishment the franchise can claim, however, is that it successfully
refreshed the spirit of a more down-to-earth American adventure hero in the era of sci-
ence fiction blockbusters. As his many fans from all over the world are aware, adven-
ture has a name, and that name is Indiana Jones.
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The; Spielberg, Steven

References
Morris, Nigel. The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. London: Wallflower, 2007.
Pollack, Dale. Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas. New York: Harmony Books,
1983. Reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1999.
Rinzler, J. W., and Laurent Bouzereau. The Complete Making of Indiana Jones: The Definitive
Story behind All Four Films. New York: Del Rey 2008.
—Michael G. Robinson

INSIDER, THE. Departing from the action-adventure and crime film genres for
the first time in his career, writer/director Michael Mann created a scathing indictment
of the American cigarette and television news industries with The Insider (1999). Based
on Marie Brenner’s 1996 Vanity Fair article “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” the
film follows the ordeal faced by Dr. Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) when he attempts
to blow the whistle on Big Tobacco, as well as the efforts of 60 Minutes producer Low-
ell Bergman (Al Pacino), who fights his superiors in order to get Wigand’s story on the
air. By turns a crackling thriller and powerful drama, the picture serves as a potent
reminder of the importance of investigative journalism and the human costs of corpo-
rate greed.
The first half of The Insider focuses on Wigand, his dilemma in going public with
what he knows, and the tribulations he suffers after he decides to do so. The head
research scientist at Brown & Williamson Tobacco, he is fired after a dispute with his
boss (Michael Gambon). When contacted by Bergman to consult on a 60 Minutes
piece about smoking, Wigand is initially reluctant, as he plans to honor the confiden-
tiality agreement he signed upon termination. He changes his mind after Brown &
Williamson attempts to insure his silence by undertaking a campaign of intimidation

258
 Insider, The

against him and his family, which includes death threats and a bullet placed in his
mailbox. Wigand must first testify in a Mississippi court case in order to get his infor-
mation onto the public record, risking imprisonment by defying a restraining order
placed on him by a Kentucky judge friendly with Big Tobacco. He then tapes a devas-
tating interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace (Christopher
Plummer), in which he reveals the fact that Brown & Williamson knowingly included
cancer-causing chemicals in their cigarettes and, despite Wigand’s protests, refused to
pull the products until a safer alternative could be found.
Once Wigand tapes this interview, a new battle emerges, serving as the focus of the
film’s second half. Due to the threat of lawsuits from Brown & Williamson, CBS’s cor-
porate lawyers pressure the news division to pull the story. Although initially resistant,
and despite Bergman’s emphatic protests, both Wallace and 60 Minutes’ executive pro-
ducer Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall) buckle, excising Wigand’s interview from the
episode that finally airs. Angered by his superior’s abandonment of Wigand after he
has endured so much, Bergman exposes the controversy in the press, humiliating
Wallace and embarrassing CBS into airing Wigand’s interview.
The central theme of Mann’s film is the juxtaposition of corporate greed with the
everyday heroism demonstrated by whistleblowers like Wigand. Wigand is an inher-
ently decent man and a scientist by training, and thus his conscience demands that
he expose the health risks inherent in smoking, despite the knowledge that doing so
will ruin his comfortable life and place his family’s future in doubt. Ultimately,
Wigand’s noble deed costs him dearly: his wife leaves him, he is attacked in the press,
and he eventually contemplates suicide. The film excoriates the television news indus-
try for emphasizing entertainment over journalistic integrity, criticizing 60 Minutes for
encouraging Wigand to violate his confidentiality agreement and then abandoning
him when the possibility of a lawsuit appears. In this respect, both Wigand and Berg-
man, at different times, serve as the “insider” in the film’s title: Wigand for exposing
Big Tobacco’s malfeasance and Bergman for doing the same at 60 Minutes.
The Insider was the source of considerable controversy after it was initially released.
Brown & Williamson denied intimidating Wigand, pointing out that his ex-wife
believed he placed the bullet in the mailbox himself. Furthermore, CBS contended that
the film showed Wallace in “a very misleading light,” and that rather than buckling under
legal pressures, he fought against the decision to cut Wigand’s interview. Mann
responded to these criticisms by noting that the film did alter events for dramatic impact,
but that its broad strokes were true. Indeed, real individuals who had been portrayed in
the film, such as Richard Scruggs, the Mississippi attorney for whom Wigand testified,
praised its accuracy. Despite this controversy, The Insider earned seven Academy Award
nominations, including those for Best Picture, Director, and Actor (Crowe).

References
Carter, Bill. 1999. “TV Notes: Mike Wallace Getting Over It.” New York Times, November 3,
online edition. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/03/arts/tv-notes-mike-wallace-getting-
over-it.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/T/Television.

259
Interiors

Culpepper, Andy. 1999. “Smoke and Alleged Mirrors: ‘The Insider’ Goes Public.” http://
www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9911/05/insider.culpepper/.

—Bryan Kvet

INTERIORS. Woody Allen followed his Oscar-winning Annie Hall with Interiors
(1978), his first true drama. In this darkly melodic portrait of the dissolution of a dys-
functional family, Arthur (E. G. Marshall) tells Eve (Geraldine Page) he wants a trial
separation. The film then charts the reactions of various family members to this sepa-
ration. Joey (Mary Beth Hurt), who has never been close to her mother and desperately
wants her affection, tries to comfort Eve, who has suffered a nervous breakdown. The
other family members exploit Joey’s charity. Joey has a love/hate relationship with her
sister, Renata (Diane Keaton); she admires her artistic success, but resents her distance
from the parents’ drama. Joey feels that Renata was the child her mother loved best,
while Renata complains that Joey was their father’s favorite. The third sister, Flyn
(Kristin Griffith), is a Hollywood actress, whose brief appearances reflect her lack of
interest in the family. She is never with the others long enough to become entangled
emotionally. In fact, her rejection of Frederick’s sexual advances is due not to her devo-
tion to her sister, or out of some ethical code, but rather reflects an emotional coolness
rendering her incapable of sexual arousal. Similarly, the overall mood of the film is void
of passion. This is the cool, almost monochromatic world that Eve has created for her
family.
Shapes and colors carry significant metaphorical weight throughout Interiors. The
colors are muted pastels and earth tones, and Gordon Willis’s photography uses soft,
muted lighting, which has the effect of absorbing the characters into the sets. The
result is a tragic organic unity between the family and its environment; they are
trapped. Eve favors the vase as a decorative item, and its delicate, feminine shape seems
representative of her; but the cool greens and grays she chooses also echo her icy char-
acter. When the vase is broken by Pearl (Maureen Stapleton), Arthur’s new wife,
resplendent in her bright red dress, the accident is understood by Joey as a symbolic
act of aggression toward Eve’s “perfect,” suffocating world.
One of the key symbols in the film is the family house, in which most of the group’s
gatherings take place. It is where Arthur announces his desire to separate from Eve; yet
even though Eve moves out, there is no sense that Arthur occupies the house—while
she lives, it remains Eve’s creation. When she dies, so too does the perfectly decorated
house. The opening shots of Joey walking through the house take place after her moth-
er’s death, and convey a sense of emptiness. Ironically, though, it is the same emptiness
that existed even when Eve occupied the space. The title, therefore, suggests that the
physical interior spaces designed by Eve, and the emotional interior spaces of her chil-
dren and husband, are mirror images of each other.
Interiors is Allen’s tribute to the iconic Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and spe-
cifically the latter’s Cries and Whispers. Both films share a sense of starkness, opening
with limited dialog and only ambient sound. The characters are stoic, and the sets

260
 Intolerance

are austere. While Bergman’s film is imbued with crimson, however, Allen’s is cast in
subtle earth tones and pastels. A similar theme is the façade of conventions and physi-
cal structures (interior spaces) constructed by the characters in order to hide their emo-
tional emptiness.
As was mentioned, Interiors was Allen’s follow-up to the previous year’s Best Picture
winner, Annie Hall, which established Woody Allen as an important filmmaker. Interi-
ors’ serious tone came as a shock to most viewers and critics, who had grown accus-
tomed to Allen’s comedies and it had only marginal success at the box office. Allen
addresses this issue two films later, in Stardust Memories, which is about a filmmaker
at odds with his fans’ expectations. Allen’s later film, Hannah and Her Sisters, is very
similar to Interiors, so much so that some critics have considered it a remake. Notice-
able differences include more lighthearted comic elements and the presence of Allen
himself. Interestingly, Hannah and Her Sisters was a commercial success and is consid-
ered one of Allen’s best films.
See also: Allen, Woody

References
Cardullo, Bert. “Autumn Interiors, or the Ladies Eve: Woody Allen’s Bergman Complex.” In
Silet, Charles L. P. The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
2006, 145–55.
Kael, Pauline. “Fear of Movies.” In For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies. New York: Dutton, 1994,
784–87.
Pogel, Nancy. Woody Allen. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

—Dean R. Cooledge

INTOLERANCE. D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916)—often subtitled Love’s Strug-

gle Through the Ages—is certainly his most innovative and ambitious film. Stung by
the negative reaction to his epic Birth of a Nation (1915)—a film that many believed
perpetuated coarse racial stereotypes and glorified the Ku Klux Klan—Griffith
responded with this complex presentation of four parallel narratives that were tied
together by thematic elements such as injustice, religious intolerance, and tragic and
redeeming love. The intricate plotlines range from ancient Babylon to the early twen-
tieth century, and as the film reaches its moralizing climax, Griffith cuts back and forth
between these stories with increasing rapidity, linking each narrative shift with the
recurring image of a woman (Lillian Gish) rocking a cradle—a personification of the
triumph of the human spirit over its own tendency toward the inhumane.
The first of these narratives, “The Modern Story,” was actually the plotline of a movie
entitled The Mother and the Law that Griffith was shooting when he decided to respond
to the controversy surrounding Birth of a Nation. Set during the Progressive era of the
early twentieth century, this narrative features Griffin’s searing critique of contemporary
social reform through the characters of Miss Jenkins (Vera Lewis) and the puritanical
“Vestal Virgins of Uplift.” The protagonist, an Irish Catholic laborer identified simply

261
Intolerance

as the Boy (Robert Harron), loses his job when the factory owner (the brother of Miss
Jenkins, played by Sam de Grasse) reduces wages in order to support the Uplifters’
reforming efforts, resulting in a strike that the owner ruthlessly suppresses. The Boy
turns to a life of petty crime, but is redeemed by the love of the Dear One (Mae Marsh),
who has been reduced to poverty through similar circumstances. Despite the Boy’s
efforts to turn his life around, he and his family continue to be victimized both by the
criminal elements of the urban slums and by the intrusive reforms of the Uplifters them-
selves. Eventually, he is wrongly accused of murder and faces death on the gallows.
The second narrative, “The Judean Story,” offers Howard Gaye as “The Nazarene”
in a retelling of various episodes from the gospels. The story focuses on the conflicts
between Jesus and the Jewish Pharisees that led, as Griffith interprets the story, to the
crucifixion. Although not the first time the drama of the Christian passion account
had been filmed, Griffith employed the story to serve his own moralistic didacticism.
In the film, the self-righteous Pharisees are explicitly connected to the meddlesome
reformers of the Modern Story, thus making the Boy—and all those who suffer simi-
larly from misguided critics—a sympathetic Christ figure.
The remaining two storylines were fictionalized and dramatized historical events.
“The Babylonian Story” recounted the fall of that empire to the Persians through the
treachery of the priests of Bel, who have lost their religious monopoly under Prince
Belshazzar’s tolerant rule. The key protagonist in this story is Mountain Girl
(Constance Talmadge), often hailed as the first feminist heroine in American cinema,
who vainly fights to preserve Belshazzar’s empire. In “The French Story,” the queen
regent Catherine de Medici (Josephine Crowell) plots the destruction of her Huguenot
opponents in Griffith’s interpretation of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.
Driven by a mixture of religious intolerance and political ambition, the queen’s evil
designs lead to the death of two Huguenot lovers, who are the sixteenth-century equiv-
alents of the Boy and the Dear One. In the end, the Boy is reprieved by the last second
confession of the real murderer, but the other stories end with loss and destruction.
The final scenes, however, offer a utopian vision of peace and tolerance, as soldiers
throw down their weapons and angels appear in the heavens beside a shining cross.
Although the initial public response was strong, Intolerance quickly lost its popular
appeal. Audiences distracted by the escalating war in Europe had little sympathy for
Griffith’s pacifism or his criticisms of a fading Progressivism. Similarly, critics were,
and remain, divided over the significance of the film. Many regard it a masterpiece
and cinematic milestone—certainly it introduced numerous production techniques
that became industry standards—but others have argued it is an overwrought and over-
long failure.
See also: Birth of a Nation, The; Griffith, D. W.

References
Drew, William M. D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Its Genesis and Its Vision. Jefferson: McFarland,
1986.

262
 Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Hansen, Miriam. “The Hieroglyph and the Whore: D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance.” In Gaines,
Jane, ed., Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1992: 169–202.
—Rodger M. Payne

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

is an enduringly popular Cold War–era science fiction film noted for paranoid chills
and a famously modified ending. Set in the pleasant town of Santa Mira, California,
the film centers around a subtly accomplished invasion by alien plants that use large
seed pods to produce duplicates of human beings after the humans fall asleep. The nar-
rative follows town doctor Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), who returns from a
conference to find a strange paranoia present in his community. This paranoia has
emerged, it seems, because on some level unaffected members of the community
who knew the “snatched” humans before they were invaded can sense something is dif-
ferent about these duplicates. Miles is distracted by the return of his lost love Becky
Driscoll (Dana Wynter). Their relationship is slightly risqué for the era, as both char-
acters are recently divorced from other people and are overtly flirtatious.
Miles realizes strange events are, indeed, occurring when his friends Jack (King
Donovan) and Jack’s wife “Teddy” (Carolyn Jones) stumble upon an unformed dupli-
cate. Briefly convinced by psychologist Danny Kaufman (Larry Gates) that he has

Actress Dana Wynter and actor Kevin McCarthy hold hands and run from unseen terror in a still
from the horror motion picture Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, 1956. (Allied
Artists/Getty Images)

263
Invasion of the Body Snatchers

simply succumbed to mass hysteria, Miles suspicions are confirmed when he discovers
more seed pods in his greenhouse. After the friends split up to escape, Miles and Becky
realize the extent of the body snatching, witnessing an ordinary morning turn into a
moment during which a meeting is convened in order to distribute additional pods
to surrounding areas.
With the town members now arrayed against them, Miles and Becky are confronted
by the bodysnatched Danny and Jack. The emotionless pods explain that their life is
now comfortably ordered, but our heroes reject the idea of living in such a passive
and loveless world. After escaping and being chased into the hills, Miles sadly loses
the exhausted Becky to the pods. Running out into the road, his frenzied warnings
make him appear insane. The film was intended to end at this point with a close-up
of Miles’s face, but after test audiences found this ending lacked a sense of resolve,
Allied Artists added a number of scenes meant to frame the narrative. In the new open-
ing, a distraught Miles relates the events to another psychologist (Whit Bissell) as a
flashback with voice-over. In the new closing sequence, authority figures, who initially
disbelieve Miles, accidentally discover more seed pods, lending credence to his story
and setting the authority figures into action, presumably to save the day.
While the pod people appear as the ultimate conformists in Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, weaving that theme into the fabric of the real-world concerns of the time
is more complex. Targeting individuality and displaying a lack of motivation beyond
simple survival, the aliens appear to embody American stereotypes of Cold War com-
munists. However, the film also cautions against the kinds of reactionary groupthink
that gripped Americans during this hypersensitive era. A fundamental human insecu-
rity may also be read into the film, a sense that one never truly knows exactly who
other people really are—a notion that resonated with Americans convinced that com-
munist spies lurked around every corner. While the duplicates are by no means the
sluggish, mindless cannibals that filmic zombies would become after the release of
Night of the Living Dead in 1968, Invasion of the Body Snatchers presages the chaotic
excitement that defined scenarios in which the few must face a mob of the many. In
one suspenseful sequence, for example, Miles and Becky blend in with the snatchers,
pretending that they too have no emotions; unfortunately, all-too-human Becky fails
to fool the duplicates, who realize what she is after she shouts a warning as a truck
almost hits a dog.
The popularity of the original picture inspired a number of remakes and reimagin-
ings. Perhaps the most notable was the 1978 version. While updating the special effects
and shifting the narrative setting to the urban environs of San Francisco, the 1970s
version of the film follows the basic plot points of the original (although a fun, early
cameo by Kevin McCarthy delivering his crazed speech from the 1956 film allows
one to imagine the pictures are somehow related). The 1978 version also added a par-
ticularly startling quality to the pod people, who now point and emit a disturbing
scream when they spot normal humans. Body Snatchers (1993) moved the action of
the film to an American military base. A commercial failure, The Invasion (2007)
changed the nature of the invaders from plants to viral contaminate.

264
 Iron Man

Despite the varied records of the films that followed Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
the original has endured as a popular choice among latter-day viewers, continuing to
have a chilling effect on them. After all, we all have to go to sleep, do we not?
See also: Science Fiction Film, The

References
LaValley, Al. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Politics, Psychology, Sociology.” In LaValley, Al, ed.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
Worland, Rick. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
—Michael G. Robinson

IRON MAN. The box-office successes of the Spiderman and X-Men franchises were
enough for Marvel Comics to decide to form their own production studio. Iron Man
(2008) was the first major motion picture released by Marvel Studios, and it marks the
first in a series of feature films that will allow the various characters in the Marvel Comics
universe to interact with each other in a similar manner to the comic books. Earning over
$300 million at the domestic box office, it was the second-highest-grossing feature in 2008
(behind The Dark Knight), and this financial success bodes well for a host of related movies
already scheduled for release. Throughout Iron Man, there are direct references to or cam-
eos from the forthcoming Marvel Studios movies: Nick Fury (2010), The First Avenger:
Captain America (2011), and The Avengers (2012). Already, Robert Downey Jr. has had

Scene from the 2008 film Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau and starring Robert Downey Jr. (Photofest)

265
Iron Man

a cameo in Marvel Studios The Incredible Hulk (2008), and the studio has also announced
two Iron Man sequels, slated for release in 2010 and 2012.
It took a long time for the Iron Man franchise to take off, with the rights being
passed around in Hollywood for nearly 20 years with high-profile names like Tom
Cruise, Joss Whedon, and Quentin Tarantino attached to the project. Yet it is now
Robert Downey Jr.’s work in Iron Man that is clearly linked to the film’s success, and
director Jon Favreau could not have chosen a better actor to portray the character.
While being billed as a child-prodigy genius, Iron Man’s alter ego Tony Stark is also
an irresponsible playboy party animal, gambler, and alcoholic, and Downey’s well pub-
licized real-life struggles with similar issues made him a natural for the part, although
these issues are not directly addressed in the film. Nevertheless, Iron Man marked the
beginning of a huge comeback for the actor, who, in addition to signing on for the
sequels, was featured in two other box-offices successes in 2008: The Incredible Hulk
and Tropic Thunder. Critics were also enthusiastic about the film, and Iron Man was
one of the best-reviewed movies of the summer.
Iron Man is a superhero origin story, and follows the basic mythology of the original
series faithfully. Initially conceived as a character that would engage in Cold War issues
from the perspective of the military-industrial complex, the title character debuted in
1963. Millionaire inventor and arms dealer Tony Stark becomes Iron Man after he is
injured by one of his own land mines in Vietnam. In the film, the time and place are
updated to the present and Afghanistan, respectively. This allowed Favreau and the
production team to engage in the timeless themes associated with the character and
his story, but also to showcase them through the contemporary global political scene.
Stark transforms into an armored superhero even as he wrestles with the same prob-
lems as U.S. politicians and military forces deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan: when
to take action, how to respond to terrorism, how to deal with civilian “human shields,”
how to keep U.S. weapons out of the wrong hands, duplicity by defense contractors
and rapidly shifting alliances. It is in dealing with this conundrum that the character
of Stark matures from the man-child he is at the beginning of the film.
In the film, it is not only Stark’s run-of-the-mill conventional weapons, but also the
top-of-the-line Jericho missile technology (a major plot point), and eventually, the Iron
Man designs that are utilized by his enemies. While the members of the Ten Rings
organization, led by Raza (Fahrin Tahir), are the terrorist-themed villains in the film,
they take a back seat to Stark’s primary nemesis, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). Stane
is Stark’s mentor and business partner who betrays him and ultimately appropriates
the Iron Man technology to create his own powered suit of armor, the Iron Monger.
Stane is motivated by both greed and a lust for power, but he does not run into prob-
lems with Stark until the latter develops a conscience after seeing his weapons used to
kill U.S. troops. Stane’s character also makes Iron Man a film about overcoming the
expectations and the burdens of the previous generation, as Stane not only is of an
older generation, but also is defined by his relationship with Stark’s father, Howard.
Ultimately, Iron Man is a film about responsibility, demonstrating that good inten-
tions often result in negative consequences.
See also: Science Fiction Film, The

266
 It Happened One Night

References
Hornaday, Ann. “Iron Man Shows Strength of Character.” Washington Post, May 2, 2008: C1.
Witmer, Jon D. “Heavy-Metal Hero.” American Cinematographer 89(5), May 2008: 32–36, 38–43.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
—James M. Brandon

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. To the delight of movie audiences, Frank Capra

released It Happened One Night in 1934. Although American viewers had been watch-
ing film comedies for two decades by the time Capra’s film was released, It Happened
One Night struck them in a surprisingly new way—not only was it funny, it was also
wonderfully romantic. Along with two other films that debuted in 1934, Howard
Hawks’s Twentieth Century and W. S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man, It Happened One
Night set the tone for a new type of genre film, the romantic comedy. Unlike other
genre films that have evolved over time, the western and the war film, for instance,

Movie poster for director Frank Capra’s film It Happened One Night, featuring actors Clark Gable
and Claudette Colbert embracing on a crescent moon against a backdrop of stars. (Columbia
TriStar/Getty Images)

267
It Happened One Night

romantic comedies have basically remained the same since they began to be made in
the 1930s, almost always pairing a man and a woman who meet, fall in love, are kept
apart, and finally come together by film’s end. These pictures, it seems, have moved us
for decades because they allow us to believe that there is, indeed, someone out there for
each one of us, someone with whom we can live happily ever after.
The gifted Capra began making motion pictures in the early 1920s; he would go on
to make over 50 films during his long and distinguished career. Capra worked across all
genres, becoming a purveyor of populist cinema during the 1930s and ’40s with pic-
tures such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),
and Meet John Doe (1941), as well as the most prominent film industry spokesperson
for Franklin Roosevelt’s post–Pearl Harbor, prowar message during the early 1940s—
he actually volunteered to join the army and to make a pseudo-documentary series of
combat pictures known collectively under the title Why We Fight (1941–1945). He
also became familiar with cinematic romance, especially with its comedic dimensions,
making pictures such as That Certain Thing (1928), So This is Love? (1928), The Mat-
inee Idol (1928), Ladies of Leisure (1930), and Platinum Blonde (1931) before turning
his attention to It Happened One Night.
The film features Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable as Ellie Andrews and Peter
Warne, unlikely romantic partners who are thrown together on a cross-country bus
trip. Ellie is rich and only boards the bus to defy her father, Alexander Andrews (Walter
Connolly), who has been keeping her under house arrest aboard his yacht in an
attempt to keep her away from her fiancé, King Westley (Jameson Thomas). Literally
diving overboard, Ellie swims ashore and begins a covert operation to get herself to
New York City, where King awaits. Angry and embarrassed, her father posts her pic-
ture on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, seeking her return. Ellie makes
her way to a bus station, where she convinces another passenger to buy her a ticket
so that she will not be recognized.
We first encounter Peter at the bus station; drunk and surrounded by a cheering
crowd of men, he is crammed into a telephone booth having a heated discussion with
his newspaper editor. A talented, charming, rough-edged journalist, he has just lost his
job after filing a story—while drunk—in a nonsensical free-verse form that his editor
finds impossible to understand. Peter plays to the crowd of admirers, pretending that
he quits his job and tells off his boss, even though his editor, unheard by the crowd
on the other end of the phone line, has already fired him and hung up. Swaggering
from the phone booth—quickly sobering up after being canned—Peter does not let
on that he is now a little more than desperate. Fate intervenes, however. Noticing that
Ellie’s bag has been taken as she leans against the bus smoking a cigarette, Peter races by
her and after the thief. Unable to catch him, Peter returns and informs Ellie what has
happened. Instead of being appreciative, she dismisses him, apparently lumping him
together with the riff-raff who stole her bag. Boarding the bus, the two are forced to
sit together, much to Ellie’s chagrin. Peter, though, eventually recognizes Ellie as the
“runaway heiress,” and looking to resurrect his moribund career, he befriends the
uneasy young woman, striking a bargain with her: he will get her safely to New York
City if she agrees to give him an “exclusive” once she has been delivered over to her

268
 It Happened One Night

fiancé. With few options left to her if she wants to avoid being returned to her father,
Ellie agrees to Peter’s conditions.
Typical of the populist fare released during the Depression years of the 1930s, much
of the tension that arises between Ellie and Peter is the result of class differences. Ellie,
of course, would never choose to ride a bus under normal circumstances, and has no
sense of the blue-collar esthetic that marks her situation. When the bus stops for break-
fast and the bus driver informs the passengers that they have 30 minutes before they
must be back onboard, Ellie haughtily tells Peter that she is going into town to send a
cable. When he informs her that she will never make it back in time, Ellie imperiously
declares that the bus will wait for her. Of course it does not wait, but Peter is there to
rescue her—both from her current precarious position and from her elitist sensibilities.
Capra masterfully sets the scenes in which Peter provides Ellie with her populist
education—none more endearing than the one in which he teaches her the proper way
to dunk doughnuts, something she has never had to learn, having had the advantage of
being surrounded by servants her entire life. Ellie, though, is not without her own talents,
as, after yet another round of instruction by Peter—this one related to how best to thumb
a ride on the highway—she steps up, raises her skirt, revealing an extremely fetching leg,
and succeeds in stopping a number of cars when Peter had failed to stop any. “Aren’t you
going to congratulate me?” asks Ellie. “For what?” responds Peter. “Well,” says Ellie
mischievously, “I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb.”
Forced to share a room at a “camp motel,” Peter strings a rope from wall to wall and
hangs a blanket over it—dubbing the setup the “Walls of Jericho.” Ellie, naturally, is
skeptical, unwilling to believe that a flimsy blanket will keep Peter on his side of the
room. What keeps him in his place, though, Ellie comes to understand, is not any
material barrier but a powerful sense of middle-class integrity. Peter, it seems, is more
than meets the eye—as it turns out, he has the soul of a poet: “Who are you?” asks
Ellie. “Who me?” responds Peter. “I’m the whippoorwill that cries in the night. I’m
the soft morning breeze that caresses your lovely face.”
As it turns out, their class differences almost succeed in driving them apart. As the
film winds down, Ellie readies herself to marry King Westley, thinking that Peter wants
nothing to do with her. Contacted by Ellie’s father, Peter arrives at the Andrews estate,
demanding that Mr. Andrews pay him back for what he had to spend on Ellie—it’s
the principle that is important, says Peter. Thinking that Peter has come after the
$10,000 reward Mr. Andrews has offered up for the return of his daughter, and sur-
prised that Peter has rejected it, Mr. Andrews begins to understand the situation. “Do
you love my daughter?” he asks Peter. “A normal human being couldn’t live under the
same roof with her without going nutty! She’s my idea of nothing!” “I asked you a simple
question,” says Mr. Andrews. “Do you love her?” “Yes!” responds an exasperated Peter,
“but don’t hold that against me, I’m a little screwy myself.” Exiting Mr. Andrews’s study,
Peter encounters Ellie—who mistakenly thinks that he has only come for the money.
After trading insults, Peter storms from the house, and the wedding proceeds. While
walking Ellie down the aisle, her father whispers to her: “You’re a sucker to go through
with this; that guy Warne is okay. He didn’t want the reward. All he wanted was
$39.60, what he spent on you. Said it was a matter of principle.” And so it is—principles

269
It’s a Wonderful Life

that Ellie, and her father, we hope, has done well to adopt. Having planted her car at the
rear gate of the estate, Mr. Andrews convinces her to run—run to Peter if she wants to be
happy! King Westley is paid off by Mr. Andrews, and, taking her father’s advice, Ellie
returns to Peter. In a final, magical scene shot from outside a camp motel room, we hear
a horn blow, and we understand that the Walls of Jericho that have separated Ellie and
Peter—and perhaps those that separate us from our loves—have come tumbling down.
See also: Romantic Comedy, The

References
Gehring, Wes D. Romantic vs. Screwball Comedy. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.
Harvey, James. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1987.
Kendall, Elizabeth. The Runaway Bride: The Romantic Comedy of the 1930s. Lanham, MD:
Cooper Square Press, 2002.

—Philip C. DiMare

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. Based on the short story “The Greatest Gift,” by
Philip Van Doren Stern, and directed by Frank Capra, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is
a morality tale about coming to terms with the hand dealt by fate, and finding value
in even a seemingly unremarkable life.
The film is one of a number of supernatural dramas—films in which God, the
Devil, and their associates intervene in the modern world—which became an estab-
lished Hollywood subgenre by the mid-1940s. Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and
Stairway to Heaven (1946) both featured heroes precariously perched between life
and death, and stories about souls poised between heaven and hell drove the plots of
Cabin in the Sky (1943), Heaven Can Wait (1943), and Between Two Worlds (1944).
Clarence, the “angel, second class” of It’s a Wonderful Life, who rescues protagonist
George Bailey, found cinematic company in Spencer Tracy’s pilot-turned-angel from
A Guy Named Joe (1943) and Jack Benny’s heavenly trumpeter from The Horn Blows
at Midnight (1945). Supernatural plot elements generally connoted comedy, or at least
lightness of tone, but It’s A Wonderful Life uses them to serve a more serious purpose.
Capra’s film treats heaven and hell less as places than as states of mind, and traces
George Bailey’s dawning comprehension that he has mistaken one for the other.
Throughout his life, George Bailey (James Stewart) has sacrificed his hopes and
dreams for others. He has been the dutiful son, watchful brother, vigilant employee,
devoted provider, concerned citizen, and dedicated community leader. As a young
man, George spends his days dreaming of the world beyond his tiny community of
Bedford Falls—grand places such as Europe, Tahiti, the Fiji Islands—and of building,
creating, and “doing important things.” When his father suffers a fatal stroke, however,
just when George is finally ready to leave Bedford Falls, he is drawn into the family
business: the Bailey Building and Loan Association, the town’s only alternative to the
bank run by the venomous Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore). He reluctantly abandons

270
 It’s a Wonderful Life

Actors James Stewart and Donna Reed star in the Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946.
(RKO Pictures/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

his dreams of travel and college, and—for the sake of his father’s legacy, his younger
brother Harry’s (Todd Karns) education, and the community’s well-being, and simply
because it is the right thing to do—dedicates his life to the Building and Loan. Thanks
to George’s self-sacrifice, Harry goes on to college, marries, takes a profitable job away
from Bedford Falls, and after being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his
military service, becomes the much-lauded hometown hero. George, meanwhile, car-
ries on unnoticed, at least in his mind.
From his youth he has been captivated by Mary (Donna Reed), who, while captur-
ing his heart, represents the small-town insularity and contentedness that he seeks to
escape. Mary believes in his dreams, but her own are focused on marriage, a family,
and remaining in Bedford Falls. At each critical juncture, the tug of responsibility
threatens to sabotage their relationship: His father’s death derails their first romantic
encounter; a bank run robs them of their honeymoon; yet Mary continues to offer sup-
port. This, however, only reinforces George’s self-loathing, for not being able to give
himself, much less her, the life of which he dreams.
Tragedy strikes—just when things seem to be going well—when George’s fumbling,
lovable partner Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) unwittingly hands a bank deposit of
$8,000 to Potter, which he keeps, realizing that the loss means ruin for the Bailey
Building and Loan. A panicked George senses the imminent collapse of his life’s work,
lashes out at his family, and in desperation turns to Potter for a loan to cover the loss.

271
It’s a Wonderful Life

Potter refuses and taunts him: “You once called me a warped, frustrated old man. What
are you but a warped, frustrated young man?” He chides George that with a $15,000
insurance policy, he’s worth more dead than alive.
Facing disgrace and ruin on Christmas Eve as a result of Potter’s machinations,
George contemplates suicide. He is interrupted (and thus saved) by his guardian angel,
Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers), who shows him what Bedford Falls would have
been had George never been born: a garish Babylon, firmly under Potter’s control. In
the scenes that follow, George comes to realize that a quiet life of sustained belief in
humanity and community leaves a deeper mark on the world than one of personal
achievement and superficial success.
Both director Frank Capra and star James Stewart had spent the war years in uni-
form, which may explain why It’s A Wonderful Life has a darkness of tone that sets it
apart from their prewar work. George Bailey—bitter, frustrated, and gripped by suici-
dal despair—is far removed from the callow innocents Stewart played in Destry Rides
Again (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and The Philadelphia Story
(1940). Capra, who had shown the Common Man triumphing in films like Mr. Deeds
Goes to Town (1936) and Meet John Doe (1941), as well as in Mr. Smith, imagined him
crushed by the wealthy and powerful in the alternate-universe scenes. The film’s tone
was not its only wartime legacy, though. In the character of George Bailey, Capra cre-
ated a figure for whom life has been a series of frustrated possibilities—plans thwarted,
dreams deferred—that has finally taken its toll. Yet the message he receives from
Clarence is that he has, in fact, had a wonderful life. In the film’s closing scenes, he finds
himself back in his real life, and considers it a miracle—Dickensian second chance. He
is deliriously happy and grateful for even the direst consequences of his latest run of
misfortune. He sees his life as a triumph. Only then does he find himself surrounded
by those whose lives he has so positively affected. He has finally understood and
accepted his lot, and discovered community as a result. For Capra, Stewart, and other
members of the “Greatest Generation,” George is admirable because his life was spent
doing his part for the greater good. He does what needs to be done for those around
him, despite the personal costs, and is rewarded in the end by the satisfaction that his
small contributions to the world—the actions of a single man—have made a tangible
difference in the lives of others.
Despite its poor box-office draw at the time of its release, It’s a Wonderful Life has
become a classic of the American screen, and an emotional touchstone for millions
of viewers. Its televised version is a staple of holiday viewing, in much the same way
as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which delivers a similar message. The American Film
Institute (AFI) ranked It’s a Wonderful Life at the top of its list of 100 Inspirational
American Films, designating it the most inspirational film of all time. In so doing,
however, the AFI is embracing and advocating a particular ideology of what it means
to be a good person, a good community member, and a good American—an ideology
that harkens back to postwar notions of the duty of the individual to society, and flies
in the face of competing ideologies of meritocracy and American independence—
granting it a quality of timelessness and fundamental applicability to all generations.
Capra pits Bailey’s downtrodden “everyman” against Potter’s despicably self-centered

272
 It’s a Wonderful Life

but successful entrepreneur, and finds the latter severely lacking, a strident critique of
postwar progress that threatened the loss of small-scale communities with face-to-
face economic interactions. The ideological chasm between the two characters is vast,
and viewing audiences are tacitly urged to situate themselves with George, and against
the era’s impersonal march of progress.
It is not surprising that Capra tacitly asks audiences to make such a choice. The
thread of making choices—of choosing sides—is central to the film and to the era from
which it emerged. It firmly connects It’s a Wonderful Life to the populism of Capra’s
prewar films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe, in which prin-
cipled individuals take stands against the wealthy, powerful, and corrupt. It echoes the
ideological divisions that Capra had spent the war years addressing through the films of
the “Why We Fight” series. And it prefigures the gulfs of politics and principle that
would divide the country during the Red Scare—just beginning, in 1946, as the House
Un-American Activities Committee was granted permanent status and Richard Nixon
won election to the House by smearing his opponent, baselessly, as a communist.
Capra understood, as audiences still haunted by the memories of World War II would
have understood, that It’s a Wonderful Life is a story about choices: throughout the film,
George is asked “Which side are you on?” The life that he looks back on (first in
despair and then in elation) is not an accident, but the sum of those choices. The over-
powering joy that he feels in the final scenes comes from having been given the greatest
gift of all: the knowledge that he chose well.
See also: Capra, Frank

References
Carney, Raymond. American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1996.
Cox, Stephen. It’s a Wonderful Life: A Memory Book. Nashville: Cumberland House, 2003.
Poague, Leland. Another Frank Capra. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
—Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper

273
This page intentionally left blank
 v
J
JAWS. It is difficult to overstate the impact that Steven Spielberg’s Jaws had on the
American motion picture industry. Adapted from Peter Benchley’s runaway bestseller
of the same name, the film opened in June 1975 and became an instant hit, ushering
in the ongoing era of the summer blockbuster. Critics of the movie argued that the
release of Jaws marked the end of a golden cinematic period in Hollywood, one that
had begun in the late 1960s with the release of Bonnie and Clyde and that saw the
emergence of important American directors such as Arthur Penn, Francis Ford
Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman. Defenders of Jaws argued that it was
a carefully crafted piece of cinema that demonstrated Spielberg’s mastery of the tech-
niques of suspense.
The film stars Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw; however, the real
“star” of the movie is the great white shark that menaces the beach resort of Amity
Island. The plot is fairly simple. A shark begins attacking swimmers off Amity Island.
First a young woman is attacked and killed at night. The second victim is a young boy
swimming in the middle of the day on a crowded beach. The three protagonists
include Amity’s new police chief, Martin Brody (Scheider); a local professional shark
hunter, Quint (Shaw); and a marine biologist, Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss). Much of the
action takes place on Quint’s boat, the Orca, as the three men try to find and kill the
shark. The three characters complement each other. Quint is the hard-nosed shark
hunter who reminds us a great deal of Captain Ahab, with his maniacal obsession with
killing the great white; Hooper is the rational scientist; while Brody is the everyman-
victim-of-circumstances who has to negotiate the tensions that arise between Quint
and Brody.
Spielberg had constant problems with the mechanical shark he was forced to
employ, which meant that he had to devise ways of allowing viewers to see the great
beast without really seeing it. Utilizing the extraordinary score produced by John
Williams—the film’s theme music is instantly recognizable—and skillful editing,
Spielberg cued audiences into the presence of the shark. Providing us only with
glimpses of the animal—a vast, dark something slipping past the boat—we begin to
sense that the shark has the advantage; as Brody says when the shark explodes from

275
Jaws

Actors (from left) Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw onboard the Orca in a still from
the film Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg, 1975. (Universal Studios/Courtesy of Getty Images)

the ocean’s inky depths, nearly taking him overboard: “We’re gonna need a bigger
boat!” What is most frightening about this shark, though, is not its enormous size
but its seemingly humanlike capacity to think—something both Hooper and Quint
understand in their own very different ways.
Although Hooper and Brody are finally able to kill the shark—Quint is ultimately
devoured by the animal—and to make their way back to the safety of land, the film
is not, perhaps, as redemptive as it first appears. While his critics have accused
Spielberg of being an overly sentimental filmmaker—rightly so, it seems—they cannot
deny that he knows how to make movies. All of his skills are on display in Jaws, as he is
able to transfer the imagined horrors of Benchley’s novel to the screen: trapped, as it
were, in the unfamiliar, uncontrollable domain of some archetypal beast, we under-
stand full well that we are subject to the forces of nature—or, perhaps, subject to the
forces of our own natures.
Jaws would propel Spielberg toward becoming the most commercially successful
director in Hollywood history. Although he would go on to make serious films such
as The Color Purple (1985), Schindler’s List (1993), and Saving Private Ryan (1998),
he remains best known for the string of box-office, block-buster hits he has directed:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. (1982), the Indiana Jones films
(1981–2008), and Jurassic Park (1993).
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The; Spielberg, Steven

276
 Jazz Singer, The

References
Buckland, Warren. Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Block-
buster. New York: Continuum, 2006.
Morris, Nigel. The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. London: Wallflower, 2006.

—Govind Shanadi

JAZZ SINGER, THE. History remembers The Jazz Singer (1927) as the first “talkie.”
Roughly 18 minutes into the picture, star Al Jolson delivers the first spoken words in
film: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” It was a sensation.
But the technological innovation that distinguishes The Jazz Singer obscures the film’s
historical value: today, it functions as a guide to a dynamic era in American history.
The Jazz Singer stars Al Jolson, a Lithuanian-born Jew who became the most popu-
lar entertainer of the early twentieth century. He started in a traveling minstrel group,
rose through vaudeville, and eventually cracked Broadway. Often performing in black-
face—a conspicuous aspect of his career but one common at the time—he helped
introduce black music to white audiences. Considered lowbrow by polite society,
Jolson nevertheless emerged as America’s greatest entertainer.
The film recounts the experiences of Jackie Rabinowitz, the son of a Jewish
immigrant, as he emerges from the cloistered world of ethnic America to become a
pop-culture sensation. The story begins as a silent film, with dialogue displayed through
traditional intertitles. Jackie’s father is a cantor, a singer of Jewish devotionals, and
expects Jackie to be the same. But Jackie wants to sing jazz. He runs away to make it big.
Jackie Rabinowitz changes his name to Jack Robin and begins performing locally,
wowing audiences with his dynamic new sound. When Jack performs, the silent film
becomes auditory. He meets a woman, rises through vaudeville, and catches his big
break: a shot at Broadway. He returns home to visit his sympathetic mother, plays
music for her, and, in the first spoken dialogue in film, promises to buy her a new
home. As he performs an energetic rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” however,
his father enters and shouts “Stop!” The new world temporarily recedes before the
old—the first talkie goes silent. The father banishes his son.
On the eve of his Broadway premiere, which coincides with Yom Kippur, Jack’s father
falls ill. Will there be no cantor for the Jewish holy day? The elderly cantor has visions of
Jack singing in his stead. Jack must choose between Broadway and the synagogue, between
his father and the world. Jack fulfills his father’s wishes and sings “Kol Nidre” in the syna-
gogue. The dying father hears his son’s voice, forgives him, and dies. Jack misses his pre-
miere. But time passes, and Jack is again a jazz singer. In the film’s climactic scene,
before a large audience, Jolson sings “Mammy” in blackface, in tribute to his mother.
The Jazz Singer was a great success, shattering all existing box-office records. Within
mere years, the silent film had become an artifact. But the film’s significance extends
beyond these accomplishments. It provides a useful glimpse into 1920s America, into
the history of American entertainment, and into the history of race and American eth-
nic groups.

277
Jazz Singer, The

For an era obsessed with immi-

gration and assimilation, the story
of Jackie Rabinowitz offers poign-
ant commentary on American life
in that time. The jazz singer, shorn
of his ethnic roots and reborn as
Jack Robin, strives to reconcile
these two worlds. He navigates,
tenuously, between the religious,
ethnic world of his immigrant
parents and the bright, dynamic,
secular world of American enter-
tainment. As Jack Robin rehearses
his Broadway performance, his
mother movingly acknowledges
that “here he belongs. . . . He’s not
my boy anymore—he belongs to
the whole world now.” Moreover,
Jack performs in blackface: a Jewish
singer posing as a black man to
gain the approbation of a secular,
white America. The new forms of
entertainment in the twentieth cen-
tury—radio, film, television—
Al Jolson performs in blackface in The Jazz Singer in this July 2, were, slowly and unevenly, creating
1946 photo. (AP/Wide World Photos) a mass culture. Ethnic whites were
assimilating, united in their quest
for the American Dream, for material gain. The film’s use of dialogue allows Jack to give
expression to the promises he makes to his mother: a new home, a new dress, a new Ameri-
can life—wishes spoken through a new American technology. When Jack’s father passes
away, Jack has fulfilled his obligation to the past. At that point, he belongs, as his mother
realizes, not to the American Jewish world but “to the whole world.”
The Jazz Singer is the quintessential film of the 1920s. It captures the creation of a
mass American culture built around entertainment, race, and materialism, as well as
the tensions inherent in assimilation. Its use of blackface, unsettling perhaps for modern
audiences, further testifies to the link between film and its popular predecessors. As an
historical memento and for its insights into American culture, it is invaluable.
See also: African Americans in Film; Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Filmmaking;
Music in Film Sound

References
Alexander, Michael. Jazz Age Jews. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

278
 Jerry Maguire

Carringer, Robert L. The Jazz Singer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.
Lhamon Jr., W. T. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
—Joseph Locke

JERRY MAGUIRE. Jerry Maguire (1996) is a sports film focusing on the business
side of the industry. Tom Cruise plays a disillusioned sports agent who ultimately loses
his job when he attempts to instill a sense of ethics in the members of his firm—Sports
Management International (SMI)—by writing a new company mission statement.
Although many of his colleagues respect his effort, they also feel his ideas are unrealistic
in the late twentieth-century marketplace.
When Jerry is forced to leave the firm—literally having to carry his belongings from
his office as everyone looks on—he exhorts his colleagues to follow him; only Dorothy
Boyd (Renée Zellweger in one of her early roles), a naive, idealistic, single-mother
office assistant at the agency, joins him. On his own, Jerry is left with only two clients:
a star college prospect, Frank Cushman (Jerry O’Connell), and a troublesome but tal-
ented veteran, Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.). Tidwell agrees to stay with Jerry—as
long as he can “Show me the money!” “Cush” is closely watched over by his devoted
father, Matt (an uncredited Beau Bridges), who initially likes Jerry’s personal approach,
but finally decides that his son is better served by shifting over to another agent at SMI,
the slick, ruthless Bob Sugar (Jay Mohr). Desperate, and realizing that Dorothy—and
her young son Ray (Jonathan Lipnicki)—are now counting on him, Jerry seeks to
negotiate a new contract for Tidwell.
Interestingly, Jerry and Tidwell have much to teach each other. Tidwell, angry and
feeling underappreciated—even by Jerry—has become less than a team player. Sympa-
thetic to what Tidwell is feeling, Jerry nevertheless points out that if Tidwell wants the
big contract, he has to stop complaining and play the game. For his part, Tidwell real-
izes that Jerry’s ethical sensibilities notwithstanding, he has lost his sense of what
Tidwell calls “kwan,” a sort of postmodern expression of care and concern for others.
Both learn their lessons, and in the heartwarming denouement of this storyline,
Tidwell proves himself on the field and Jerry is successful in securing him the
multimillion-dollar deal both feel he now deserves. Other athletes, impressed with
Jerry’s style—with his kwan—opt to leave SMI, and the fawning Sugar, and join Jerry
at his new agency.
An indictment of the win-at-all-costs, me-first American marketplace and the world of
spoiled athletes who believe that their extraordinary talents excuse them from their per-
sonal, familial, and communal responsibilities, Jerry Maguire is also a touching love story.
After he is fired, Jerry’s fiancée, Avery (Kellie Preston), leaves him and he finds himself
increasingly drawn to Dorothy. Dorothy, we realize, has harbored a secret crush on Jerry
since they first met: “You had me at hello . . . you had me at hello,” Dorothy tells Jerry.
Mirroring the relationship between Cush and his father, Dorothy is watched over by her

279
JFK

older sister, Laurel (Bonnie Hunt), who realizes that Dorothy must protect not only her
heart but also the fragile emotions of her son. Although Laurel likes Jerry, she understands
how dangerous he is for her sister. Jerry, though, comes to realize that he loves Dorothy
—“You complete me,” he tells her—and he becomes a devoted husband and father.
Although some critics found the film overly sentimental and the relationship
between Dorothy and Jerry unrealistic, audiences embraced the cinematic couple—
the phrase “You complete me” appeared on the cards that accompanied countless bou-
quets of flowers. The film also had much to say about masculinity—especially as it was
viewed through the lens of the hypermacho world of professional sports. In the end,
Jerry becomes “the man he wants to be” by rebelling against a definition of masculinity
based solely on financial success and trophy wives, choosing a different kind of love—
kwan, as Rod Tidwell would say—caring and commitment to family, friends, and
doing the right thing, even when it requires profound sacrifices.
See also: Romantic Comedy, The

References
Galician, Mary-Lou. Sex, Love, and Romance in the Mass Media: Analysis and Criticism of Unre-
alistic Portrayals and Their Influence. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004.
Lang, Robert. Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2002.

—Michael Faubion

JFK. Many have called the Academy Award-winning JFK (1991) “the most impor-
tant political thriller of its time.” Centering on the real-life prosecution of New Orleans
businessman Clay Shaw by District Attorney Jim Garrison as a co-conspirator in the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the film was awash
in controversy long before it was released. Aside from its financial and critical success, it
is equally culturally important as the only Hollywood film to result in an act of
Congress.
Oliver Stone directed the film, co-producing with A. Kitman Ho and co-writing the
script with Zachary Sklar. Casting himself in the role of detective, Stone sought to
piece together exactly what happened that day in Dallas. The primary story is based
on two major works on the assassination: Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins
and Dallas journalist Jim Marrs’s Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Part of the
controversy surrounding the film comes from the way Stone shot and cut the film,
weaving real and fictional footage together so seamlessly that it blurred the line
between fact and faction.
Starring Kevin Costner as New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison and Tommy Lee Jones
as the subject of his investigation, local businessman Clay Shaw, the film boasted a
star-studded cast. The story tells the tale of the 1967–69 investigation and trial of
Shaw. According to Garrison, Shaw was a CIA operative overseeing a team of assassins,

280
 JFK

Scene from the 1989 film JFK, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Kevin Costner. (Photofest)

including both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, the man who had killed Oswald
two days after the death of JFK. The film posits several scenarios for the assassination,
ultimately concluding that Kennedy was killed primarily because of his weak stance
against global communism by a cabal of operatives drawn from the CIA, the mafia,
and the military-industrial complex. Before the trial begins, it becomes clear to
Garrison that unknown persons, who he is convinced are government agents, are seek-
ing to interfere with the district attorney’s investigation.
The film—and the books on which it is based—sets out to discredit the so-called
single-bullet, or “magic-bullet, theory” of the Warren Commission, which stated that
only three shots were fired at President Kennedy, and that one of those bullets took a
statistically unrealistic course through both the president and Texas governor John
Connelly, producing seven wounds with little effect on the bullet itself. Jurors in the
original trial claimed they were convinced that a conspiracy had taken place, but not
necessarily that Shaw was aware of or had taken part in it.
One of the criticisms of the film was that much of the evidence presented in the trial
sequences actually did not come to light until well after the Shaw trial. Stone argued
that the inclusion of this material in the film was necessary in order to prove to the
audience the credibility of Garrison’s arguments. Another element of the filmmaking
process that many questioned was Stone’s willingness to blur the boundaries between
the real and the cinematic. Defending the process, Stone said that before every

281
Judgment at Nuremberg

narrative moment not supported by actual evidence, one of the film’s characters would
intone: “for a minute, speculate.” What emerges is a brilliant piece of political drama,
as well as a provocative piece of historical hypothesis.
The film succeeded in raising doubt about the legitimacy of the government’s first
“official” report of the assassination, the famous Warren Commission Report of
1964. Public outcry after the film became so pronounced that Congress was pushed
to pass the JFK Act of 1992, calling for the creation of a team of historians to gather
information currently available on the assassination. The resulting Assassination
Records Review Board, working from 1993–98, meticulously gathered together every
available document connected to the assassination, and pushed for the declassification
of as many restricted documents as possible. In the end they succeeded in collecting
more than five million documents surrounding the death of President Kennedy.
Although many documents will remain classified until at least 2017, subsequent inves-
tigations of the infamous case, begun after Stone’s film was released, have lent support
to the theories offered up by the controversial director.
See also: Costner, Kevin; Politics and Film; Stone, Oliver

References
Hall, Richard. Beyond a Reasonable Fact: The Role of Historians in Researching the Assassination of
President John F. Kennedy. Master’s thesis. Texas A&M International University, 2004.
Schechter, Danny, and Barbara Kopple, Directors. Beyond JFK: The Question of Conspiracy.
Global Vision. Warner Bros. DVD, 1992.
—Richard A. Hall

JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG. On the same day in 1961 when Adolph

Eichmann was sentenced to death in Jerusalem for his role in the Holocaust, Judgment
at Nuremberg premiered before American audiences (Gonshak, 2008). Director Stanley
Kramer was already well known for didactic films, such as The Defiant Ones (1958) and
Inherit the Wind (1960). Now he posed more difficult questions to film audiences: is
resistance possible in a totalitarian regime, and what is the responsibility of ordinary
citizens—not major war criminals—for genocide?
The Hollywood production of Judgment at Nuremberg featured popular stars:
Spencer Tracy, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster, and Marlene Die-
trich. The film was based on the play and television production of Abby Mann, who
also wrote the script. It was a box-office success and won Academy Awards for Schell
(Best Actor) and Mann (Original Screenplay).
Judgment at Nuremberg portrays the course of one of the lesser war crimes trials, that
of German judges. It poses the problem of ex post facto law and the reach of
international war crimes tribunals. Spencer Tracy, in the role of American judge Dan
Haywood, presides over the trial of Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) and other judges
who administered Nazi racial policy. The film is set in Nuremberg, the Bavarian city

282
 Judgment at Nuremberg

Actor Montgomery Clift as Rudolph Petersen on the witness stand in a still from the film Judgment
at Nuremberg, directed by Stanley Kramer. (United Artists/Courtesy of Getty Images)

known as the site of Nazi party rallies. This history is recalled as Judge Haywood takes
a walking tour of the city. Defense counsel Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell) presents
the case of decent men caught in the web of Nazi politics. His appeals on behalf of
the aristocratic Minister of Justice, Ernst Janning, one of the authors of the Weimar
constitution, powerfully pleads for understanding on behalf of all of the German peo-
ple. Judy Garland plays Irene Hoffman, an Aryan woman tried for a race crime, an
affair with a Jew, known as the Feldenstein case. It was Justice Janning who presided
over this showcase trial, and he knew that both Irene and Herr Feldenstein, a Jewish
family friend, were innocent. Judge Janning, widely respected among the German peo-
ple, condemns Feldenstein to death and has Irene imprisoned. Later, he tells Haywood
that he did not know his own judicial actions would “come” to mass executions. Hay-
wood responds that it “came to it” the minute he sentenced to death a man he knew
was innocent.
The film has a docudrama feel as the courtroom audience is presented with actual
footage of the camps. Germans in the courtroom voice disbelief; could it really have
been so atrocious? As millions of Germans would claim after the war, so too the char-
acters in the film: we had no knowledge of the camps. The judges, the educated men
who condemned their compatriots to death, defended their positions as men who

283
Jurassic Park

merely followed the rule of law and who fervently loved their country. Madame
Bertholt (Marlene Dietrich), the aristocratic widow of a respected German general,
presents the case of the cultured, sophisticated citizens who viewed the Nazis as thugs
who had hijacked their nation. She decries the charge of collective guilt: Millions had
not known of the camps, she argues, but were caught up in a personal war for survival,
a struggle that continued among the ruins of postwar Germany. Haywood, wrestling
with doubt, seeks empathy for these ordinary people. As the trial nears conclusion,
the Berlin airlift begins and Haywood is counseled by other Americans that they will
need Germans as friends now that they face the beginning of the Cold War. However,
in his courtroom decision, the plain-speaking American judge upholds the value of
human life and the burden of all decent people to resist inhumane policies. (Bradley)
When the film premiered in Berlin in 1961, the mayor of the city, Willy Brandt,
commented: “I hope that world-wide discussion will be aroused by both this film
and this city, and that this will contribute to the strengthening of right and justice”
(Steffen, 2009). However, just as Judge Haywood was unsure, it may be that audiences
were left with the impression that Germans were neither coming to terms with their
past nor fully acknowledging their guilt.

References
Bradley, Sean. “Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg.” http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/
projects/ftrials/nuremberg/JudgmentAtNuremberg.html.
Gonshak, Henry. “Does Judgment at Nuremberg Accurately Depict the Nazi War Crimes Trial?”
Journal of American Culture 31(2), 2008: 153–63.
Steffen, James. “Judgment at Nuremberg.” Turner Classic Movies. http://www.tcm.com/
thismonth/article/?cid=12678&mainArticleId=152449/
—Katharina Tumpek-Kjellmark

JURASSIC PARK. Adapted from Michael Crichton’s novel, Steven Spielberg’s mega
hit Jurassic Park was released by Universal Studios in 1993. Interestingly, the innovative
Spielberg used the latest technology to bring to the screen Crichton’s cautionary tale
about the danger of human beings seeking to control nature through the use of that
very technology. The leading roles were filled by Sam Neill as paleontologist Dr. Alan
Grant, Laura Dern as paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler, Jeff Goldblum as mathematician
Dr. Ian Malcolm, and Sir Richard Attenborough as financier John Hammond; sup-
porting actors include Samuel L. Jackson, Wayne Knight, and B. D. Wong. The real
stars, however, were the dinosaurs, which were cast in an eerie way as late twentieth-
century representations of Frankensteinlike antagonists/victims.
The film opens dramatically with the gruesome death of a park worker on a mysteri-
ous island off Costa Rica, cuts quickly to a Caribbean amber mine, and then to a dino-
saur dig in Montana. By the time John Hammond arrives at the dig, the essentials are
in place: Hammond needs experts to conduct an inspection of his enterprise and sign
off on it to avoid a lawsuit and keep his backers onboard. Once Hammond lures Grant

284
 Jurassic Park

and Sattler with support for their

research, the three join lawyer
Donald Gennaro and chaos theo-
retician Malcolm for a trip to
Jurassic Park, a vacation spot
where the main attractions are
dinosaurs cloned from DNA
found in mosquitoes preserved
in amber. Complications arise
almost immediately from three
sources: the greed of computer
tech Dennis Nedry (Knight),
who has arranged to sell dinosaur
embryos to a competitor; the
arrival at the park of Hammond’s
grandchildren; and a huge storm.
As the “ride” begins—with elec-
tric cars on a track—things begin
to go wrong almost immediately:
one of the dinosaur exhibits has
gone missing, and a triceratops
has contracted a mysterious ill-
ness. Meanwhile, in order to
accomplish his goals, Nedry shuts Scene from the 1992 film Jurassic Park, directed by Steven
down security, including the elec- Spielberg. (Photofest)
tric fences separating dinosaurs
from tourists. Although he dies a
gruesome and, it seems, fitting death at the hands of the dinosaurs, Nedry has now
blurred the boundaries between humans and beasts. Arguably the most heart-
stopping scenes come when the loosed T-Rex finally appears, first as an ominous spec-
ter shaking the ground with its enormous weight as it makes its way toward its victims,
then as an unstoppable force of nature. Chaos reigns for the majority of the film, with
velociraptors emerging as the main villains due to their intelligence and killer instinct.
After their harrowing experiences, all of the central characters escape the island.
Spielberg’s filmic version of the story effectively combines the traditional “monster
movie” with the literary and film tradition of the mad scientist trying to play God.
Again, Jurassic Park is a warning about the dangers involved when human nature, with
its corruption, ego, and greed, meets and tries to control a capricious Mother Nature.
This message, explicitly articulated in the novel, is powerfully expressed in the film by
Dr. Malcolm, who warns everyone that, “Life will not be contained. . . . Life finds a
way.” Malcolm is appalled at Hammond’s “lack of humility” in cavalierly resurrecting
animals that had, quite naturally, been long extinct before humans arrived on the
scene. In this film, cloning provides the contemporary version of the science-run-
amok motif, a topic that became increasingly relevant in the post–World War II world.

285
Jurassic Park

Although cloned sheep Dolly was yet to be produced, scientists cloned a tadpole in
1952, and the U.S. Human Genome Project began just as Crichton’s book hit the
stands.
Ironically, new technologies made possible this scathing critique. Spielberg wanted
“animals, not monsters,” and so his crew cleverly combined animatronics (such as those
used in Jaws) with the newest in computer-generated imagery (CGI) interfaced with
go-motion animation. The result was a film that was wildly popular with audiences
worldwide: costing $95 million to make, it grossed nearly ten times that much and col-
lected dozens of award nominations. Jurassic Park earned a People’s Choice Award for
Favorite Motion Picture and three Academy Awards (Best Sound, Best Visual Effects,
and Best Sound Effects Editing), while Spielberg, though not nominated for this film,
took away Best Director and Best Picture Oscars the same year for Schindler’s List.
See also: Science Fiction Film, The; Spielberg, Steven

References
Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
DeSalle, Rob, and David Lindley. The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World. New York:
HarperCollins, 1997.
Shay, Don. The Making of Jurassic Park. New York: Ballantine, 1993.

—Vicki L. Eaklor

286
 v
K
KARATE KID, THE. Written by Robert Mark Kamen and directed by John G.
Avildsen, The Karate Kid is a martial arts film released in 1984. A pop culture classic,
the movie spawned three sequels and a loosely related animated spin-off series,
although the first movie made the greatest impact on audiences.
The film follows the young Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) after he and his
mother (Randee Heller) move to Los Angeles from New Jersey. Soon after arriving,
Daniel meets an older, Japanese man, Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), who works as a handy-
man in the apartment complex he and his mother have moved into. Daniel quickly
becomes the target of Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), a bully who practices a bru-
tal form of martial arts, against which Daniel is unable to defend himself. During one
of the beatings inflicted on him, Mr. Miyagi steps in and easily defeats Johnny and his
thuggish friends using his own form of martial arts. Daniel begs Mr. Miyagi to teach
him how to fight. Although Mr. Miyagi finally agrees, what he really teaches Daniel
is that the true martial artist is a practitioner of a spiritual art form—one learns how
to fight, says Mr. Miyagi, so that one does not have to fight. Although there is a requi-
site climactic fight scene at the end of the film—Danny faces down Johnny at a martial
arts tournament and defeats him—what Daniel learns about friendship, love, and fam-
ily are the real lessons he takes from his teacher.
Wildly popular with audiences, The Karate Kid is a classic coming-of-age film.
Daniel is just the sort of underdog character for whom Americans love to root. Aside
from being beaten up by particularly violent high school bullies, Daniel is also the
new kid in town struggling mightily just to fit in. He comes from a lower-class family,
which he feels hinders him in establishing a relationship with Ali (Elizabeth Shue), a
girl at school whose parents are wealthy. Daniel has much to learn, it seems, but he is
surrounded by smart, capable allies who assist him in his existential journey.
Significantly, The Karate Kid is characterized by positive, well-rounded portrayals of
minorities and women. Daniel’s mother, for instance, is a hard-working single mom,
who, although she is frustrated by Daniel’s unwillingness to accept her help, maintains
a positive and supportive attitude throughout the film. Ali is depicted as a level-headed
and independent young woman while still being a likable and caring person. She may

287
Killing Fields, The

Scene from the 1984 film The Karate Kid, directed by John G. Avildsen. (Photofest)

not necessarily need rescuing, but she appreciates Daniel’s attempts, and remains a
loyal friend despite what Daniel perceives as their insurmountable cultural differences.
Mr. Miyagi, who initially appears to be little more than the stereotypic wise old Asian
man, is revealed to be a character of great, even tragic depth, who has much to teach
Daniel beyond just martial arts.
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The; Coming-of-Age Film, The; Sports Film, The

References
West, David. Chasing Dragons: An Introduction to the Martial Arts Film. New York: I. B. Tauris,
2006.
Weyn, Suzanne. From Chuck Norris to the Karate Kid: Martial Arts in the Movies. New York:
Parachute Press, 1986.
—Benjamin O’Neill

KILLING FIELDS, THE. Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields (1984) depicts the hor-
rors that occurred in Cambodia when it was ruled by the Khmer Rouge between
April 1975 and January 1979. Based on a true story, the film is organized around the
relationship between Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterson) and Dith Pran (Haing Ngor).
Schanberg, a New York Times reporter, was actually based in Cambodia and won a
Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the situation in Southeast Asia. Pran was a translator
and aide to Schanberg from 1972 to 1975. Ngor, like Pran, himself a survivor of the

288
 Killing Fields, The

communist regime in Cambodia, was able to escape and became active in publicizing
the horrors of the Pol Pot regime. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards
and won three, including Best Supporting Actor for Ngor.
The film begins in Cambodia in 1973, with Pran and Schanberg traveling to an area
outside of the capital, Phnom Penh. There they see the damage caused by errant bomb-
ing by an American B-52. The early scenes show the tension between Khmer Rouge
communists and the nationalist forces in Cambodia. The film suggests that covert
American bombing in Cambodia, authorized by the Nixon administration during the
final phase of the Vietnam War, destabilized the Cambodian government and radical-
ized the communist movement vying for power during the early 1970s. The film also
suggests that the United States never fully acknowledged its complicity in this destabi-
lization and did not do enough to assist the victimized Cambodian people.
Having set the tragic scene in Cambodia, the film shifts to April 1975, after the
Khmer Rouge have defeated nationalist forces. Schanberg helps Pran’s wife and chil-
dren escape from the country, but he encourages Pran to remain in order to help
him report on what is happening in the region. There are riveting scenes of young
Khmer Rouge soldiers—some in their early teens—brandishing weapons and killing
those who do not follow their orders. Pran is forced to plead with the soldiers to spare
the lives of Schanberg and other journalists traveling with him. The Khmer Rouge
government, known as Democratic Kampuchea, allows the foreign journalists, includ-
ing Schanberg, to leave the country, but Cambodian citizens are detained.
Pran, like the nearly three million other residents of Phnom Penh, including the
sick, are forced out of the city and into the countryside where work and reeducation
camps are formed. The Khmer Rouge, whose leaders are known as the Angka, attempt
to build a fully agrarian and self-sufficient political order. At the reeducation camp,
Pran’s voice-overs reveal that the Angka requires reeducation of anyone who was part
of the elite classes in prerevolutionary Cambodia; because of this, Pran must pretend
that he does not know English or French. Forbidden from growing food for them-
selves, the people in the camps are always close to starvation.
Schanberg is back in the United States during this time and doing what he can to
encourage humanitarian groups to help find Pran. His actions, which prevented Pran
from leaving Cambodia, weigh heavily on him, and when he accepts his Pulitzer he
dedicates it to Pran. Pran is eventually able to escape his captors; but while making
his way through a series of tributaries and marshes, he finds himself in the midst of a
vast area filled with human remains: tragically, the rice fields have now become the
“killing fields.”
Pran is finally captured by another member of the Khmer Rouge, a leader of a
prison compound. Pran cares for this man’s child and gains the man’s confidence.
When the fighting between Cambodia and Vietnam spills over into this area, Pran is
able to escape and eventually reaches an international Red Cross station. Once safely
out of Cambodia, he is reunited with his family and Schanberg. In the end, Schanberg
wants to apologize to Pran, but Pran assures him that no apology is needed.
Obviously, no single film can adequately explore the complex issues that
surrounded the period of communist rule in Cambodia—Pol Pot’s killing fields,

289
Killing Fields, The

America’s involvement in Vietnam, and its covert activities in Cambodia during the
Nixon years—but Joffé’s The Killing Fields is certainly notable for its attempt to dis-
close the actions of a brutal regime and to depict the unique friendship that emerged
and was sustained during and after that tragic era.
See also: War Film, The

References
Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge,
1975–1979. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
Pran, Dith, and Kim DePaul, eds. Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
Schanberg, Sydney. The Death and Life of Dith Pran. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984.
—Michael L. Coulter

290
 v
L
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. L.A. Confidential (1997), directed by Curtis Hanson and
adapted by Hanson and Brian Helgeland from a novel by James Ellroy, adds another
dimension to the category of the “urban noir” film. Both book and movie evoke a
Los Angeles that exists—if it ever existed at all—only in the memory and in the
smudged newsprint of discarded scandal sheets and police blotters. Ellroy and Hanson
both see their native town with a sort of double vision—from the perspective of the
children they once were and from that of the artists they have now become.
Both novel and film are set in the years immediately after World War II. Los
Angeles has one foot lightly planted in the fairyland of Hollywood movies and boom-
ing urban optimism, while the other foot is buried in the mire of personal and public
depravity. As the expanding city sheds its small-town skin, rampant corruption erodes
the ranks of the police force, gossip tabloids expose the sleazy underbelly of the film
colony, and urban development scars the area with a new freeway system. There is even
a prostitution ring whose women have been transformed by cosmetic surgery into the
likenesses of Hollywood glamour queens such as Marilyn Monroe and Veronica Lake.
Striding through this milieu of the New Arabian Nights—blended into a factual
background brimming with references to real-life figures like Mickey Cohen, Robert
Mitchum, Johnny Stompanato, Veronica Lake, and Lana Turner—are a gallery of color-
ful fictional characters, including Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a beautiful woman
whose resemblance to Veronica Lake qualifies her as a member of a very exclusive call-
girl ring; and four L.A. policemen investigating a string of unsolved murderers—Captain
Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), an authoritative minion of the law with a secret in his
past; Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), a straight-arrow cop obsessed with doing things by the
book; Bud White (Russell Crowe), a one-man vigilante squad pursuing his own personal
sense of justice; and Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a smooth-talking celebrity hound
who pursues an unholy alliance with tabloid gossipmonger Sid Hudgens (Danny
DeVito). While we watch them sift through the facts and fictions of the case, we discover
they, too, conceal their own secrets and hidden selves.
Los Angeles and its secrets are writer James Ellroy’s great subject. His mother was
murdered there near her El Monte, California, home in 1958, propelling the

291
L.A. Confidential

10-year-old Ellroy into a downward spiral of sex, drugs, and violence. “The event dis-
tilled in me an obsession with all things criminal and violent,” he recalls. “I was com-
pletely perverted. I drank, used drugs, broke into rich people’s houses, sniffed
underwear, and went to jail.” But the self-styled “Demon Dog of American Crime Fic-
tion” pulled himself out of his private morass when, at age 31, he left L.A. and began
writing a series of highly successful, densely packed detective noirs, including the
“L.A. Quartet” cycle—The Black Dahlia (based on an unsolved 1947 murder case),
The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. “Everything I have written comes
from the violence and dislocation of my childhood. Back then L.A. cops were provid-
ing the scandal sheets with the inside skinny on Hollywood celebrities caught with
their pants down. Some were caught at all-male tomcat houses; others were busted
for dope; and there were homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, drunks, sadists, peepers,
prowlers, perverts, panty-sniffers, punks, and pimps. The L.A.P.D. busted them all
and fed the information to the scandal rags. In my novel, L.A. Confidential, and now
in the film, you can see all this in the characters.”
Director Hanson was already familiar with the Los Angeles that Ellroy knew so well.
Indeed, he grew up near Ellroy, in the Wiltern neighborhood at Wilshire and Western.
For him, as well as for Ellroy, the project represented the chance to return to some of
the lost places of his youth, even though they too proved elusive and difficult to trace.
“The city I come from is a city of manufactured illusions,” says Hanson. “It has no
respect for its own past. Some neighborhoods I once knew now look like they’re in
another country, or on another continent. L.A. is famous for that, for just building
itself up and tearing itself down just as quickly.” It was Hanson’s shared obsession with
Ellroy in revisiting—and reconstituting, when necessary—the lost Los Angeles of his
boyhood that gives the film its special credibility. Hanson is particularly proud of the
title credit that reads, “Shot on location in Los Angeles, California.” He boasts that,
except for two computer-enhanced shots, the entire movie cleaves closely to the resi-
due—the physical evidence, as it were—that remains from 1953. “It’s true that L.A.
is famous for tearing things down, like the freeways that bulldozed much of it into
oblivion. But L.A. is still there. You can see what you want to see. It’s like looking at
one of your favorite movies when it comes to television: If you look past all the com-
mercials and distractions, you can still recognize it. L.A. is that way. There were many
things starting up then—television, tabloid journalism, the freeways. They’re still with
us, even though much of the dream of L.A. was bulldozed into oblivion by freeway
construction.”

References
All quotations are taken from interviews by the contributor with James Ellroy and Curtis
Hanson in Toronto, September 7, 1997.
Tibbetts, John, “L.A. Confidential.” American Historical Review 102(5), December 1997,
1599–1600.
—John C. Tibbetts

292
 Land Beyond the Sunset, The

LAND BEYOND THE SUNSET, THE. Written by Dorothy Shore, The Land
Beyond the Sunset (1912) offered early twentieth-century audiences a parable about
humans and their connection to nature. Thomas Edison’s film company produced
the 14-minute silent film in collaboration with the Fresh Air Fund, a popular charity
focused on temporarily transporting tenement children to the country for physical,
mental, and moral improvement. The film remained virtually unknown until voted
into the National Film Registry in 2000.
The film follows the arc of an urban boy’s tribulations on the streets of New York,
through his experience of a Fresh Air excursion to the country, to his salvation in the
bosom of a healthy and hospitable countryside. With evangelical energy, the camera
crew’s lights illuminated for audiences the dark recesses of tenement squalor and used
the symbol of the shining sun to suggest solutions to societal issues. Plot elements
and production values converged around the idea that nature-based social reform
could mitigate urban problems. Breaking conventions of social realism with stylistic
flourishes, the Edison production suggested a world beyond convention: artistic pas-
sage to a better society through the gateway of philanthropic service. The lyrical short
depicted Fresh Air reform with documentary value and artistic flair.
The opening sequence immediately draws the audience into the dilemma of urban
poverty and its deleterious effect on children. A bedraggled Joe (played by child actor
Martin Fuller) peddles newspapers against a black backdrop. Lyrics to a plaintive
lullaby croon “somewhere the sun is shining,” while the boy’s posture conveys dejection
commensurate with a disappointing bundle of unsold newspapers in his clutch. A cam-
era dissolve locates Joe on a recognizable New York City street, finding no success cap-
turing the attention of passersby, until a woman stops to hand him a ticket for a Fresh
Air excursion.
Joe’s delight is quickly quashed in the next scene when his drunken grandmother
(actress Mrs. William Bechtel) berates him for coming home to her disorderly apart-
ment without money to sustain her drinking habit. She departs with his meager earn-
ings, leaving him bereft and weeping against the closed door. The jaunty rhythm of a
piano riff accompanied by a hopeful hymn promises “there is a happy life far, far away,”
and triggers a rapid scene change to the bustling office of a Fresh Air agency. Two
women burst through the clearly labeled office door of the Fresh Air Fund, where a
minister distributes excursion tickets, nodding enthusiastically to a steady stream of
volunteers.
A scene title page announces the arrival of a pivotal plot point: “The morning of the
picnic.” Knowing his grandmother would never permit him a day free from hawking
newspapers, Joe fondles the Fresh Air ticket and hatches a plan. He sneaks out while
his guardian sleeps, and joins a crowd of children boarding a train for the countryside
outing. Another title card informs viewers to pay attention to “His first sight of
the world beyond the slums.” A rolling, open field dotted with white flowers fills the
frame for a reflective moment before the children rush forward in unfettered frolic.
Adult escorts point out all the wonders of nature around them. At the minister’s urg-
ing, the children gather round to offer prepicnic thanks and to hear a fairy tale under
the aegis of a large shade tree.

293
Land Beyond the Sunset, The

The camera fades to a reenactment of the fairy tale. A boy named Jack escapes the
abuses of a wicked witch (warts and all) by seeking refuge with a small band of winged
fairies. The costumed crew of woodland spirits usher him to a boat waiting on the
shore, and send him off along a path of shining light to a “land beyond the sunset.”
In a moment of modernist filmic sensibility, the fairies all turn and face the camera
in unison, suggesting with a glance that the viewers, too, must assist in sending the
children to a better place—an appeal consistent with Progressive-Era reform.
A sharp scene transition refocuses on the picnic children listening intently to the con-
clusion of the fairy tale. Joe sits in a daze. Memories of violence and neglect swarm above
him, represented by the ghostly image of his grandmother hovering nearby. While the
other children ready to depart, Joe dodges the crowd and hides behind a small cottage.
He wanders tentatively toward the ocean, passing beneath the threshold of a large bough.
The camera follows him along the water’s edge until he finds an abandoned boat. He
looks at the Fresh Air ticket in his hand and points toward the boat with an “a-ha” ges-
ture of realization, making the connection between Fresh Air outings and his salvation
as clear for the audience as it to his weary mind. Joe heaves the boat from shore and floats
toward the horizon. Waves carry the vessel and its cargo toward the setting sun.
Although it is never clear whether Joe drifts toward his salvation or a fantasyland
beyond the sunset, it is clear that the Fresh Air Fund infused the film with a powerful
message about nature’s role in galvanizing morality and civic duty. Not only did the
closing “long shot” of Joe’s disappearance in the distance evoke nature’s ability to pro-
vide safe haven from urbanization’s problems, it promised a new beginning for both
Joe and the viewing audience in the great thereafter.
Stylistic techniques such as the opening appeal to the audience, the explicit eye con-
tact of magical woodland creatures, and the final poetic gesture toward the afterlife all
highlight the primary message of the Fresh Air Fund’s foray into film: nature, infused
with a religio-civic humanitarianism, might provide a solution to the social problems
of the day.
See also: Silent Era, The; Coming-of-Age Film, The

References
Everson, William K. American Silent Film. New York: Da Capo, 1998.
Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of
the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Mitman, Gregg. Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999.
Musser, Charles. “A Cornucopia of Images: Comparison and Judgment across Theater, Film,
and the Visual Arts during the Late Nineteenth Century.” In Mathews, Nancy Mowll, ed.
Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910. Manchester, UK: Hudson Hills
Press, 2005: 5–38.
Ufford, Walter Shepard. Fresh Air Charity in the United States. New York: Bonnell, Silver, 1897.

—Barry Ross Muchnick

294
 Last Picture Show, The

LAST PICTURE SHOW, THE. Based on the novel by Larry McMurtry, The Last
Picture Show (1971) explores the lives of a group of people in a dying Texas town
(named Thalia in the book and Anarene in the movie) in a vanishing age in early
1950s America. Its 1971 opening at the New York Film Festival caused a sensation,
and the picture was nominated for eight Oscars, winning for Best Supporting Actor
(Ben Johnson) and Best Supporting Actress (Cloris Leachman). The film was also
one of the first to use a soundtrack entirely made up of pop songs (Ebert, 2004).
During an era when Hollywood was seeking to portray the nation’s counterculture
and its rejection of what it considered the vacuous materialism of the times, director
Peter Bogdanovich offered up his own scathing critique of 1970s America by turning
the clock back to what seemed a more reassuring and comforting period in our his-
tory. Conceiving his film as a cinematic homage to directors like Howard Hawks
and John Ford—whose movies he felt captured both the real and imagined grandeur
of the American West—Bogdanovich shot his picture in black and white, giving it a
spare, hopeless quality. Anarene is characterized by barren, small-town streets and
decaying buildings that are perpetually assaulted by harsh winds and hot sun. Even
the interiors of the buildings reflect a sense of loss and decay—especially the billiard
parlor of Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), which contains only empty cases, a solitary
cooler, and an aging pool table. The homes are not in any better condition, nor is
the high school where the only thing that seems to matter is devotion to Texas and
whether or not the football team will ever win again. Hovering over the town is the
Royal Theater, a symbol of hope and redemption for the townspeople, but in reality
a haunting specter of the community’s once glorious past as well as its doomed
future.
The film begins in late 1951 and follows the lives of two high school football play-
ers, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges). While Duane sets his sights
on Jacy (Cybill Shepherd), the daughter of the richest family in town, Sonny ends up
having an affair with Ruth (Cloris Leachman), the wife of the football coach. Beyond
the town itself, which Bogdanovich gives an eerie, almost organic feel, two figures are
elemental to the picture’s narrative flow. Sam the Lion is the community’s connection
to the past—during the film we find out that he had a passionate affair with Jacy’s
mother, Lois (Ellen Burstyn)—while young Billy (Sam Bottoms), who spends most
of his time sweeping dust off of Anarene’s dirty streets, represents its stultifying
present. All the characters seek escape in their own way: Ellen seems content with
drinking her life away in relative comfort while carrying on an affair with her hus-
band’s foreman; Duane eventually enlists in the army and is sent to Korea; Jacy uses
sex as she coldly teases first Duane and then Sonny; Sonny and Ruth ultimately find
comfort in each other’s arms; and, in cruel twists of fate, Sam the Lion dies of a heart
attack while young Billy loses his life when he is struck by a car. Only Genevieve
(Eileen Brennan), a waitress, seems to possess a spark of life—and perhaps the pos-
sibility of transcending her situation. In the end, the death of Sam while Duane
and Sonny are on a road trip to Mexico signals the beginning of the end for the
town, as the Royal Theatre eventually closes—the last picture show.

295
Last Picture Show, The

Scene from the 1971 film The Last Picture Show, starring Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd.
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. (Photofest)

Besides the innovative use of popular songs (primarily country-western) in the

musical score, The Last Picture Show was significant in other ways. With the exception
of Ben Johnson, Bogdanovich purposely used young, unknown actors and actresses.
The movie served as a breakout vehicle for Bridges, Leachman, and Shepherd. The
issue of the seduction of young man by an older woman, while dealt with tenderly,
ultimately unsettled viewers. Finally, Cybill Shepherd’s seductive striptease, performed
on a diving board in front of a group of young men and women who are nude, was
considered radical for the time.

References
Ebert, Roger. “The Last Picture Show: Deep in the Heart of Texas.” Chicago Sun-Times, July 4,
2004.
Gerlach, John. “The Last Picture Show and One More Adaptation.” Literature Film Quarterly 1,
Spring 1973: 161–66.
Willson, Robert. “Which is the Real Last Picture Show?” Literature Film Quarterly 1, Spring
1973, 167–69.
—Charles Johnson

296
 Lean on Me

LEAN ON ME. Lean on Me (1989) follows a Paterson, New Jersey, high school
principal who attempts to reform a troubled, inner-city school by implementing con-
troversial but ultimately extremely effective policies. Loosely based on the story of
“Crazy Joe” Clark, a committed New Jersey educator, the film was directed by John
G. Avildsen, the Academy Award-winning director of Rocky (1976) and The Karate
Kid (1984), two other films in which an “underdog” triumphs over seemingly insur-
mountable odds.
Significantly, the narrative flow of Lean on Me is similar to those of other films
released during the 1980s and 1990s that dealt with educators challenging “the sys-
tem”: the brilliantly titled Children of a Lesser God (1986), for instance, which starred
Marlee Matlin and William Hurt; Stand and Deliver (1988), with Edward James
Olmos playing East L.A. math teacher Jaime A. Escalante; Dead Poets Society (1989),
starring Robin Williams as a nontraditional instructor who returns to teach at the
staid, oppressive boys’ school from which he graduated; and Dangerous Minds
(1995), with Michelle Pfeiffer playing “Lou Anne Johnson,” a former marine who
reaches her culturally and emotionally dispossessed students by teaching them about
both Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas.
Lean on Me opens with a fight scene at Eastside High School. The school’s principle,
attempting to stop the fight, is brutally beaten. Desperate, the Superintendent of Pater-
son Public Schools, Dr. Frank Napier (Robert Guillaume), decides to hire Joe Clark as
Eastside’s new principal. Napier, along with the mayor of Paterson (Alan North), is
ambivalent about hiring Clark, who already has established a reputation as being an
effective if overzealous educator. Eastside, however, has been plagued by violence,
drugs, vandalism, and low tests scores, and when the state of New Jersey threatens to
take over the school, Napier and the mayor put aside their reservations and bring Clark
aboard.
During his first week on the job, Clark decides to expel 300 Eastside students for
various infractions. This causes a great deal of tension among Clark, his teachers, the
parents, Napier, and the mayor. Clark eventually goes so far as to place chains on the
school’s doors in an attempt to keep “the drug dealers out”; he also begins to carry a
baseball bat that he makes clear he will use in order to impose his will—“they can call
me batman,” declares Clark. Although he is a no-nonsense administrator, Clark is also
a compassionate educator who slowly wins the hearts of his students. When their prin-
cipal is jailed for violating the city’s fire codes by placing chains and locks on the
school’s doors, Eastside’s students march on the central office of the Paterson Board
of Education, demanding that he be released and reinstated. They, at least, realize that
Clark is someone on whom they can lean.
Representative of 1980s and ’90s coming-of-age films set in beleaguered high
schools, Lean on Me presented audiences with a charismatic protagonist who was at
once a rigid, Reaganesque disciplinarian and a noble, socially minded reformer. Joe
Clark, who published his book Laying Down the Law the same year Lean on Me was
released, went on to become an educational advocate and motivational speaker.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The

297
Left Handed Gun, The

Scene from the 1989 film Lean on Me, starring Morgan Freeman (far right) as Principal Joe Clark.
Directed by John G. Avildsen. (Photofest)

References
Clark, Joe, and Joe Picard. Laying Down the Law: Joe Clark’s Strategy for Saving Our Schools.
Washington, DC: Regnery, 1989.
Muller, Jurgen. The Best Movies of the 80s. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2005.
—Hettie Williams

LEFT HANDED GUN, THE. The Left Handed Gun (1958) was the first feature
film of American director Arthur Penn, whose major works, including The Miracle
Worker (1962), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Little Big Man (1970), helped to facili-
tate the transition in American filmmaking from the studio system to the postclassical
era of the New Hollywood. With the advent and growing popularity of television has-
tening the decline of the movie industry’s golden age in the 1950s, Penn, a successful
young Broadway stage and television director, was hired to direct this Warner Bros.
project.
The Left Handed Gun was derived from actual historical events, the last three years
of the life of William Bonney, better known as “Billy the Kid,” a gunfighter who came
to prominence during the 1870s. Paul Newman, with whom Penn had worked at the
Actors Studio and whom Penn had directed in television productions, was chosen to
play William Bonney. (Newman had been slowly establishing himself as a film actor
during the 1950s, but 1958 would prove to be a breakout year for the talented,

298
 Left Handed Gun, The

extraordinarily handsome young performer. In addition to his masterfully played role

in The Left Handed Gun, Newman also starred that year in The Long Hot Summer,
Rally ‘round the Flag Boys, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.) Shot in black and white on a
shoestring budget, the film was made in a mere 23 days, entirely on Warner property
in Southern California. The Left Handed Gun received little critical attention when it
was released, and was a box-office failure in America, where it survived as the bottom
half offering of theatrical double bills. Interestingly, however, it was recognized for its
creative artistry in Europe, particularly in France and Belgium, where it won the Bel-
gian Film Critics Prize for Best First Picture.
Although The Left Handed Gun was based on people, places, and events from the
past, it clearly reflected and addressed contemporary social issues that existed in
America in the 1950s. This decade was marked by a post-World War II economic
prosperity, the growth of the middle class and suburbia, and the emergence of a cer-
tain paranoia and pressure to conform in the face of the threat of Cold War
communism. In this environment a “generation gap” began to emerge between older,
more conservative members of the “establishment”—parents, politicians, even teach-
ers, anyone over the age of 30—and restless American youth who sought greater
freedom than their elders allowed. Focusing on these 1950s tensions, Penn depicted
Billy as an emotionally underdeveloped, disaffected young man at odds with the
social order of the day. In Penn’s hands, then, William Bonney was, in many ways,
a typical teenager, acting and reacting impulsively with little or no self-control, often
expressing his feelings violently and without considering the consequences of his
actions.
Befriended by an English merchant and cattle rancher, Mr. Tunstall, William is put
to work driving cattle to market in Lincoln, New Mexico Territory. The wayward
William is warmly taken under Mr. Tunstall’s wing, as this caring substitute father
begins to show an interest in William’s views, even offering to teach him to read.
Unfortunately for William, Tunstall is murdered by four Lincoln townspeople seeking
to prevent his prospective cattle sale from depressing market prices for their own cattle.
Distraught, William reacts in the only way he knows: He seeks to avenge the murder of
his surrogate father by hunting down and killing the four men involved in Tunstall’s
death; in his mind, he is effecting justice rather than committing murder. The plan,
though, endangers not only his intended victims but also his own friends and loved
ones; it also threatens the amnesty proclaimed by the territorial governor, who is seek-
ing to restore peace to the community.
Although order ultimately prevails in the picture—in the end, Billy dies at the
hands of Sheriff Pat Garrett—it is an order that is always and everywhere fragile, unsta-
ble, and possibly immoral. Penn acknowledged that his portrayal of Billy the Kid was
inaccurate and completely fanciful. In his account, Penn was determined to leave
William trapped in a perpetual adolescence—literally Billy the “kid”—who longs for
the father he never had. Defining a narrative space in which a delicate balance exists
between fanciful play and sudden, disturbing violence, Penn was especially interested
in exploring the relationship between myth and reality. Through the character Moul-
trie, the “yellow journalism” reporter who skews and exaggerates Billy’s exploits and

299
Left Handed Gun, The

feeds the Eastern news machine with stories that make the Kid a nationally recognized
figure, Penn sought to reveal both America’s perverse need to create heroes as well as
the potentially devastating consequences that may result when those mythical figures
inevitably fail to live up to our unrealistic, idealized images of them.
Significantly, The Left Handed Gun may be understood as a revisionist western that
departs from the traditional characterization of cowboys and settlers as virtuous pio-
neers who tamed the frontier during the second half of the nineteenth century. At
the time Penn made The Left Handed Gun, westerns—with a few exceptions such as
the complex westerns of Anthony Mann, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray featuring
morally dubious heroes—had, for the most part, been conceived as action films that
included a great deal of bloodless gunfighting between clearly defined white-hatted
heroes and black-hatted villains. Two years before Penn made The Left Handed Gun,
however, John Ford, who many considered the father of the film western, made The
Searchers, an unsettling, nontraditional character study that featured the iconic John
Wayne as the violently pragmatic Ethan Edwards, whom we come to understand is
not seeking to rescue his niece from Indians but is tracking her down in order to kill
her because she has been despoiled by her contact with these heathens. Following Ford,
Penn turned The Left Handed Gun into a powerful psychological examination of a mis-
understood historical figure. In Penn’s hands, Billy the Kid became a complex,
troubled man-child, for whom we feel a great deal of compassion. In this way, Penn
successfully challenged viewers’ expectations and traditional attitudes about heroism,
villains, violence, and courage.
On the last day of filming, Penn was told by the studio that he would not be doing
the final edit for The Left Handed Gun. He was greatly disappointed, disagreed with
the ending the studio created for the film (which focused on Garrett rather than Billy),
and generally described his first experience in cinema as unpleasant. Although disillu-
sioned by the experience of bringing The Left Handed Gun to the big screen, a decade
later, Penn would go on to direct Bonnie and Clyde, one of the most important American
films ever made. One of a handful of directors who came to define the first wave of
independent filmmaking that extended from the late 1950s into the 1970s, Penn used
his unique cinematic style to deconstruct popular myths and conventional notions
about movies.
See also: Newman, Paul; Penn, Arthur; Western, The

References
Bolar, Terry. “The Left Handed Gun.” Screen 10(1), January/February 1969: 15–23.
Crowdus, Gary, and Richard Porton. “The Importance of a Singular, Guiding Vision: An Inter-
view with Arthur Penn.” Cineaste 20(2), December 1993: 4–16.
Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3rd ed.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Wood, Robin, and Ian Cameron. Arthur Penn. New York: Praeger, 1969.
—J. Bruce McGee

300
 Lethal Weapon

LETHAL WEAPON. A box-office hit when it was released in 1987, Lethal Weapon
spawned three successful sequels. Viewed by most American audiences as merely another
action-adventure picture, it was characterized by some critics as quintessential Reaganite
cinema, as it reflects (and helped to shape) a political and cultural shift to the political
Right. It has even been suggested that its sequential nature is expressive of certain Rea-
ganite themes: a desire for constancy in a decade of recuperation from the anxieties raised
by 1960s and ’70s radicalism; attempts to reassert racial integration in response to the
threat of Black Power movements; a shift back to patriarchal values in response to femi-
nism; and a push to reestablish a law-and-order sensibility in a nation plagued by urban
crime, disrespect for authority, and liberal permissiveness (Wood, 2003).
Central to the narrative flow of Lethal Weapon is the relationship between two vastly
different LAPD officers: black sergeant Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and white
sergeant Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson). Initially indifferent to each other—both would
much rather work alone—they gradually develop not only a strong partnership but
also an enduring friendship. It may be argued that their unusual union, and
Murtaugh’s middle-class success, reflect both a desire for racial integration—black
and white can be reconciled, despite America’s past racial hostilities—and a Reaganite
preference for a color-blind but strictly ordered meritocracy. To be sure, America inter-
preted this integrative process very differently. Liberals tended to view this 1980s
version of meritocratic integration as yet another example of forced assimilation into
white society—and thus a reassertion of white cultural norms and values that acted
to subjugate an historically repressed black community. Conservatives, on the other
hand, tended to view the process as an example of assimilation into American society—
and thus an adoption of traditional norms and values that would free the black commu-
nity from the shackles of a socially engineered welfare state ushered in by liberal politi-
cians intent on codifying preferential treatment for racial minorities.
Lethal Weapon also reflects a hope for the reassertion of patriarchy. The film’s antag-
onists (the drug dealers) are a threat to the family—most explicitly when they kidnap
Murtaugh’s daughter Rianne (Traci Wolfe). Murtaugh must save his helpless daughter
and protect his family. More generally, Lethal Weapon reveals a concern with crime,
especially crime related to an urban environment, and more specifically to drugs,
which Reagan identified as a principal threat to the family and American society. Lethal
Weapon can be seen as a cinematic war on drugs. When Murtaugh and Riggs realize the
extensive power of the drug dealers (they have corporate cover), their professional
expertise (they are not merely Vietnam vets but ex-special forces), and that they have
declared war on them (they try to kill Riggs and kidnap Rianne), they return the favor,
waging an unlimited war against the drug dealers. The war reflects not only a reaction
against supposed liberal weakness against crime, but also a morally unambiguous view
of law and order—another Reaganite or rightist view.
Lethal Weapon may also be seen as an (urban) western. The urban environment has
become the frontier; civilization has receded. The drug dealers operate outside of the
law and must be eliminated and civilization restored by gunmen who also must
become a law unto themselves. Rianne’s capture is a threat not merely to the family
but to civilization, which she represents; and to save her is to reestablish civilization.

301
Letters from Iwo Jima

Scene from the 1987 film Lethal Weapon, starring Mel Gibson (left) and Danny Glover. Directed by
Richard Donner. (Photofest)

The Vietnam War also permeates the movie, still lurking and haunting Americans;
especially their fear of violent veterans. The principal characters, good and bad, are all
Vietnam veterans. The drug dealers, employing their military skills for evil purposes,
threaten society. And if Murtaugh is a well-adjusted veteran, his partner Riggs, while
the protagonist, is still a “lethal weapon.”
See also: Gibson, Mel; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The

References
Jordan, Chris. Movies and the Reagan Presidency: Success and Ethics. Westport, CT: Praeger,
2003.
Palmer, William J. The Films of the Eighties: A Social History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1993.
Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan—and Beyond, rev. ed. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003.
—Mark D. Popowski

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA. Letters from Iwo Jima is Clint Eastwood’s
companion piece to his Flags of Our Fathers. Released in 2006, the two films represent
Eastwood’s attempt to reimagine the traditional World War II combat picture. While
Flags of Our Father explores the real-life drama that surrounded the publication of

302
 Letters from Iwo Jima

Ken Watanabe in a scene from the movie Letters from Iwo Jima, directed by Clint Eastwood.
(AFP/Getty Images)

Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of the American flag raising on Mount Suribachi
during the Battle of Iwo Jima, Letters from Iwo Jima shifts perspectives, focusing on
the experiences of the Japanese soldiers who gave their lives defending the relatively
small island in the Pacific.
The Battle of Iwo Jima extended over an extraordinarily bloody 35-day period that
stretched between February 19 and March 26, 1945. During this battle, over 6,000
American troops died, while U.S. causalities numbered over 23,000. On the Japanese
side, nearly 22,000 soldiers died defending the strategic island. Located some 650 miles
south-southeast of Tokyo, the island lay almost exactly halfway between the airfields
that the U.S. military had established on Guam, Saipan, and the Mariana Islands
and the Japanese mainland. Although the United States had already been engaged in
B-52 bombing missions focused on the Japanese mainland, the 1,200-mile distance
from their island airfields to Japan stretched the capabilities of their bombers. Taking
Iwo Jima, reasoned U.S. military commanders, would allow for much more effective
B-52 strikes; it would also limit kamikaze attacks on American battleships that were
being carried out by pilots who lifted off from Iwo Jima.
American forces were not expecting to meet the sort of resistance they encountered
when they stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima in 1945. Knowing full well that Japanese
soldiers would fight tenaciously to hold territory they had been ordered to defend,
and further, that the Japanese understood Iwo Jima as part of the motherland, U.S.
forces were still unprepared for the defensive strategy that was put in place by the
Japanese commander on the island, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi.

303
Letters from Iwo Jima

Kuribayashi, who seemed to understand that he and his men had little chance of
actually defeating the U.S. invading force, decided that attempting to stop American
troops on the beach would be foolhardy. With this in mind, he had his soldiers pull
back off the beaches and build a series of heavily fortified bunkers connected by an
intricately designed string of tunnels.
Basing his film on information provided in letters that were written by Kuribayashi
and other men to their families while they nervously awaited the arrival of the
Americans, Eastwood portrayed the Japanese troops in a radically different way than they
had so often been depicted in traditional World War II combat pictures. Instead of rep-
resenting them as some nameless, faceless, evil force of nature, in Letters from Iwo Jima,
they are shown to be simple human beings who desperately miss their families and
who, like most young men in battle, cannot really understand why we must fight and die.
With the arrival of Kuribayashi, things begin to change quickly on Iwo Jima. The
newly assigned commander (played in a powerfully subtle way by the Japanese actor
Ken Wanatabe) immediately sets off on foot to survey the island. When he returns—
exhausted yet energized—he directs his officers to begin to implement what they feel
is his controversial defense plan. He also gives orders that the foot soldiers tasked with
digging the bunkers and tunnels that will be used to defend Iwo Jima should be treated
with dignity, receiving adequate breaks for water and rations of food equal to those
provided to their superiors.
Eastwood does a masterful job depicting the existential despair experienced by most
of the Japanese soldiers on the island who struggle with the demand that they remain
committed to a nineteenth-century Bushido ethic (the “Way of the Warrior”) that
requires them to face death fearlessly. Most of the young men, while proud of serving
the motherland, want nothing more than to survive and return to their families. In
one particularly chilling scene, a group of soldiers, who realize that they will almost
certainly be captured, are forcefully directed by their commanding officer to commit
ritual suicide—much like the samurai warriors of old. Declaring their loyalty to Japan,
each pulls the pin on a hand grenade and shoves it up against his stomach. One of the
soldiers, Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), who has consistently grappled with his commit-
ment to the cause, risks dishonor by fleeing—he hopes that he might blend in with
other troops and somehow make his way off the island and back to his wife and new-
born daughter. Even the courageous Kuribayashi struggles with his mortality—after
being wounded, he realizes that he must commit suicide, denying himself the opportu-
nity to say a proper goodbye to his family.
Taken together, Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers remind us
that war, while sometimes perversely heroic, is always tragic—people die, lives are shat-
tered, and we are all left broken and unsure of what exactly has been accomplished.
See also: Eastwood, Clint; Flags of Our Fathers; War Film, The

References
Kakehashi, Kumiko. So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War Based on General Tadamichi
Kuribayashi’s Letters from Iwo Jima. New York: Presidio Press, 2007.

304
 Lion King, The

Kuribayashi, Tadamichi. Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief: Letters from Iwo Jima.
Searleman, Eric, ed. San Francisco: VIZ Media, 2007.
Suid, Lawrence. Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

—Claire Puccia Parham

LION KING, THE. Walt Disney loved nature, and The Lion King (1994) was one
of the many products of the Disney Company’s longstanding affinity for animals.
The film, winner of the 1995 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Comedy/Musical,
became a Disney classic, beloved by fans around the world.
The story, adapted from Hamlet, follows a young lion cub named Simba (voiced by
Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Matthew Broderick). Simba’s father, King Mufasa
(voiced by James Earl Jones), is a strong leader who teaches Simba about the difficulties
of being King and the importance of respecting all living things. Mufasa’s brother Scar
(voiced by Jeremy Irons), resents Mufasa and Simba, leading him to befriend the hye-
nas, who live outside the boundaries of the Pride Lands and are the only creatures over
which Mufasa does not rule. With the hyenas’ help, Scar plots to kill both Mufasa and
Simba in order to ascend to the throne. While the plan is successful in regard to killing
Mufasa, Simba escapes, taking refuge in a distant oasis.
Timon (voiced by Nathan Lane) and Pumbaa (voiced by Ernie Sabella) find Simba
and teach him to adopt a life of leisure. As he tries to overcome the guilt of his father’s
death, Simba grows with Timon and Pumbaa, content to live outside his Kingdom.
When his childhood friend Nala (voiced by Niketa Calame/Moira Kelly) finds him
and pleads for him to return, however, Simba reconsiders. Conflicted, Simba encoun-
ters the sorcerer baboon Rafiki (voiced by Robert Guillaume), who shows him that
nothing can be done about the past. Suddenly, Mufasa’a ghost appears in the clouds,
telling Simba to “take your place in the Circle of Life” and to “remember who you
are.” Simba returns to the Kingdom and defeats Scar in a dramatic and visually stun-
ning fight scene. Following Simba’s reclamation of the throne, it rains, symbolically
washing away the evil of Scar and signaling a rebirth for the land.
In addition to the film, a successful Broadway version of The Lion King, produced by
director Julie Taymor, opened in 1997. The soundtrack, composed by Elton John and
Tim Rice, produced three Academy Award nominations for Best Song: “Circle of Life,”
“Hakuna Matata,” and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” with the last taking home the
Oscar. Disney even produced two sequels, Lion King II (1998) and Lion King 1 1/2
(2004), although neither achieved the critical or box-office success of the original.
It may be argued that the film’s success is due in large part to its familiarity. Apart
from the parallels to Hamlet, the characters recall those in traditional Westerns. From
the lawless bandits (hyenas), to the redemptive violence (Simba fighting Scar), and
the reliance on one man to solve the community’s problems (Nala tells Simba that he
is the only one who can save the Pride Lands), The Lion King follows the long-
established formula of the genre Western. Another reason for the film’s success may
be attributed to the way the character of Simba is depicted. Simba confronts personal

305
Lion King, The

tragedy, a widespread emotional

difficulty that everyone faces. In
addition, Simba’s feelings of
inadequacy when compared to
his father—beautifully demon-
strated when he steps in his
father’s huge paw print—speaks
volumes about the complexity
of father-son relationships.
Critics of the film argued that
the picture perpetuated destruc-
tive stereotypes—in this case
racial, as the good characters are
light-skinned, the evil characters
dark-skinned—and that it was
another attempt by Disney to
indoctrinate children. (In 1995,
the studio would once again
come under attack—this time
for perpetuating gender stereo-
types—for its Cosmo-cover
depiction of Pocahontas.) Some
even suggested that woven into
the storyline of The Lion King
were ideas advocating the crea-
tion of a monarchy in South
Africa following the end of
apartheid. Although the latter
Scene from the 1994 film The Lion King, directed by Roger suggestion appears far-fetched,
Allers and Rob Minkoff. Pictured are Baby Simba (voiced by
it shows that issues concerning
Jonathan Taylor Thomas), Rafiki the Mandrill (voiced by
Disney and stereotyping will
Robert Guillaume), Queen Sarabi (voiced by Madge Sinclair),
King Mufasa (voiced by James Earl Jones), and (below) Scar continue to be discussed.
(voiced by Jeremy Irons). (Photofest) See also: Animation

References
Budd, Mike, and Max H. Kirsch, eds. Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
Byrne, Eleanor, and Martin McQuillan. Deconstructing Disney. London: Pluto Press, 1999.
Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2001.
—Sean Graham

306
 Little Big Man

LITTLE BIG MAN. The year 1969 marked the point at which a momentous de-
cade in American history drew to a close. The decade was marked by antiwar protests
against the ongoing conflict in Vietnam and by revolutionary social movements related
to issues of class, gender, race, and sexual orientation. Nowhere were these changes
more accurately recorded than on the big screen.
Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) encapsulated many of society’s changes and
revolutionized the western. Decades earlier, director John Ford set the standard for
the genre with his Cavalry trilogy: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1948), Fort Apache
(1949), and Rio Grande (1950). One biographer noted that Ford placed Native Amer-
icans and African Americans on the lowest rung of the social ladder, rarely giving them
speaking parts or sympathetic treatment (Baxter, 1971). John Wayne faithfully played
the heroic Cavalry officer pitted against Indian antagonists. Penn took another tack
and gave Little Big Man’s Native American characters a humanity rarely seen before
in film.
Little Big Man begins with 121-year-old Jack Crabbe, played by Dustin Hoffman,
recounting his life and adventures in the Wild West. It is unclear whether Crabbe
actually witnessed life on the plains or just possessed a colorful imagination. Found
at age 10 after a wagon train massacre, Crabbe was adopted by a band of Cheyenne
who call themselves the Human Beings. Crabbe learns to track and hunt, earning the
name Little Big Man when he demonstrates how courageous he is in the face of a
Pawnee attack despite his less than imposing stature. He lives an unfettered life as a
Cheyenne warrior, nurtured by his adoptive family until being captured during a skir-
mish with the army. In trademark Penn style, the film turns to parodying the dominant
society’s values as Crabbe receives religious instruction from a switch-wielding preacher
and his seductive wife, joins a maimed swindler to peddle snake oil, and drinks soda
pop alongside Wild Bill Hickok.
Little Big Man’s Cheyenne family is cast in a more complicated but tender light.
While he was raised by his wise and virile grandfather, Old Lodge Skins, Penn depicts
more complex and often overlooked roles in Cheyenne society. Younger Bear, a long-
time rival who owes Little Big Man his life, becomes a contraire, saying the opposite
of what he means and doing things backwards. Little Horse, a childhood friend who
preferred to stay behind with the women while the men went to war, is identified as
a Heemaneh, an individual who assumes another gender. When they reunite later in
the film, Little Horse offers to become Little Big Man’s wife, a union that was not only
acceptable but desirable in Native communities (Williams, 1986). Little Big Man
instead takes in and services his own wife’s three unmarried sisters, winning praise as
a loyal and generous husband. Despite clear documentation from the nineteenth cen-
tury, such social dynamics are rarely depicted in film.
The treatment of the U.S. Cavalry and General Custer in particular is revolutionary
for the time and mimics the growing dissent over the war in Vietnam. Unlike John
Wayne’s dashing officers who always best the Indians, Richard Mulligan’s General
Custer comes across as an arrogant buffoon whose obsession with the public’s percep-
tion of him compromises his military campaign. With decades of scholarship to draw
on, Penn’s depiction of the doomed officer was more caricature than accurate

307
Little Big Man

Native American warriors on horseback in a scene from Little Big Man, directed by Arthur Penn.
(Ernst Haas/Getty Images)

representation. While Custer may have been arrogant, circumstances overwhelmingly

favored the Indians, who possessed superior numbers and weapons (Michno, 1997).
Custer’s troops, on the other hand, were poorly positioned, easily divided, and not
accustomed to taking the offensive in the face of unified Indian resistance.
With Little Big Man, Arthur Penn not only spun an entertaining tale of historic
events and colorful figures of the Old West, he revised generations of bias and stereo-
types. Penn portrayed the Cheyenne as human beings in their own words, victims of
an encroaching expansion threatening their way of life. By giving Native Americans
voices and emotions against the backdrop of Plains Indian wars, he presented audi-
ences with a revisionist history lesson. Little Big Man takes Native Americans from
faceless riders on the horizon to loving, inclusive people trying to make sense of a
changing world.
See also: Penn, Arthur; Western, The

References
Baxter, John. The Cinema of John Ford. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1971.
Kemp, Philip. “Arthur Penn.” http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Mi-Pe/Penn-
Arthur.html.
Michno, Gregory F. Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer’s Defeat. Missoula, MT:
Mountain Press, 1997.

308
 Lord of the Rings, The

Williams, Walter. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1986.

—Mark Vezzola

LORD OF THE RINGS, THE. Adapted from J. R. R. Tolkien’s classic novels, The
Lord of the Rings trilogy is perhaps the largest film production in history. Spanning
nearly a decade in planning and production and boasting an estimated budget of
$297 million, The Lord of the Rings trilogy was an ambitious project that set out to
bring the complex civilizations, languages, and creatures of Middle Earth to life. Writ-
ers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson shared the task of first adapting
Tolkien’s mythical world from book to screen. Their visual translation created a model
for global event filmmaking, and had a major impact on American fan culture.
Originally written in the mid-1900s, The Lord of the Rings novels have grown in
popularity among literary critics and science fiction and fantasy readers alike. The
series follows the gentle hobbit Frodo Baggins on a grueling but inspiring journey to
protect and then destroy an all-powerful ring that threatens all life in Middle Earth.
Each film in the series was released in the month of December, beginning with The Fel-
lowship of the Ring in 2001, The Two Towers in 2002, and finally The Return of the King
in 2003. Jackson in particular, who also directed, claimed to be committed to creating
an historical film rather than a fantasy film, so design elements became the key to cap-
turing the cultures of Middle Earth. The film series draws upon a range of special
effects and design techniques to bring Tolkien’s elaborate, magical world to life. Due
to the unique demands for costumes, modeling, computer-generated images (CGI),
and other digital effects, the production inspired ideas that have since become

Scene from the 2001 film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, starring Elijah Wood.
Directed by Peter Jackson. (Photofest)

309
Lord of the Rings, The

customary in large-scale special effect filmmaking. To achieve the realism the film-
makers sought, scores of polystyrene sculptures and miniatures—or “bigatures” as the
larger models have come to be known—were created for Middle Earth. Through
manipulation of light and scale, these models were used to create anything from a
sky-scraping tower to a deep, echoing cavern. Despite the creation of these magical
models, Middle Earth could only be fully realized through the use of blue-screen tech-
nology and CGI. Along with the Star Wars prequels (1999, 2002, 2005) and the Harry
Potter series (2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010), The Lord of the Rings trilogy
combines innovative digital effects with traditional physical effects. These film series—
all produced within the past decade—have come to symbolize a new age in epic film
production.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy compares to the Harry Potter series and Star Wars not
only because of the production traits, but also because of the fan culture these films
have attracted. The Lord of the Rings is supported by one of the largest and most vigo-
rous fan cultures of all time. The adaptation from the original novels to the film series
has sparked exponential growth in fan activism, and the story’s rebirth in the digital age
adds to its significance as a staple of American culture. An exceptionally loyal fan base
surrounding the original novels has existed for years, so the introduction of a new gen-
eration of film enthusiasts has caused a culture clash within the Lord of the Rings
extended fan family. Among the more controversial points of contention within the
self-termed “ringer” community are the competing languages between the books and
films. Though members of the film production, and Jackson in particular, worked tire-
lessly to remain as loyal as possible to Tolkien’s original writings, some changes have
provoked criticism from devoted fans of the novels. One notable adaptation that took
place for the film series was the omission or revision of English words like “gay” and
“queer,” which were used commonly in Tolkien’s novels. Contemporary meanings of
these words have helped strengthen alternative interpretations of homosexuality both
in the original story and the film adaptation. Coupled with a particularly affectionate
relationship between Frodo and his best friend Sam, these alternative readings have
gained a great deal of momentum among fans. Because of this, relationships in The
Lord of the Rings have been re-shaped and cultivated by fans on the Internet, in particu-
lar. Perhaps one reason for such an active fan culture surrounding The Lord of the Rings
is the emergence of online communities and blogs. A number of Web sites provide
forums for discussion between ringers. In addition to a flourishing fan culture within
discussion-based Web sites, fans produce their own revisions to the existing stories. Alter-
nate scenes and storylines continue to come to light, from satirical drawings, poems, and
articles to erotic slash fiction that romanticizes the relationships within the fellowship—
the group of hobbits, men, dwarves and elves accompanying Frodo on his journey.
Despite the different readings fans have derived from the films, or perhaps because
of them, each film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy was immensely successful at the box
office. Each one sits among the 15 top-grossing movies of all time. The final entry, The
Return of the King (2003), is the second-highest-grossing film at $1.1 billion world-
wide. The final film also won the most awards within the trilogy, including 11

310
 Lost In Translation

Academy Awards. All three films won Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects.
Combined, the trilogy won 247 awards worldwide.
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The; New Technologies in Filmmaking

References
Carter, Lin. Tolkien; A Look Behind “The Lord of the Rings.” New York: Ballantine, 1969.
The Internet Movie Database. “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” http://
www.imdb.com/title/tt0120737/.
Jenkins, Henry, and John Tulloch. Science Fiction Audiences: Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Their
Followers. London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1995.
Nash, Bruce. (1997–2004). “The Numbers: Movie Budget Records.” http://www
.the-numbers.com/movies/international/records.php.
Tyler, J. E. A., ed. The Tolkien Companion. New York: St. Martin’s, 1976.
—Adam Dean

LOST IN TRANSLATION. In the opening scene of Sofia Coppola’s second fea-

ture, Lost In Translation (2003), the camera is fixed on the bottom of a young woman
named Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) lying on her hotel-room bed, her skin barely
covered by translucent pink underpants. It’s a memorable and much-discussed shot,
both for its ambiguous meaning and for its gauzy and dreamy aesthetic, and it

Scene from the 2003 film Lost in Translation, starring Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray. Directed
by Sofia Coppola. (Photofest)

311
Lost In Translation

establishes the visual and emotional mood of the film (intimately shot by cinematogra-
pher Lance Acord). This scene is juxtaposed with one of Bob Harris (Bill Murray)
arriving in Tokyo, sleeping in the back of a taxi, rubbing his eyes in wonderment and
disbelief when he encounters the lights and kinetic energy of Tokyo and then, sud-
denly, a giant billboard of himself in a whiskey ad framed by Japanese characters.
Bob and Charlotte haven’t met yet, the sequence suggests, but they will. As different
from each other as Bob and Charlotte seem (there is a significant age gap between
them), they are at similar places in their emotional lives. Charlotte is married to John
(Giovanni Ribisi), a hipster photographer who has brought Charlotte to Tokyo so that
he can shoot a band, leaving her alone to gaze out at the city from her hotel room (mir-
roring Bob’s opening scene), as if searching for her place in it. Early on, Charlotte calls
a friend to tell her that, after visiting a Buddhist temple, she “didn’t feel anything.”
Bob, in turn, is at a point in his career where his film work has waned, and he’s in
Tokyo to shoot a Suntory whiskey commercial, a not-so-secret celebrity shame for
which he will be paid $2 million. Bob’s wife Lydia is back home in Los Angeles looking
after their children, and the two of them communicate through stilted phone conver-
sations and inconveniently received faxes (Lydia seems unaware of the time difference
between L.A. and Tokyo), in which she poses inane questions to Bob about how to
decorate his home office.
Coppola develops the relationship between these two Americans in exile very deli-
cately, allowing the narrative (and their parallel lives) to unfold naturally. Bob and
Charlotte, both unable to sleep, wander about the hermetic and luxurious Park Hyatt
Tokyo, exchange awkward smiles and knowing glances, yet it’s a full half-hour before
they finally speak. When they do, it is a brief and quippy late-night exchange in the
hotel bar, which is usually full of lonely businessmen and suffused with the soporific
music of a third-rate American lounge act. The energy of the film, along with Bob
and Charlotte’s friendship, shifts considerably after Charlotte invites Bob for a night
out with her and Charlie (Fumihiro Hayashi) and some other Japanese friends. They
go to a club, drink, chat amicably, flee an irate bartender, and run through Tokyo’s
streets, wending their way through crowds, traffic, and a pachinko parlor. Later, they
listen to music at Charlie’s apartment, and end the evening in a private karaoke room,
where Charlotte endearingly falters: “I’m special” (the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket”),
while Bob nods his head in heartfelt agreement. “There is nothing more than this,”
he sings to her (Roxy Music’s “More Than This”), and Murray’s heretofore muted per-
formance explodes with emotion. Back at the hotel, as Bob innocently tucks Charlotte
into bed, his expression as he walks away from her is full of longing and resignation.
Later still, in another pivotal scene, they lie on Bob’s bed, fully clothed, discussing life
and marriage. “I’m stuck,” Charlotte says. “Does it get easier?” “No,” Bob says emphati-
cally. “Yes.” He pauses. “It gets easier.” But the look on Bob’s face makes it clear that he’s
protecting Charlotte from the harsh truth. The scene, in keeping with Coppola’s
restrained script and style, ends with Bob gently placing his hand on Charlotte’s foot
and nothing more, emphasizing the importance of what is not said and the unfulfilled
desire between them. Instead, Bob has a one-night stand with the hotel’s lounge singer
(Catherine Lambert), an obvious response to his sublimated longing for Charlotte.

312
 Love Story

Expressing her anger with him over lunch the following day, Bob responds harshly:
“Wasn’t there anyone else there to lavish you with attention?” They reconcile, knowing
that, within days, Bob will head back to L.A., and Charlotte’s husband will rejoin her in
Tokyo.
Some critics attacked Coppola for the wispy-ness of her script (for which she won
an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay), claiming she failed to push her characters into
any real emotional danger. Yet others commended her for not following a traditional
romantic arc, and for choosing to focus on the realistic rather than the epic. The
script’s spareness may have also allowed her leads the improvisational room to realize
fully the nuances of their characters. Johansson was 18 years old when she filmed Lost
In Translation, but she perfectly captures a 25-year-old woman who is both self-assured
and lost. Murray, in arguably the best performance of his career (he was nominated for
an Oscar for Best Actor), employs his trademark humor to hide the melancholy and
regret that lies within.
Coppola also received criticism for failing to depict any fully developed Japanese
characters and a backlash followed (citing the film’s racism), tempering the overall criti-
cal success of the film. But the story is told from Bob’s and Charlotte’s points of view,
and Japan is rendered through their deeply impressionistic perspectives. Bob seems dis-
interested or, at best, bemused by Japan (as he is by life in general), while Charlotte is a
cautious observer, full of curiosity and quiet intelligence as she deciphers Tokyo’s sub-
way system, explores the city, and watches its people.
The film ends as it opens, with another much-remarked scene that captures one of
the most affecting goodbyes in movie history. As Bob sits in the taxi that will take
him to the airport, he spots Charlotte in the crowd and runs after her. “Hey you,” he
says. She smiles at him. They embrace and Bob strokes Charlotte’s hair. As the camera,
in close-up, focuses on Charlotte’s face, Bob whispers something in her ear. We hear
words being exchanged, but they are lost on us. “Okay?” we hear Bob ask. “Okay,”
Charlotte responds. They kiss for the first time and then, cautiously, turn away from
each other. Charlotte walks off into the crowd, and Bob walks back to the taxi that will
take him away from Tokyo and Charlotte, but hopefully not forever.

References
Denby, David. “Heartbreak Hotels.” New Yorker 79(26), 2003: 100–01.
King, Homay. “Lost in Translation.” Film Quarterly 59(1), 2005: 45–48.
San Filippo, Maria. “Lost in Translation.” Cineaste 29(1), 2003: 26–28.
Smith, P. J. “Tokyo Drifters.” Sight & Sound 14(1), 2004: 12–16.
—Helen Georgas

LOVE STORY. “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died? That she was
beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.”
These are the first lines of Erich Segal’s Love Story. Segal was a professor of literature

313
Love Story

during the 1960s who had written the screenplay for the 1968 Beatles’ film Yellow Sub-
marine. Interestingly, after selling his screenplay for Love Story, Segal adapted his work
into a novel, which became the top-selling fiction book of 1970. The film that was
based on his screenplay was also released in 1970, and became the year’s top box-
office hit, while making millions of viewers cry.
In flashbacks, Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O’Neal), a Harvard freshman and son of a
wealthy, well-respected WASP family, details his romantic relationship with a
working-class Italian American woman named Jennifer (Jenny) Cavalleri (Ali
McGraw). Jenny is a talented Radcliffe scholarship student who loves classical music.
Oliver’s father interprets his son’s relationship with Jenny as simply an act of rebellion
and threatens to cut him off from the family fortune if he marries her before finishing
school. Ignoring his father’s threats, Oliver marries Jenny and pays for his education by
working at summer camps; for her part, Jenny gives up a prestigious scholarship in
Paris, and takes a teaching job at a private school that offers her a modest income. After
graduation, Oliver joins a New York law firm, and they build a comfortable middle-
class life. Proud that they have made their own way in the world, everything is wonder-
ful until Jenny is diagnosed with leukemia. Unable to afford the treatments Jenny
requires, Oliver turns to his father. Oliver is able to convince his father to grant him
a loan only by lying to him, telling him that he has gotten another woman pregnant
and needs the money in order to take care of the situation. Although Jenny receives
therapy for her illness, it becomes clear that she is going to die. Oliver is distraught,
yet Jenny is able to reassure him that she has lived a full life. When Oliver’s father dis-
covers what has really happened, he apologizes to Oliver, prompting Oliver to quote
Jenny: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Love Story explored powerfully complex and often divisive issues that emerged
during the 1960s: youth culture, counterculture rebellion, alienation, student upris-
ings, free love, and the generation gap. War-weary after the nation’s long, bloody years
in Vietnam, and becoming increasingly skeptical about the country’s political leaders,
audiences embraced the overly sentimental Love Story, making it an instant sensation.
Although reflecting conventional attitudes toward romance and marriage, the film’s
dominant theme, it seems, is youthful rebellion. In contrast to Jenny, who calls her
widowed father by his first name and declares her love for him, Oliver addresses his
father as “Sir” and is burdened with the weight of his family heritage and the expec-
tations attached to it. Following the path of the traditional Barrett man, Oliver attends
Harvard and is preparing himself for the stultifying life embodied by his father. But
then he meets Jenny and everything changes, as she teaches him that no matter what
the circumstances, love conquers all.

314
 Love Story

References
Canby, Vincent. “Screen: Perfection and a ‘Love Story’: Erich Segal’s Romantic Tale Begins
Run.” New York Times, 1970. Available at http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res.
Friedman, Lester D., ed. American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations. Oxford, UK:
Berg Publishing, 2007.
Sutton, Bettye, et al. “American Cultural History, The Twentieth Century: 1970–1979,” Lone
Star College, Kingwood Library. 1999. Available at http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decades.html.

—Daniela Ribitsch

315
This page intentionally left blank
 v
M
MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, THE. The Magnificent Ambersons, the second
major project at RKO Studios directed by the young Orson Welles, was an ambitious
historical film faithfully conveying the anti-industrial outlook of Booth Tarkington,
the author of the 1918 novel. It remains a cautionary tale about the independent film-
maker working within the studio system.
Interestingly, Welles was born near Chicago in 1915, close to the time of the publi-
cation of Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize novel. A lifelong liberal who befriended President
Franklin Roosevelt, Welles, it seems, decried the destructive effects of late nineteenth-
century industrialism and urbanization. His film version of Ambersons sentimentalizes
the Gilded Age and the genteel Amberson family of Indianapolis. Picture postcard
scenes celebrate the upper-class balls, dinners, and outings of the very rich, whose
wealth was accumulated before the mass production of automobiles and other prod-
ucts. Taking a cue from Tarkington, Welles—in a voice-over narration—speaks brood-
ingly about the industrial darkness spreading over the city as real estate values fall in
the Ambersons’ formerly idyllic neighborhood.
The Magnificent Ambersons was the second and last studio-made film by the director
who would become the exemplar of independent filmmaking. It was a classic case of
trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Welles’s first effort at RKO, Citizen Kane,
had been a critical success but a box-office failure. RKO could not afford a repeat.
When Welles finished with a multihour epic, filmed in bravura but unsettling style,
the studio was bewildered. Cinematographer Stanley Cortez had provided the deep-
focus photography, Rembrandt lighting, offbeat angles, and tracking shots that Welles
required. Movie audiences in 1942 were not accustomed to Welles’s visual and audio
tricks—radio and live stage devices, including overlapping dialogue and widely spaced
actors on deep-focus sets. For these and other reasons, Welles lost control of the editing
process and suffered his film to be cut from 148 minutes to 88, a process that also
involved the mutilation of Bernard Herrmann’s musical score. The truncated result
was released in Los Angeles on a double bill with Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost.
Another problem was the fact that the actual shooting of the film in late 1941 and
its release in 1942 straddled the Pearl Harbor tragedy and the entrance of the United

317
Magnificent Seven, The

States into World War II, a development that changed public taste in movies to
Welles’s detriment. RKO executives foolishly previewed a version of Ambersons on a
double bill in Pomona, California, to a generally youthful audience that had enjoyed
the first half of the bill, a musical comedy, The Fleet’s In. The long, heavy film that fol-
lowed had audience members hooting, walking out, and denouncing it on response
cards. Studio head George Schaefer was mortified and in fear of losing his job—which
he eventually did.
Timing was poor, in regard to both the story (a lament for Victorian America) and
to the cinematic expressions of an essentially noncommercial filmmaker (none of
Welles’s subsequent movies was a hit with mass audiences). Not much more than a de-
cade later, directors like Welles—Bergman, De Sica, Fellini—would be finding audi-
ences in art-house and college cinemas nationwide. Welles, it seems, was ahead of his
time, but not by much.
See also: Melodrama, The; Welles, Orson

References
Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: Hello Americans. New York: Viking, 2006.
Higham, Charles. Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius. New York: St. Martin’s,
1985.
Woodress, James. Booth Tarkington: Gentleman from Indiana. New York: Lippincott, 1954.

—James Delmont

MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, THE. The Magnificent Seven (1960) is a Western pro-

duced and directed by John Sturges that was based on the 1954 film Shichinin no
Samurai (Seven Samurai), directed by Akira Kurosawa. Long interested in American
films, Kurosawa said that he was trying to create a Japanese Western with Seven
Samurai. Thus, a Hollywood remake was probably inevitable. The Magnificent Seven
was produced on a budget of $2 million (the English rights to Seven Samurai were
acquired for only $250) and was shot in Tepoztlan, near Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Government censors in Mexico disliked having Mexican bandits killed solely by
Americans, so the young hero Chico (Horst Buchholz) was created to alleviate their
concerns.
The plot is uncomplicated. Following another attack on their village by thieves led
by Calvera (Eli Wallach), several Mexican farmers travel to a U.S. border town to pur-
chase guns. Upon arriving, they witness two gunmen, Chris (Yule Brynner) and Vin
(Steve McQueen), defeat a group of men who objected to an Indian being buried in
the town’s cemetery. Impressed, the farmers convince Chris to help them. He then
recruits additional gunslingers, including Vin, who prefers being a poorly paid man
of action to becoming a comfortable store clerk. The safety of the Mexican village is
finally secured after several battles between the seven gunmen (aided by the villagers)
and Calvera and his men, but it costs the lives of four of the heroes.

318
 Magnificent Seven, The

Scene from the 1960 film The Magnificent Seven, starring (from left) James Coburn, Brad Dexter,
Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz, Steve McQueen, and Yul Brynner. Directed by
John Sturges. (Photofest)

The film affirms the right to use violence (both individually and collectively) to
defend life, property, and self-determination. (Even the wise old man of the commu-
nity warns the villagers they must learn to kill or die.) It also locates the source of ben-
eficial military intervention in the United States. The film can be read, therefore,
against the backdrop of the Cold War, but more domestic concerns are also apparent.
Most prominent is the closing of the West and the uncertain place that men of action
and violence have in the newly settled world. This is made clear in the first scene
between Chris and Vin, who refer to themselves as “drifting” in subsequent dialogue
about the low pay offered for the gunmen’s services, and in the conversation among
the seven late in the film about the freedom (and loneliness) of their profession. Even
Calvera refers nostalgically to a past of plenty when, like a good father, he more easily
fed his men.
The construction of masculinity is thus at the heart of the film and may reflect con-
cerns about the role of men in postwar America. Chico and the trio of village boys who
befriend O’Reilly (Charles Bronson) most successfully resolve the tensions in the film
concerning masculinity. Although Chris initially calls him a kid and notes that grave-
yards are full of proud but inexperienced youth, Chico describes himself as a man.
He eventually proves this through skill and reckless daring, yet he also falls in love

319
Malcolm X

and becomes attached, despite his oft-repeated contempt for the farmers. Ultimately
his choice of social responsibility as a future husband rather than his success as a gun-
slinger demonstrates his newfound manhood. Likewise the village boys learn to em-
brace their fathers—men burdened by responsibility—as truly courageous and brave.
Contrarily, although they also become emotionally invested in the villagers’ lives, Chris
and Vin cannot settle down.
During the 1960s, The Magnificent Seven was at the forefront of the internationali-
zation of the Western, influencing Italian spaghetti Westerns. The main theme of its
Oscar-nominated score by Elmer Bernstein also graced Marlboro cigarette advertise-
ments with their iconic images of cowboys. The film inspired three sequels and a
short-lived television series of the same name (1998–1999). The themes and situations
in that series—the changes in the ethnicities, backstories, and treatment of the seven
principal male characters and their relocation to an American frontier town where they
gradually mature from aimless drifters to reasonably committed lawmen deputized by
the circuit judge—point to the transformation of the social, cultural, and political con-
texts in America between 1960 and 1998.
See also: Sturges, John; Western, The

References
Anderson, Joseph L. “When the Twain Meet: Hollywood’s Remake of The Seven Samurai.” Film
Quarterly 15, Spring 1962: 55–58.
Corkin, Stanley. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2004.
Kennedy, Paul P. “Shooting a ‘Magnificent Seven’ in Mexico.” New York Times, April 10, 1960.
Reprinted in Brown, Gene, ed. The New York Times Encyclopedia of Film, 1958–1963. New
York: New York Times Books, 1984.
Loy, R. Philip. Westerns in a Changing America, 1955–2000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.
Nash, Jay Robert, and Stanley Ralph Ross. The Motion Picture Guide, L-M. Chicago: Cine-
books, 1986.
Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Whitehall, Richard. “The Heroes Are Tired.” Film Quarterly 20, Winter 1966–1967: 12–24.
—Stanley C. Pelkey II

MALCOLM X. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) is based loosely on The Autobiography

of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. The picture played an important part in develop-
ing the African American film, the African American actor, and perhaps most impor-
tantly, Spike Lee as a director.
Following the book, Malcolm X is divided neatly into three sections. In the first sec-
tion, we learn the story of a young Malcolm Little (Denzel Washington). His father is
murdered by the Black Legion; his mother, now single and poor, breaks down emo-
tionally and is eventually institutionalized. After leaving foster care, Malcolm finds a
job on the railroad, where he is introduced to singers, gangsters, white women, and a

320
 Malcolm X

Scene from the 1970 film Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington. Directed by Spike Lee. (Photofest)

life of crime. He ultimately leaves New York City and makes his way to Boston, where
he and his best friend Shorty (Spike Lee) are both arrested for burglary and sentenced
to 10 years in prison.
The prison years comprise the film’s second section. While serving his time,
Malcolm meets Baines (Albert Hall), a fellow inmate, who introduces him to the teachings
of the Nation of Islam and, in particular, to the work of its leader, Elijah Muhammad.
The film’s final section follows Malcolm Little’s transition to Malcolm X. He now
becomes an outspoken advocate of the ideals of the Nation of Islam and rallies the
black community to free themselves from their white oppressors “by any means neces-
sary.” Representing a far different vision of black liberation than Martin Luther King,
Jr., who urged his followers toward “nonviolent resistance,” Malcolm X now becomes
a powerful, and sometimes violent, force in the black community. All of this changes,
however, when Malcolm goes on pilgrimage to Mecca. There he comes to understand
that the vast majority of Muslims reject the most violent ideals of The Nation of Islam.
Returning to America, Malcolm begins to speak out against The Nation and Elijah
Muhammad, which leads to his being criticized, attacked, and eventually murdered.
Interestingly, Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night, The Hurricane) was origi-
nally slated to direct the film; and it was he who brought Washington (who had played
Malcolm X on Broadway) onto the project. Lee, though, argued that it would be
impossible for anyone other than a black director to tell the story of Malcolm X. The
stakes were too high, according to Lee, to trust this picture to a white director. Pro-
ducer Marvin Worth agreed, and chose Lee to direct the film.

321
Maltese Falcon, The

Ironically, many in the black community, and especially members of the Nation of
Islam, did not support Worth’s choice of Lee to direct Malcolm X. Many worried, based
on what they saw as Lee’s tendency to deal with black/white racial issues in an almost
satirical fashion in his previous work (Mo’ Better Blues, Do the Right Thing, School
Daze), that he might taint the legacy of Malcolm X. Lee, they feared, would focus this
autobiographical narrative on the early, criminal years of Malcolm Little and neglect
the work that Malcolm X did as a Nation of Islam community leader. For his part,
Lee did not endear himself to members of the entertainment community when he
requested that he only be interviewed by African American reporters while he was
involved with the project. Even the casting of Denzel Washington was called into ques-
tion, as some believed that the light-skinned six-foot actor would be unable to portray
the six-foot-four inch, darker-skinned Malcolm X. Once the film was released, how-
ever, these concerns disappeared. Lee did a masterful job of bringing the Autobiography
of Malcolm X to the screen, establishing himself as a major Hollywood player in the
process; while Washington succeeded in bringing Malcolm X to life with a brilliant,
Oscar-nominated portrayal of the slain civil rights leader.
See also: African Americans in Film; Lee, Spike; Washington, Denzel

References
Aftab, Kaleem. Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
Massood, Paula. The Spike Lee Reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.
Weinraub, Bernard. “Spike Lee’s Request: Black Interviewers Only.” New York Times,
October 29, 1992.
—Robert C. Robinson

MALTESE FALCON, THE. Considered one of the greatest Hollywood detective

films, The Maltese Falcon (1941) helped cement Humphrey Bogart’s status as one of
cinema’s superstars, launched John Huston’s career as a director, and turned the char-
acter of the hard-boiled detective into an elemental figure in American movies.
Although debated by some, most consider the picture the first true film noir offering,
one that profoundly influenced the noir movement that emerged during the 1940s.
Adapted for the screen by Huston, and made for the modest sum of $300,000, the
1941 version of The Maltese Falcon was the third film based on Dashiell Hammett’s
classic novel; Huston’s masterpiece, though, towers above the others.
The film follows private eye Sam Spade (Bogart) as he becomes embroiled in the
search for a highly desired black Falcon, a jewel-encrusted statuette being sought by a
veritable rogue’s gallery of villains. The beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor)
contacts Spade and his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan), claiming that her sister
has run off with a criminal; appearing distraught, Brigid hires the detectives to rescue
her sister. That night, Archer is murdered and Spade, even though he is the victim’s
partner, becomes the primary suspect in the crime. Digging into the case in order to

322
 Maltese Falcon, The

From left to right, actors Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet in a
still from the film The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston and based on the book by Dashiell
Hammett, 1941. (Warner Bros./Archive Photos/Getty Images)

clear his name, and to avenge the death of his partner, Spade comes to realize that his
mysterious client has a propensity for lying and manipulation; Brigid, it seems, has no
sister, and in reality, it is she who has fallen in with dangerous men.
In short order, Spade meets these men: Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), an effeminate sprite
of a man of indeterminate foreign origin; Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), who
is obese, jovial, and malevolent; and Wilmer (Elisha Cook Jr.), Gutman’s tough-
talking gunman. Along with Brigid, they have searched the globe for the falcon, a quest
that appears to have reached its conclusion in San Francisco. Playing the various vil-
lains off against each other, Spade delves ever deeper into the maze of deception,
intrigue, and murder swirling around the priceless bird. Despite temptations, both
romantic and financial, he cannot be bribed, and at the end of the film, he turns the
whole lot over to the police, Brigid and the falcon included.
The Maltese Falcon is the rare picture in which virtually all the filmic elements seem
tailor-made, as if Hammett penned the novel with the movie in mind. Huston, with
his unsentimental approach, was an ideal choice to direct the author’s brawny prose,
while the principal actors were perfectly cast. Surprisingly, Bogart only landed the lead
role after George Raft turned it down, but he did the most with his opportunity.
Indeed Spade became, by way of Bogart’s genius, the first of the actor’s characteriza-
tions of the dangerously attractive, world-weary loner—one who is honor-bound to

323
Manchurian Candidate, The

follow a strict moral code that only he seems to understand. Bogart would bring this
iconic character to life again and again, especially in films such as Casablanca (1942)
and The Big Sleep (1946). For their parts, Greenstreet, making his film debut at the
age of 62, after nearly four decades on the stage, turned Gutman into one of cinema’s
great villains, while Lorre was equally effective as the effete Cairo.
Film historians disagree on whether or not The Maltese Falcon constitutes an “offi-
cial” film noir, as the trends that led to that movement, including social dislocation,
the fear of atomic warfare, and the psychic ravages of World War II, had yet to appear
in 1941. However, it clearly introduces many of the elements essential to noir, includ-
ing the beautiful-but-deadly femme fatale, the hard-boiled protagonist, and degenerate
characters with twisted morals. Moreover, the character of Spade introduces noir’s
peculiar blend of cynicism and integrity. The detective admits he does not particularly
care for Archer, and even has Archer’s name removed from their office door the day
after the murder; but driven by his sense of honor, he stops at nothing to avenge his
partner’s death. Despite appearances to the contrary, Spade’s integrity is unimpeach-
able; and when Brigid pleads for her freedom, he responds by telling her, “Don’t be
too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be.”
See also: Bogart, Humphrey; Film Noir; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The; Huston, John

References
Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
Hammen, Scott. John Huston. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Hirsch, Foster. Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen. San Diego: A. S. Barnes, Inc, 1981.
—Bryan Kvet

MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, THE. John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian

Candidate opened in New York City on October 24, 1962, at the height of the Cold
War and during the week that the Cuban Missile Crisis exploded, stunning frightened
Americans. In the film, Frankenheimer focused on themes such as the threat of com-
munist subversion, America’s paranoid response to the threat, and the loss of individ-
ual liberties.
Screenwriter George Axelrod (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Seven Year Itch) developed
the screenplay from Richard Condon’s 1957 novel. The film begins in 1952, during
the Korean War. An American platoon, led by the abrasive and unpopular Sergeant
Raymond Shaw, is ambushed by enemy forces during a patrol mission. The film fast
forwards; the platoon is back in the United States, and Raymond Shaw is hailed as
the hero who saved them. When asked about Shaw, the platoon members, including
its second in command Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), all respond in the same mono-
tone way: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human
being I have ever known in my life.” This mantra is recited, even as Marco and his

324
 Manchurian Candidate, The

fellow soldiers begin to have nightmares about Shaw killing two members of the
platoon.
Shaw’s popularity is exploited by his mother, Mrs. Iselin (Angela Lansbury), and her
husband, Raymond’s stepfather, Senator John Iselin (James Gregory). Often compared
to the perverse mother/son relationship portrayed in Hitchcock’s Psycho, the relation-
ship between Raymond and his mother is characterized by her total control over
him. In fact, Mrs. Iselin demands unquestioned obedience from all the men in her life:
they are simply pawns in a game of political chess.
It was obvious to 1960’s audiences that the character of Senator Iselin was patterned
after Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. Frankenheimer makes his contempt for
McCarthy clear in shaping the Iselin character. In the manner of McCarthy, the ficti-
tious senator is depicted as a paranoid hunter of communists. In one memorable scene,
for example, Iselin announces to reporters that he knows of 207 members of the Com-
munist Party working in the Defense Department. This scene bears a striking resem-
blance to the actual moment in 1950 when McCarthy delivered his famous
Wheeling, West Virginia, speech, in which he claimed to have knowledge of 205 com-
munists in the State Department. Of course, neither McCarthy nor Iselin was able to
keep his numbers straight, and each ends up continually changing the count. In the
film, Iselin eventually settles on a number he can easily remember: 57, which he hap-
pened to see on the label of a catsup bottle.
As the story unfolds, Marco’s investigation into the strange dreams of the platoon
members uncovers a diabolical scheme carried out by Chinese (hence the Manchurian
Candidate) and Russian scientists who had captured and brainwashed Shaw, Marco,
and their men. Interestingly, while attacking McCarthy’s irrational fears concerning
the presence of hundreds of communist subversives in America, the film seemed to
be saying that some of those fears were actually warranted. Common stereotypes, such
as the Fu Manchu-like communist Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), were used to reinforce
those fears. Indeed, Shaw’s mother, who tries to use her son to assassinate her party’s
presidential candidate in order to clear the way to the Oval Office for her husband,
turns out to be exactly the kind of communist subversive that McCarthy claimed
threatened the American people. The film climaxes with Marco attempting to destroy
the communist “programming” that is allowing Shaw to be manipulated. Believing he
has failed, Marco rushes to stop Shaw from carrying out the assassination. In the end,
however, Raymond regains his individuality. Rather than carry out the assassination,
he instead kills Iselin, his mother, and then commits suicide.
Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963,
Frankenheimer slowed his film’s distribution and later refused to allow a second theat-
rical release altogether. Although both Frankenheimer and Sinatra denied it, there were
rumors that Lee Harvey Oswald had been driven to kill Kennedy because he had
viewed The Manchurian Candidate. Running periodically on television through the
1970s, the film was rediscovered in 1988, and with the support of Sinatra, rereleased.
In 2004, it was remade and updated, featuring contemporary stars Denzel Washington
and Meryl Streep.
See also: Frankenheimer, John; Sinatra, Frank; Politics and Film; War Film, The

325
Manhattan

Frank Sinatra, actor-singer, helps Laurence Harvey, British actor, from the lake at Central Park in
New York, 1962, during the filming of The Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Franken-
heimer. In the scene from the film Harvey has, according to the script, reacted to a random sugges-
tion: “Go jump in the lake.” (AP/Wide World Photos)

References
Armstrong, Stephen B. Films about Extremes. The Films of John Frankenheimer. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2008.
Barson, Michael, and Steven Heller. Red Scare! The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular
Culture. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2001.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye, and Gaspar Gonzalez. What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchu-
rian Candidate and Cold War America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

—Robert W. Malick

MANHATTAN. Manhattan opens with a montage of images of New York City,

combined with the voice of Isaac “Ike” Davis (Woody Allen) as he attempts to begin
his novel: “Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of propor-
tion. Uh, no, make that: He—he . . . romanticized it all out of proportion. Now . . .
to him . . . no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black
and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Ahhh, now let me start
this over. Chapter One. He was too romantic about Manhattan as he was about every-
thing else.” Isaac continues to start and stop as more images of New York City are pro-
jected upon the screen, and with this opening, Woody Allen continues the
philosophical treatise on art he began to create in Annie Hall.

326
 Manhattan

The scene at Elaine’s, which follows the opening montage, establishes the key con-
flict in the film. The opening montage, with Ike’s voice-over, emphasizes the creative
process at work. Yet the first voice we hear in Elaine’s is Yale’s (Michael Murphy), stat-
ing that “the essence of art is to provide a kind of working through the situation for
people, you know, so that you can get in touch with feelings that you didn’t know
you had, really.” This is the voice of the art critic, expressing a didactic approach to
art. While his comment echoes Alvy Singer’s statement in Annie Hall, that art is a
way to get things perfect that can’t be attained in life, Yale’s perspective is that of
the viewer, not the creator. Indeed, throughout the course of the film, Yale seems to
personify another line from Annie Hall: “Those who can’t do, teach, and those who
can’t teach, teach gym.” He lacks the moral courage to write the O’Neill biography
he’s been planning. He recognizes the narcissistic value of art for the spectator,
but seems unable to comprehend the courage necessary to succeed as an artist, which
Ike displays when he quits his job to write his own long-planned novel. Yale’s
definition of art seems to be an extension of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, in that by throw-
ing “a light upon the mystery of humanity,” art simplifies the complex because
it emphasizes the essential components of nature that man needs in order to survive
in civilization. But the art critic complicates this relationship through his analysis
of art. The process of criticism is such that the simple becomes complex so that the
art critic can offer an interpretation to disseminate its meaning. As we see in the scene
in which Ike first meets Mary (Diane Keaton), her critique of the art in the gallery
reflects the pseudo-intellectual complication the art critic levies on the art: “To me, it
was—it was very textural. You know what I mean? It was perfectly integrated and
it had a-a-a marvelous kind of negative capability.” Allen is arguing that the critic
co-opts the art, while reinscribing it with a new lexicon understood only by the critic
herself.
Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) is central to Isaac’s search for integrity. Contrary to
many critics’ assessments, which seem to echo Mary’s comment to Yale, “somewhere
Nabokov is smiling,” Ike’s relationship with Tracy is not “Humbertian.” Indeed, Tracy
functions as a symbol of those things that Ike is pursuing: goodness, innocence, and
integrity. Emerson states that beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue, and this state-
ment seems to apply to Tracy. Not only is she physically attractive, but her beauty
seems to be enhanced by her character’s innocence. She is, without debate, the most
virtuous character in the film, and this virtue is enhanced by the depravity of the other
characters. By casting her character as physically attractive, Allen draws attention to the
embodiment of virtue. In Emerson’s terms, God has made virtuous things beautiful so
that we will be attracted to them.
Manhattan is regarded as one of Allen’s masterpieces. Filmed in black and white,
with a Gershwin soundtrack, Manhattan continues Allen’s exploration of the nature
of art and the artist that began with Annie Hall and ends with Stardust Memories. Man-
hattan dispenses with the sight gags and situational comedy still present in Annie Hall,
relying more on linguistic comedy, a shift that will mark Allen’s work during the
1980s.
See also: Allen, Woody; Romantic Comedy, The

327
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The

References
Brode, Douglas. The Films of Woody Allen. New York: Citadel, 1991.
Girgus, Sam B. The Films of Woody Allen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Pogel, Nancy. Woody Allen. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

—Dean R. Cooledge

MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT, THE. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(1956), directed by Nunnally Johnson, was based on Sloan Wilson’s best-selling novel
by the same title. It stars Gregory Peck as Tom Rath, an ex-army officer who struggles to
provide for his family in 1950s New York by taking a job at a broadcasting company
on Madison Avenue. Interspersed with flashbacks of Rath’s experience in combat, the
movie uses his struggle to fit into an ever-changing corporate environment as a narrative
opening through which to explore the anxieties experienced by many Americans during
a decade transformed by a post-Depression, postwar economic boom. Rath’s standard
“gray flannel suit,” silhouetted and multiplied in the opening credits, symbolizes the social
changes of “the long 1950s,” during which dreams of mass consumption disguised the
dual threats of anonymity and alienation that millions of middle-class Americans
confronted.
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit describes the experiences of one man living in a
nation haunted by a capitalist model described by Frederick Taylor in Principles of Sci-
entific Management (1911), and put in place by Henry Ford in his early twentieth-
century mass-production factories. The film examines the implications of America’s
transformation into a culture of abundance—what John Kenneth Galbraith called
the “Affluent Society.” The film suggests that the abundance of 1950s middle-class
existence had left Americans filled with material possessions but psychologically
alienated—from each other and from themselves. Rath’s destabilizing experience during
the war, coupled with his return to a needy wife who wants nothing more than to climb
the social ladder, forces him to decide if he is willing to compromise his ethics in order
to maintain his sense of well-being. Rath’s desire to achieve economic and social
success—which he will only be able to do by engaging in a Machiavellian game of decep-
tion and veiled aggression—becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile with what he
believes is the right way to live his life. Struggling against what he sees as the conformist
hypocrisy of his white-collar colleagues, he still seeks to satisfy his wife’s demands that
they move to a better neighborhood. Passing from military officer, to executive, to public
relations expert, Rath is a tortured man, torn between his professional obligations and
the imperative to be true to himself and honest with his wife and boss.
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was shot immediately after Sloan Wilson pub-
lished his novel in 1955. Like the book, the film went to great lengths to expose the
disturbing effects that corporate culture could have on the individual. But while
Wilson’s novel depicted Rath as a sort of cultural spokesperson for the members of cor-
porate America, all of whom were subject to the dangers of conformity and alienation,
in his film, Johnson focused on the fate of a single individual struggling with his own

328
 Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media

demons. Some have argued that in shifting the thematic focus of Wilson’s almost
quasi-scientific story away from the stultifying effects of corporate America toward
the examination of one man’s existential struggle, Johnson succeeded only in romanti-
cizing a wide-ranging social problem by turning it into a personal dilemma. Yet, driven
by Bernard Herrmann’s somber score and Peck’s powerful performance, the film still
manages to deliver a significant social critique of corporate America during the mass-
consumer-based 1950s.
See also: Melodrama, The

References
Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
Mills, Wright C. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1951.
Potter, David M. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1954.
Riesman, David, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the
Changing American Character. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1950.
Whyte, William. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955.

—Enrica Picarelli

MANUFACTURING CONSENT: NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA.

This documentary, made by Canadian filmmakers Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar,
provides a thoroughgoing and entertaining introduction to the political activism of
ground-breaking linguist and radical philosopher Noam Chomsky, focusing on his
trenchant critique of the role played by mainstream American corporate media in pro-
moting the agenda of the wealthy and powerful. The film derives its title from Manu-
facturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, co-authored by Chomsky
and Edward S. Herman in 1988, which argues that, as corporate entities themselves,
the major media conglomerates are inherently sympathetic to the interests of big busi-
ness, and as a result function largely to convince the American public of the wisdom of
government policies that further those interests. The film, which was produced with-
out Chomsky’s active involvement but with his approval, features original footage of
lectures presented in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United States; archival clips of
televised interviews and debates; and eye-catching graphics and animation. It follows
Chomsky’s activism over a period of several decades, presenting an engaging portrait
of the man once described by the New York Times Book Review as “arguably the most
important intellectual alive.”
The central argument of the film is that the elite media—including, at the time the
film was made, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the major

329
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media

broadcast networks—operate
according to a model of
propaganda. They target what
Chomsky calls the “political
class,” the 20 percent of the pop-
ulation who are educated, articu-
late, and politically engaged,
creating “necessary illusions” and
“emotionally potent oversimplifi-
cations” in an effort to secure the
consent of that class for
government policies. According
to Chomsky, propaganda serves
the same purpose in democracies
as violence does in dictatorships:
it essentially eliminates any pos-
sibility of meaningful dissent.
This process is explored through
the presentation of several case
studies, the major one being a
consideration of how the main-
stream media portrayed the U.S.
-backed Philippine invasion of
East Timor in 1976 and the
ongoing human rights abuses
perpetrated there by the Philip-
pine government. Chomsky
makes a persuasive argument that
Scene from the 1992 film Manufacturing Consent: Noam American media served their
Chomsky and the Media. Directed by Mark Achbar and Peter propagandistic purpose by focus-
Wintonick. Shown is Noam Chomsky. (Photofest) ing attention on similar atrocities
being committed in Cambodia
during the same period by the
Khmer Rouge, an enemy of the United States, thereby diverting attention away from
the role the American government was playing in East Timor.
Even without the benefit of major studio distribution, Manufacturing Consent has
enjoyed phenomenal success for a documentary. It has been shown at more than 50
international film festivals, and has won numerous awards, including the Grand Prize
at the 1992 International Documentary Film Festival in Nyon, Switzerland; the Gold
Hugo, Best Social/Political Documentary, at the 1992 Chicago International Film Fes-
tival; and the Grand Prize, Best Political Documentary, at the 1994 Canadian Docu-
mentary Film Festival.
In the years following the 1993 release of Manufacturing Consent, the issues raised
by Chomsky have arguably become even more critical. The 23 corporations cited in

330
 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The

the documentary as controlling the traditional media have been reduced to a mere
handful, and many media activists see the monopolization of media ownership as
one of the most pressing problems confronting contemporary American democracy.
On the other hand, the Internet has increasingly emerged as a major alternative to
the corporate media, and is seen by many as a cause for hope. However, in a 2007
interview that appears on a bonus disc that updates the original film, Chomsky dis-
counts the importance of these changes, arguing that the continuing concentration of
media ownership has no effect on the propaganda model, and that the Internet tends
to function more as a distraction than as a real opportunity for education and activism.
This suggests that while it may be that an inherent weakness of political documentaries
is the unavoidable obsolescence of the information they present, Manufacturing Con-
sent continues to present an important analysis of the function of the media in
democratic societies.
See also: Documentary, The; Politics and Film

References
Antush, John C. “Chomsky on the Big Screen.” Monthly Review 45(9), February 1994: 47–52.
Barsky, Robert F. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the
Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 2002.

—Judith Poxon

MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, THE. When Paramount Pictures

released John Ford’s western in 1962, some mainstream critics cited the picture as fur-
ther proof of the legendary director’s incontrovertible decline. Seen as a negligible
attempt to cash in on John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart’s stardom, The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance was called culturally irrelevant, and Ford’s direction deemed indifferent
and self-derivative. The film’s big-name stars—20 years too old for their parts (and
poorly made-up to boot)—could not hide the fact that the film looked cheap, shot as
it was in black and white, largely on a soundstage comprised of fabricated sets decked
out with artificial sagebrush and cactus.
As the years have passed, however, resistance to Ford’s elegiac masterpiece has
evaporated; the film is now generally regarded as a culminating statement of one of
America’s greatest popular artists, a work of enduring relevance for those who seek to
understand the ambivalence that marks present-day America’s relationship to its
troubled mythic past.
Deceptively layered with ironic complexity, beautifully performed, and self-reflexive
to a daring degree, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is also a culturally transitional
work, bridging the period of the classic westerns of Ford’s past to the revisionist west-
erns of the late 1960s—Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch or Sergio Leone’s The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly, for example. It presents a heartbreaking story of frontier nobility,
tragic in its implications, but employs the anarchic Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a

331
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The

John Wayne (left), James Stewart (center), and Woody Strode on the set of the movie The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance in 1962. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

character who prefigures the coming cinematic use of sadistic (and humorous) vio-
lence, to exaggerate the archetypal threats inherent in the genre. Janus-faced, Ford’s
film stares simultaneously at the past of the American western in the same moment
that it gazes at the genre’s postmodern future.
The story is told in flashback: the venerable Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart)
has returned with his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) to Shinbone from Washington, D.C., to
attend the funeral of a friend named Tom Doniphon. Asked by a newspaperman to
account for his presence, Stoddard tells the story of his arrival in the town many decades
before, at a time when Shinbone was not yet a state and was plagued by the brutal outlaw
Liberty Valance. A young attorney, Stoddard wants to bring order to Shinbone by teach-
ing its townspeople the law as it is described in his law books—to the amazement of the
townspeople, he refuses to wear a gun. When the stagecoach is held up by Valance and
his men, Stoddard tries to stand up to the gang and is given a vicious beating for his trou-
ble. Realizing that in the Wild West, law comes from the end of a gun, Stoddard does the
heroic thing: he becomes the man who shoots Liberty Valance.
The film’s title makes plain from the outset what the outcome of this ideological
struggle will be. Ford, though, provides his audience with a twist, introducing into
the mix the enigmatic figure of Tom Doniphon, played by an aging and quintessen-
tially confident John Wayne. After 25 years of working together, Ford knew how to
reveal every nuance of the Wayne persona, and Wayne’s Doniphon is the classic Ameri-
can male outsider whom we admire and also somehow resent. Like Valance, he is not

332
 Mary Poppins

afraid to use violence; unlike Valance, however, he will earn his dream through hard
work, and thus his individualism is no immediate threat to the community. Doni-
phon, though, senses that Stoddard will be his foil simply because Stoddard’s rule of
law supplants the traditional Westerner’s code of instinctual ethics. Ironically, it is
Doniphon’s instinct for natural justice—an instinct that allows him to act outside the
law—that saves Stoddard, the man who steals Doniphon’s girl, destroys his idealistic
dream, and brings the cursed blessings of civilization to the wild West.
Filled with loving references to Ford’s earlier films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Val-
ance critiques American individualism even while it suggests, with its final shot of a
locomotive crossing the now-flowering frontier, that the country has lost something
essential with its “taming.” The man known for shooting Liberty Valance rides the lie
to fame and fortune; the man who really shot him—Doniphon—dies an anonymous
pauper. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” says the newspaperman
after hearing Stoddard’s legend-straightening tale. The meaning of the West’s settling
has been perverted, Ford suggests, not only by those who have misappropriated its sto-
ries, but by those who refuse to set the story straight. In a contemporary America where
people seem to care little about the facts, Ford’s poignantly complex film suggests, in a
particularly disturbing way, that perhaps Americans never did.
See also: Ford, John; Western, The

References
Ford, Dan. Pappy: The Life of John Ford. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979.
McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001.
Pippin, Robert B. Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks
and John Ford for Political Philosphy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

—Robert Cowgill

MARY POPPINS. American attitudes toward family values, social life, and female
power are addressed in Walt Disney’s musical fantasy Mary Poppins (1964), which
turned out to be Disney’s greatest cinematic triumph since Snow White (1937). The
movie combines live action and animation as well as special visual effects. Although
based on P. L. Travers’s first Mary Poppins book, the Disney film presents viewers with
a much friendlier protagonist whose mission is to reunite a family.
The Banks are a typical, upper-middle-class family living in London in 1910,
shortly before the beginning of World War I. George Banks works in a bank, while
his wife is a busy suffragist. While searching for a nanny to care for their children, Jane
and Michael, the wind literally blows Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) into their lives.
Mary Poppins has her own, unique way of educating children, showing them that
work can indeed be fun, that relationships with people from the lower classes can be
enriching, and that supporting beggars can be very satisfying. During a trip to their
father’s bank, the senior director of the institution tries to convince Michael to open
a bank account. Michael, however, chooses to give his money to a poor bird lady, an

333
Mary Poppins

act none of the bankers under-

stands. When Michael begins to
regret his decision and loudly
demands that his money be
returned, the other customers
misunderstand the situation and
cause a run on the bank. Holding
Mr. Banks responsible for his
son’s behavior, and thus for the
run on the bank, his bosses fire
him. Initially disconsolate, Mr.
Banks, who now has more time
to spend with his family, eventu-
ally comes to understand what is
really important in life. All ends
well, as the family is brought
closer together and Mr. Banks is
promoted to the position of bank
director. Having completed her
mission, Mary Poppins leaves
the Banks and heads off to work
her magic on another lost family.
Mary Poppins became one of
the greatest hits in film history,
smashing box-office records in
the United States and abroad.
Audiences loved everything
about this unforgettable movie:
Actor Dick Van Dyke and actress Julie Andrews cross a river
using turtles as stepping-stones in a scene from Mary Poppins,
its music, the actors, and its
directed by Robert Stevenson, 1964. (Hulton Archive/Getty clever use of animation. Indeed,
Images) “Supercalifragilisticexpialido-
cious,” the film’s catchword, even
entered the American lexicon.
Many critics called the picture Disney’s masterpiece. For her spectacular screen debut,
Julie Andrews—who accepted the role after being replaced by Audrey Hepburn for the
role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady—earned an Academy Award for her depiction
of the lovable Mary Poppins. Four other Academy Awards went to the production:
Special Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Original Music Score, and Best Song for
“Chim Chim Cher-ee.”
Significantly, the character of Mary Poppins functions on multiple levels. Perhaps
simply a fun-loving nanny to younger viewers, for older members of the audience,
she symbolizes feminine empowerment, as she effects revolutionary change within
the Bank’s family. She also allows audiences to understand issues such as class conflict,
male domination, and the oppression of women from a different perspective.

334
 M*A*S*H*

Although set in London in 1910, the film spoke to American audiences of the 1960s,
when the first baby boom generation emerged from the conservative 1950s and sought
change. While admittedly sending a rather elitist message to audiences, most of whom
could not have afforded a nanny, and still defining the family as “traditional,” with the
husband earning the money and the wife taking care of father and children, the film
still reflected the importance of movements such as that for women’s rights. Thus, with
her “spoon full of sugar” that “helps the medicine go down,” Mary Poppins helped
Americans reimagine what was meant by family and communal values.
See also: Disney, Walt

References
Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Biography. London: Aurum Press, 2008.
Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

—Daniela Ribitsch

M*A*S*H*. Produced and directed by Robert Altman, the counterculture film

M*A*S*H is a dark comedy that presents an irreverent and iconoclastic look at war.
Focusing on doctors of a mobile army surgical hospital, or MASH unit, during the
Korean War, the movie was released during the height of the Vietnam conflict and
embraced the sentiments many war-weary Americans were feeling at the time.
M*A*S*H became one of Twentieth Century-Fox’s most popular and critically
acclaimed films of the 1970s.
M*A*S*H is just one piece of the creative work of Altman, who had a profound in-
fluence on film. The 1970s provided an opportunity for Altman to define his voice by
producing films that were irreverent, satirical, and sometimes troubling. In addition to
M*A*S*H, he produced a staggering 15 films in the 1970s alone, including Brewster
McCloud (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves
Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), 3 Women
(1977), and Quintet (1979).
M*A*S*H, rated R, stars Donald Sutherland as Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawk-
eye” Pierce, Elliott Gould as Capt. “Trapper John” McIntyre, and Tom Skerritt as
Capt. Duke Forrest. The three are doctors who rebel against the status quo. In the film,
Altman and screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. poke fun at marital fidelity, religion, and
race relations. The conflict in the film exists among surgeons Pierce, Forrest, and
McIntyre, and the rigid military protocol propagated by Major Frank Burns (Robert
Duvall) and the new head of nursing, Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (some-
times referred to as “O’Houlihan”) (Sally Kellerman). As surgeons, they are devoted
to their craft and are experts in their specialties. The operating-room scenes in the film
have a compelling realism, but the harsh reality is mediated by a cavalier yet caring
atmosphere punctuated by sexual entendres that provide relief from the bleakness of
the task at hand. Life and death decisions are made with certainty and some

335
M*A*S*H*

Scene from the 1970 film M*A*S*H, starring (in back from left) Elliott Gould and Donald
Sutherland. Directed by Robert Altman. (Photofest)

detachment, as when Duke Forrest asks Father Mulcahy (Rene Auberjonois), who is
administering last rites, to leave the dying soldier’s side and assist him by holding a sur-
gical instrument for another soldier. His rationale is that the effort must be placed to
aid the living and not the dying.
Adding to a dimension of farce are the frequent fumbled announcements over the
public address system, such as the broadcast for Yom Kippur holiday services that must
be postponed to Sunday (the holiday must be observed on a particular day). These
serve as a metaphor for the insanity of the environment, with its constant influx of heli-
copters laden with wounded soldiers requiring urgent medical assistance.
To relieve the tension, the doctors, nurses, and staff occupy themselves by making
Majors Houlihan and her love interest Burns the victims of their practical jokes. In
one scene, a microphone is surreptitiously placed in Houlihan’s quarters to monitor
her and Burns’ private moments and is then fed through the public address system to
broadcast to the entire camp, including the operating room, resulting in her nickname
“Hot Lips.” In another scene, Duke Forrest claims that Major Houlihan’s blonde hair
is dyed and places a $20 bet to confirm his suspicion. To determine her true hair color,
a clever scheme is devised to expose Major Houlihan as she showers, with the doctors,
nurses, and staff encamping on lawn chairs, awaiting the appropriate moment when
the sides of the tent are raised, exposing her to a leering and applauding crowd.

336
 M*A*S*H*

Although the surgeons may appear selfish and preoccupied with their libidos, their
devotion to medicine and their patients is sustained through their actions. When
Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre are summoned to Tokyo to operate on
the wounded son of a congressman, they call themselves “the Pros from Dover” and,
dressed in golfing attire, they “invade” the hospital, disregarding protocol and
demanding the latest “pictures” on their patient. Appalled at their presumption, the
colonel in charge threatens them with arrest, and they use their wit to blackmail him
with a threatened call to the congressman, whose son’s life they have saved. When
Hawkeye and Trapper are asked by a colleague to treat the sick baby of a local geisha,
they immediately respond by removing the child to the military hospital and perform-
ing surgery, over the objections of the colonel and the head nurse.
Altman defied traditional film genres, deconstructing them to fulfill his vision and
voice. His subject could be very personal and intimate, or it could be a study of an
American institution (such as the military) and a portrait of its dysfunction. As youn-
ger directors embraced the stylistic rebellion against the hallowed traditions of film-
making, Altman, at age 45 when he made M*A*S*H, had already devoted a lifetime
to articulating his disdain for those values. Always seeking new ways to tell a story,
he developed the technique of multilayered sound, which gave an added sense of real-
ity to his films. He railed against the mythology of various cinematic genres. Altman
explained his attitude as a kind of rebellion against clichés.
M*A*S*H is a testament to challenging authority and the traditions of organized
institutions, including the military, government, religion, and marriage. Although its
setting is Korea, the theme has an enduring relevancy to America’s leadership in the
post–World War II world: war is never pretty, and its visual imagery is fraught with
controversy and concern. Altman bathes his satire within the context of humor, which
makes an even more profound statement on the destructiveness of these ritualistic
moral constructs. It is a timeless portrait of disdain for the ineptness of leadership
and the costs endured.
M*A*S*H was adapted from the book MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors by
Richard Hooker. A popular television series, part comedy and part drama that was also
named M*A*S*H, spun off from the film. The movie won an Oscar in 1971 for Best
Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. In that same contest,
M*A*S*H was nominated for Best Picture and Best Film Editing, and both Kellerman
and Altman received nominations for their work.
See also: Altman, Robert; War Film, The

References
Guttmacher, Peter. Legendary War Movies. New York: Metro Books, 1996.
Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. Boston:
McGraw-Hill, 1981.
Suid, Lawrence. Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
—James Roman

337
Matrix Series, The

MATRIX SERIES, THE. The Matrix series is a trilogy written and directed by Larry
and Andy Wachowski starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne,
and Hugo Weaving. After the success of The Matrix, released in 1999, the next two
films in the series, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both released in
2003, continued the saga of humanity’s struggle against a race of machines that keep
them enslaved. Weaving together narrative elements drawn from science fiction, mar-
tial arts, and action genres, and innovative visual techniques reminiscent of traditional
westerns and Japanese animation, The Matrix series became the filmic archetype for a
late twentieth-century dystopian cultural imagination. Produced with a budget of over
$363 million, the series grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, becoming one of the
most successful cinematic franchises in film history.
While the Matrix movies are highly regarded for their use of distinctive cinemato-
graphic elements, many of which have been copied by other filmmakers for use in their
own cinematic offerings, because these films are heavily indebted to ideas taken from
various liberal arts traditions, they have inspired academics to publish critical analyses
in scholarly journals and anthologies and countless fans to post their ideas about the
pictures on various Internet Web sites. Numerous allusions to religious ideas con-
nected to Christianity, Buddhism, and other Eastern schools of thought, as well as to
ancient and contemporary philosophy—as delightfully arcane as a reference to Jean
Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation—the prominence of characters of color—the
controversial African American scholar Cornell West makes guest appearances in both
The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions—make it clear that the Wachowski

Scene from the 1999 film The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves. Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski.
(Photofest)

338
 Matrix Series, The

brothers made a conscious effort to push their films beyond the discursive boundaries
of science fiction and cyber culture.
The Matrix follows the story of Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), a computer pro-
grammer by day who also leads a secret second life as a “hacker,” known by his online
name “Neo.” Neo is ultimately approached by the legendary hacker Morpheus (Law-
rence Fishburne), a father-figure-mentor—God the Father? Old Testament prophet?
Buddhist Zen master?—who reveals to the confused and frightened young man that
humans actually exist within a virtual reality called the “Matrix.” Outside of this virtual
domain lies a wasteland wherein humans are held in a sort of suspended animation,
plugged into power outlets that generate energy for a new race of machines. A small,
revolutionary band of unplugged humans live under constant threat from the
machines in a city called Zion. In The Matrix, Morpheus educates Neo in the art of
combating these machine-age enemies, who appear as Terminator-like agents within
the otherworldly realm of virtual reality. As the story unfolds, Neo comes to under-
stand that he may be the prophesized One, a Christlike, salvific figure who may be able
to save humanity from its enslavement by the machines. He also begins to develop a
romantic interest in a stunning, brutally efficient woman named Trinity (Carrie-
Anne Moss)—Neo, it seems, is the third piece in a complex spiritual, trinitarian puz-
zle. The first film ends with Neo having survived the continuous assaults waged by
the machines—who understand full well the threat that this One represents—and with
his finally managing to perceive the Matrix as the binary digits of a computer program.
In The Matrix Reloaded, viewers become acquainted with the resistance force that
exists in Zion. In the real world, enemy sentinels approach Zion intent on destroying
it, while in the virtual world, Neo and his team are led to the “Architect of the Matrix”
by way of different figures—who turn out to be computer programs integral to the sta-
bility of the Matrix—called the Oracle, a mysterious prophetic figure first encountered
in The Matrix who knows that Neo is the One, Merovingian, and the Keymaker. Neo
struggles against Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), who has turned rogue after his failure
to destroy Neo at the end of the first film. The Architect explains to Neo that the
prophecy of the One is, in fact, a built-in control mechanism of the Matrix that serves
to restore the program. Further complicating things, Neo now has to choose between
saving Trinity’s life and trying to prevent the downfall of Zion, which is still under
assault by the sentinels. Although Zion is ultimately destroyed (or perhaps not, as we
will come to learn) by film’s end, Neo is miraculously able to save the lives of Trinity
and his other friends.
The third installment of the trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions, begins with Neo’s strug-
gle to escape the Matrix, where he is now trapped as a result of his efforts to save his
friends and Zion at the end of the second film. With the help of Trinity and Morpheus,
Neo is released from his captivity under Merovingian. Although free, he realizes that he
is not fully himself, not fully his old self, whatever that may be. The Oracle explains that
he now has a special connection to “the Source,” and that he will be involved in a final
great conflict that can end the war between humans and the machines. She also tells
Neo that the rogue Agent Smith is now his opposite, foreshadowing a conclusive battle
between these two powerful opponents. Neo and a handful of humans decide to attack

339
Matrix Series, The

the Machine City, while other humans remain in Zion defending it against the attack of
the sentinels—evidently the city has survived the battle that ensued at the end of The
Matrix Reloaded. Once past the defense system of the Machine City, Neo tries to reach
an agreement with the machines with whom the humans now share a common enemy
—Agent Smith. The machines agree to a cease-fire in order to destroy Agent Smith.
Neo, blinded after an earlier confrontation with Agent Smith, sacrifices himself in the
final battle with his enemy. The series ends with the promise of peace between the
humans and the machines, after Neo saves them both.
Unlike The Matrix, which had an enthusiastic reception, the second and third films
of the series disappointed the majority of critics and many hardcore fans. The Matrix
Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were both criticized for being thematically and
visually convoluted. The Biblical allusions, central to The Matrix, seemed almost an
afterthought in the latter two films. The redemptive quality of The Matrix Revolu-
tions—the idea that heroic self-sacrifice and the power of belief will always win out
in the end—was thought by many to make the picture far too sentimental. Most critics
were disappointed with the lack of originality and inventiveness of the second and
third films, which they argued relied too heavily on action sequences and video-game
language in order to appeal to younger audiences instead of being faithful to the more
mature audiences that had been drawn to The Matrix because of its religio-
philosophical content. Still, even though the second and third installments of the series
were critical disappointments, they were nevertheless box-office successes.
Beyond being drawn in by the films’ extraordinary special effects and provocative
intellectual sensibilities, many fans of the Matrix series found it appealing because it
spoke to a number of profoundly significant historical and cultural issues that defined
the late twentieth and early twenty-first century during which the movies were
released. The rise of new media, such as the Internet, the growth of hypersensitive sur-
veillance technologies, and the monopolization of information by large corporations
seemed to many to be signs of an impending apocalypse—much like the one depicted
in The Matrix. It also helped, it appears, that the original film was released during the
run-up to Y2K, the end-of-millennium moment when a catastrophic collapse of the
world’s technological systems was supposed to occur due to the failure of computer
programmers to protect us from the dreaded rollover of the machines from 1999 to
2000. Although Y2K came and went without so much as a disruptive blip, the threat of
what could have happened awakened people to the implications of becoming hopelessly
dependent on technological systems that act—seemingly outside of our control—to shape
our social and economic relationships.
See also: Science Fiction Film, The; Action-Adventure Film, The

References
Ackman, Dan. “How The Matrix Ruined Movies.” Forbes, May 19, 2003.
Clover, Joshua. The Matrix. London: British Film Institute, 2004.
Gopnik, Adam. “The Unreal Thing: What’s Wrong with The Matrix?” New Yorker, May 19,
2003.

340
 McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Grau, Christopher, ed. Philosophers Explore the Matrix. New York: Oxford University Press,
2005.
Harris, Ken. “Film and Conspiracy Theory.” In Knight, Peter, ed. Conspiracy Theories in Ameri-
can History: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003.
Kapell, Matthew, and William G. Doty, eds. Jacking into the Matrix Franchise: Cultural Recep-
tion and Interpretation. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Schickel, Richard. “The Matrix Reboots.” Time, May 11, 2003.

—Irmak Ertuna-Howison

MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) is a western
drama set in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, early in the twentieth century.
Directed by Robert Altman, and distributed by Warner Bros., the film tells the tale
of the strained, yet symbiotic, relationship between a wanderer and a madam, who
cling to their shared autonomy against a corporate takeover of the tiny town from
which they draw their livelihoods. The film was named to the American Film Insti-
tute’s Top 10 films in the western genre, alongside such iconic works as John Ford’s
Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956), and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992).
Situated in the cynical, realist tradition of the revisionist western, the film compli-
cates, and often rejects, traditional western notions of heroism, morality, and the value
of both the frontier’s independence and its domestication. An outgrowth of the social
discontent of the turbulent 1960s, revisionist westerns are self-reflexive works intended
to call cherished conventions of the genre into question as a form of critique of uncon-
sidered values and ideals. Rather than portraying a romanticized, masculine, confident
West, McCabe’s tiny boomtown of Presbyterian Church, awash in gritty grays and
browns, is animated by icons and antiheroes, strangers and stereotypes, all struggling
to negotiate their authenticity, make their mark, and find their place in the world;
the town itself a namesake for faith and redemption never to be realized. The film
speaks to the tensions inherent in these images and portrayals of the West, as well
as offering critical commentary on attempts by traditional westerns to reconcile
lives and landscapes. More than merely a setting, Altman’s West is an idea—or more
aptly, a constellation of ideas—a polestar for progress, yet unyielding and timeless.
It lures businessmen, adventurers, and drifters alike with the myth of boundless
frontier opportunities, but delivers devastation for all but the most hardened and
mercenary.
In John McCabe (Warren Beatty), the film’s antihero, Altman fashions a figure
whose pretensions strain at the Western landscape that surrounds him. When a rain-
soaked McCabe makes his way into the tiny mining town of Presbyterian Church
and is mistaken for a gunslinger, he offers no objection. Taking advantage of his new-
found notoriety, he makes no bones about his disdain for the grit, the harshness, and
the lack of refinement. The town is at the farthest edge of habitable frontier—barely
hanging on, thanks to a fleabag hotel, a saloon, and steady work from the mining com-
pany—a conventional setting that the film’s narrative uses to defy expectations and
comment on audiences’ illusions about settlement and survival in the West.

341
McCabe and Mrs. Miller

McCabe holds himself apart from the townsfolk. He is too clever by half, and the
squalid shacks and lack of women spell opportunity to the gambler-turned-
businessman. With three small tents and three world-worn women, he opens a make-
shift whorehouse, where the sex is as isolating and lackluster as the wilderness on the
other side of the canvas flap. Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), a woman who knows her
way around a bordello, arrives in town and convinces McCabe that they should part-
ner. She is a woman of vision, and under her watchful and insistent eye, the construc-
tion of a “proper” whorehouse is completed, and the establishment comes to life. Mrs.
Miller persuades McCabe that the trappings of “civilization” matter, and that more
refined pursuit of pleasure will loosen the purses of the men of Presbyterian Church
and make them both rich. She brings “class” to McCabe’s frontier whorehouse: clean
linens, mandatory baths, and higher rates for pleasure than McCabe thought possible.
Considered “wild” herself, by the standards of Eastern civilization, she nonetheless suc-
ceeds in taming her own small corner of the Wild West and domesticating male space—
at least within the limitations of her profession and the confines of the bordello. Indeed,
in a frontier that gave birth to countless icons of masculine prowess and ingenuity, it is
Mrs. Miller alone who asserts dominance over (human) nature through her business
sense and foresight.
In the midst of Altman’s muted Western landscape, its puddles of mud blended
with evergreen and snow, McCabe’s establishment provides some of the few glimmers
of vibrant color and warmth uncharacteristic of the world outside—lingering images
of playfulness and laughing faces, lit by warm, yellow lamplight. Within these frames,
McCabe’s whorehouse takes on a liminal quality— serving as a spectacle of gaiety and
sexuality that is betwixt and between Western cultures—neither frontier nor “civiliza-
tion,” but containing bits of each. McCabe also contains bits of each, as this flawed
character wrestles with inner demons in monologue, struggling between hero and anti-
hero: “There’s poetry in me, Constance,” he argues to the absent Mrs. Miller, a hero
trying, too late, to emerge. He longs for a love that transcends the harshness of the
frontier and the realities of the whorehouse, but even those desires are denied by Alt-
man’s cynical challenge to prevailing notions of a romantic West.
The power of frontier nihilism overtakes the pair full force when the mining company
tries to buy out McCabe. His vanity and bravado lead him arrogantly to reject the com-
pany’s offers, until the company stops negotiating and sends hired guns to do their talk-
ing. Desperate panic grips McCabe, but his foolishness cannot be undone. He consults
a lawyer (William Devane), who convinces him to take a stand against the corporation
and become a representative of the frontier spirit: “If men stop dying for freedom, free-
dom itself will be dead.” And of course, McCabe’s demise is clearly written. He is trapped
within a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the gunmen while the local church burns—
the townspeople are unaware of his plight as they try to salvage what seems to be their sin-
gle moment of civilization and redemption, too late concerned with its presence, real or
symbolic, in their lives. As he dies alone, McCabe is silently covered by drifting snow—
a perversely gentle act offered up by a harsh wilderness landscape.
In the end, Altman’s West, as portrayed in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, encompasses not
one landscape but many; a landscape of minds as much as mountains. It is not one idea,

342
 Meet Me in St. Louis

but a range of closely held values and beliefs that are sometimes perpetuated at great cost.
The film reminds its audiences that the West resists the narrow confines of traditional ren-
derings. It is a West that casts a critical eye on the ways that history has been invented and
narrated, and reminds us that the frontier was a rapidly evolving social, political, and eco-
nomic landscape, and that those changes were most acutely felt, and often, best portrayed,
by characters not typically present in mainstream cinematic narratives.
See also: Altman, Robert; Western, The; Beatty, Warren

References
Loy, Philip. Westerns in a Changing America, 1955-2000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.
Self, Robert. Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Reframing the American West. Lawrence,
KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
Simmon, Scott. The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-
Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
—Cynthia J. Miller

MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) is considered one of the
greatest movie musicals of all time. It was originally intended as a straight drama, but
Arthur Freed, head of musical production at MGM, lobbied to get the film produced
as a vehicle for Judy Garland, and commissioned Vincente Minnelli to direct. Min-
nelli, a veteran of the Broadway stage, had already directed two Hollywood musicals.
Freed convinced the executives at MGM that with Minnelli at the helm, Meet Me in
St. Louis would be a smashing success.
Minnelli decided to film the movie in Technicolor, even though using the process
was expensive. Although the dazzling color heightened the beauty of the costumes
and settings, romanticizing the world of 1903 St. Louis, Minnelli was determined to
make the audience believe what was happening on screen. Forced to contend with the
two most unrealistic aspects of the musical—the passage of time, and the inclusion of
musical numbers—Minnelli split the film into four discrete segments, one for each sea-
son of the year. This allowed screenwriters Irving Brecher and Fred F. Finklehoffe
to adapt the script from a series of disjointed vignettes by the New Yorker’s Sally
Benson. To deal with the lack of realism presented by characters who suddenly break
out in song and dance, Minnelli integrated the musical numbers as natural elements
of the film’s narrative flow—except for the famous “Trolley Song,” which breaks out
among riders on a public conveyance, all of the numbers emerge organically as part of
the story.
The film traces the lives of the four daughters of the Smith family through the eyes
of Esther (Garland). It begins in the summer of 1903, and ends in the spring of 1904,
with the arrival of the World’s Fair. We are brought into the serene lives of the Smiths
as Esther pines for John Truett (Tom Drake), the boy next door. In an effort to get
them together, Rose (Lucille Bremer) invites John to a party. John watches Esther
and Tootie (the Oscar-winning Margaret O’Brien) sing for the guests, and Esther

343
Memento

tentatively courts a confused John. The summer ends with a group trip to the unfin-
ished fairgrounds, during which their relationship progresses.
Halloween: dressed as ghouls, Tootie and Agnes (Joan Carroll) get into trouble, and
Tootie comes home with a split lip and bruises. When questioned, she says that John
hurt her. Esther runs to John’s house and attacks him but later discovers that John
actually saved Tootie and Agnes from being run over by a trolley they attempted to
derail. Esther again goes to John, this time to apologize, and he kisses her. Floating
home from the encounter, Esther is shocked to learn that her father (Leon Ames) has
received a promotion that will relocate the family to New York, a move that will
require them to leave the safety and security of St. Louis.
Winter: the girls are getting ready for the holiday ball. Rose’s beau, Warren (Robert
Sully), accompanies Easterner Lucille Ballard (June Lockhart), to Rose and Lon’s
(Harry H. Daniels Jr.) dismay; though all is ultimately resolved. John proposes and
Esther accepts, only to realize that she is neither ready to be married nor to leave her
family. Conflicted, she finds Tootie, worried about whether Santa will be able to find
them if they move to New York. Tootie doesn’t believe Esther’s assurances, and cannot
be consoled. Mr. Smith witnesses the scene, and is filled with doubt. He calls an
impromptu family meeting to announce that he has changed his mind. He assures
them that St. Louis is the city of the future, filled with innovation and American spirit.
Spring 1904: The Smiths are arrayed in finery for the fair, and all of the happy cou-
ples are off to witness the future. In the final shots, everyone gathers together to watch
the city lit up by electric lights: “I can’t believe it,” says Esther of this new American
experience. “Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis.”
Nominated for eight Academy Awards, Meet Me in St. Louis embodied the utopian
values of mid-twentieth-century America. Devastated by the Depression and the hor-
ror of World War II, audiences were transported to another, simpler time and place,
where the acceptance of appropriate notions of family and gender roles insured that
dreams really could come true.
See also: Music in Film; Musical, The

References
Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999.
Cohan, Steven. Hollywood Musicals: A Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002.

—Caitlin Gallogly

MEMENTO. Director Christopher Nolan’s groundbreaking film Memento (2000)

takes the psychological thriller subgenre to new heights, using a number of tactics
and devices that have helped to reshape the perception of mainstream film. Memento
catches up with Leonard, played by Guy Pearce, who suffers from anterograde amnesia
caused by a head injury he received years before. Leonard’s condition affects his short-
term memory, rendering him incapable of keeping new memories for more than a few

344
 Memento

minutes. Details of Leo-

nard’s condition develop
throughout the film, as
we follow him on his
hunt for someone he
calls John G.—the man
Leonard believes broke
into his house, raped
and murdered his wife,
and caused his head
injury. Written by Nolan
with his brother Jona-
than, author of the source
short story “Memento
Mori,” Memento deviates
from traditional Holly-
wood filmic texts by pro-
viding audiences with
confusing and disori-
enting sequences that are
meant to mimic Leo-
nard’s skewed perspective
on reality.
Nolan’s choice to tell
Leonard’s story through
two competing narrative
styles is perhaps the
film’s most obvious de-
Scene from the 2001 film Memento, starring Guy Pearce. parture from the norma-
Directed by Christopher Nolan. (Photofest) tive Hollywood style of
filmmaking. The main
story is depicted in reverse-
chronological order, while background information is given to the audience through
intercut, forward-chronological sequences. The reverse-chronological sequences
are always shot in color, folding the story back upon itself from end to beginning.
The forward-chronological sequences are always shot in black and white. These scenes
are what Nolan refers to as the “documentary style objective view of the character,” and
they are meant to provide more and more background information through Leonard’s
phone conversations in his motel room. We return to this setting intermittently, break-
ing up the colorful reverse narrative that follows Leonard backward on his quest to find
John G.
If the combination of two opposing chronologies isn’t enough to disorient the audi-
ence, Nolan heightens the effect with short scenes, deceptive camera angles, tight close-
ups and flashbacks. Flashbacks further amplify the confusion of the time and place of

345
Metropolis

Leonard’s “time and place,” as it is already unclear how the forward and reverse sequen-
ces relate to one another chronologically. With the addition of flashbacks that offer
glimpses of Leonard’s previous life, Nolan breaks his rules of color versus black and
white. Thus, flashbacks of Leonard’s interactions with his wife are in color, while those
dealing with a man he knew from a former insurance claim are in black and white.
The film’s textual elements are enhanced by framing and shot selection. Though
Leonard’s words are almost exclusively focused on his condition and quest, shots of
Leonard’s text-based tattoos, photographs, and memory fragments encourage ques-
tions about friendship, justice, and human identity. Because Leonard has no lasting
memories since his injury, we quickly learn how easily he is manipulated by others.
We get to know other people as Leonard does—through snapshot encounters. Despite
Leonard’s very specific system of written and visual record keeping (he takes Polaroid
pictures and keeps meticulous notes to remind him of faces and important informa-
tion), others must remind him of the details of previous interactions. Leonard is skep-
tical of every encounter, but has no choice but to trust others, as long as their
information is consistent with his own peculiar record-keeping system, although the
two never quite seem to mesh. Leonard’s textual tattoos, which he creates, provide cru-
cial data in his quest to locate John G. These, along with sticky notes, a map on the
wall, and a Polaroid camera are virtually the only elements that make up Leonard’s
identity as we, and Leonard, know it. Contrary to the life seen through flashbacks,
Leonard no longer has use for his home or material possessions—even his clothes
and car have been taken from someone else’s life.
Through the use of competing narrative structures, intermittent black-and-white
and color sequences, flashbacks, and unusual camera choices, Memento’s unique design
has helped to change the language of mainstream film. By manipulating time and cre-
ating clashes in imagery, Nolan is able to break away from traditional Hollywood nar-
rative devices and challenge audiences to come as close as possible to experiencing
Leonard’s condition firsthand.
See also: Editing

References
Conard, Mark T., ed. The Philosophy of Neo-Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2007.
Griesinger, Emily, and Mark A. Eaton, eds. The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern
World. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006.
—Adam Dean

METROPOLIS. Based on a novel by Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (1927) is a

silent film directed by German-born filmmaker Fritz Lang. An expressionist work that
weaves together symbolism, distorted mise-en-scène, and a convoluted narrative, the
picture consciously blends elements of the gothic and science fiction to convey an early

346
 Metropolis

Rudolf Klein-Rogge watches over Brigitte Helm, whose body is connected with electric wires to a
robot in a still from director Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

twentieth-century socialist message, while, perhaps unconsciously, it gives expression

to an antifeminist message.
In the futuristic city of Metropolis, where airplanes and elevated roads run between
and around towering buildings, the contrast between capitalists and workers is repre-
sented by sun-kissed towers, where the privileged while away their lives blissfully, and
forbidding underground rooms, where dispossessed workers struggle to survive. In
the above-ground world of light, the capitalists enjoy sports, gardens, libraries, and the-
aters, while in an underground world of darkness, workers suffer exhaustion, hopeless-
ness, and death. The plot, in which the miserable working class revolts and is
reluctantly embraced by the capitalists, is narrated through the love story of Freder,
son of Joh Fredersen, master of Metropolis, and Maria, the politically minded daugh-
ter of a worker, and their efforts to unite a society starkly divided by class.
Before they meet, Freder lives a life of pleasure amid sun-drenched backdrops,
fountains, and lovely girls, remaining ignorant of life below the city, while Maria gives
hope to the suffering masses living and working underground. A savior will come, she
says, who will mediate between the planners who dream of towers and the toilers on
whose misery their dream depends. Freder first meets Maria when she brings the workers’
children to see the Eternal Garden, where he is being entertained. Captivated, he tries to
follow her, but instead finds the hall of machines. Here, he sees laborers tending massive

347
Metropolis

machines and witnesses an explosion that kills or injures several men. Freder is filled
with compassion, and has a vision in which the great machine is Moloch and the workers
are human sacrifices. Freder’s view of the machines as evil is borne out by subsequent
events.
Fredersen, who is afraid of Maria’s influence on the workers and is unaware of his
son’s involvement with her, tells the inventor Rotwang to lock her up, imprint her
form on a robot, and send her to the workers to undermine their belief in Maria.
But Rotwang secretly commands robot-Maria to incite the workers to destroy
Metropolis. They sabotage the machines, causing a flood, and then, believing their
children drowned, burn robot-Maria at the stake. Meanwhile Freder, who realizes
that robot-Maria is a fake, finds the real Maria trying to rescue the children and
helps her save them. The film ends on the steps to the tower, where Fredersen
rejoins Freder, whom he thought was dead, and Freder mediates between his father
and the workers.
The film is rich in symbolism, conveyed through character, narrative, imagery, and
mise-en-scène, including the retelling of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel with
capitalists and workers failing to understand each other; workers acting as the hands
and capitalists the head of society; and the heart representing the conciliatory factor
that alone can bring hand and head together. The idea that the workers are the hands
of society, for example, is expressed in an image of the masses marching in five columns
that come together at one end, like a hand. The evils of capitalism are shown in the
misery of the workers and in the link between capitalists, sin, and Moloch. The female
robot is a sexualized representation of Moloch, created and used by capitalists to
manipulate the workers. But she is also a vamp who leads men to kill each other. Even
Freder is caught up in her sexually tinged evil. After finding Maria (secretly a robot)
with his father, he envisions the seven deadly sins moving toward him. Metropolis’s evil
machines suggest a fear of technology, not just for workers but for the masters as well.
The robot, however, is both alluring and evil, a characterization that, especially in its
contrast with Maria’s maternal saintliness, suggests a subtext: the myth of woman as
virgin and whore and the masculine fear of female sexuality, projected onto a story of
conflict among capitalist, worker, and machine.
See also: Lang, Fritz; Science Fiction Film, The; Silent Era, The

References
Huyssen, Andreas. “The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” In After the Great Di-
vide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Minden, Michael, and Holger Bachmann. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Rochester, NY: Camden
House, 2002.
Williams, Keith. “ ‘Seeing the Future’: Visual Technology in When the Sleeper Wakes and Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis.” In H. G. Wells: Modernity and the Movies. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool Uni-
versity Press, 2008.
—Susan de Gaia

348
 Midnight Cowboy

MIDNIGHT COWBOY. There is a scene in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy

(1969) in which the lead character, Joe Buck (Jon Voight), uses the end of his shirt
to dry the hair of his best friend, Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Ratso is sick, dying
in fact, and running a fever. As Joe attempts to dry the sweat from his head, Ratso
closes his eyes and affectionately (but very weakly) embraces Joe. The moment lasts
only a couple of seconds, but more than any other shot, it reveals the film’s emotional
core. Midnight Cowboy is often remembered for its then-controversial subject matter—
prostitution and homosexuality—but at its heart it is a love story between two drifters,
one an inexperienced Texan who comes to New York City with the hope of pleasuring
Park Avenue women for money, the other a street-smart social pariah living on the
margins of New York society. Both men are in trouble, both are outsiders, and it is at
this existential nexus that each finds the other.
Based on the 1965 novel by James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy chronicles the
devastating experiences of Joe as he attempts to furnish a life for himself as a high-
class gigolo. Upon arriving in New York, Joe positions himself as the embodiment of
what Park Avenue women want—a rugged southern man who can satisfy their
libidos—only to realize his cowboy image is a bigger draw among homosexuals than
uptown “dames.” From here, Joe meets Ratso and the two become business partners,
then comrades, and later soul mates, but not before Ratso swindles Joe out of some
money, leaving him nearly penniless. Through Ratso, the audience is introduced to

Jon Voight (left) and Dustin Hoffman pose in a still from Midnight Cowboy, 1968. The film was the
first studio production to receive an X-rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, but
won three Oscars nonetheless. (Liaison Dist./Liaison)

349
Midnight Cowboy

the film’s third key “character,” the subterranean culture of late 1960s 42nd Street,
where prostitution, drugs, and homosexuality exist openly in what appears to be a
milieu enveloped by gloom and despair. Schlesinger, with the help of his cinematogra-
pher Adam Holender, accentuates the cold, dirty atmosphere of 42nd Street by shoot-
ing these scenes in grainy blue hues and contrasting it with the bright color palettes of
Florida, Ratso’s Nirvana. Despite his early premonitions, Joe is not a very good gigolo,
and as Ratso becomes increasingly ill the two decide to head south to Florida, a symbol
of health and nourishment—the antithesis of New York. It also represents maturity, as
the naive Joe Buck, recognizing his dreams of sex and comfort are unrealistic, sheds his
youthful cowboy persona and embraces the responsibilities of adulthood—in particu-
lar, his altruistic devotion to Ratso’s well-being.
The film’s strengths reside in its honesty, expressed through its casting and settings.
Schlesinger went out of his way to cast local nonactors whose faces captured the spe-
cific regional environments depicted in his narrative. The same approach was used
when scouting locations. Grungy street corners, dilapidated apartment buildings, and
shotgun diners seem meticulously selected to sell the film’s authenticity. This is equally
true of its sets. A scene staged in what is meant to be a party at Andy Warhol’s studio is
said to have been carefully constructed by the set designers and Warhol himself to rep-
licate the famous Factory. In this way, Midnight Cowboy reveals to contemporary
audiences a New York City of bygone years; a pre-Disneyfied era when 42nd Street
was still a place of vice and sexual nonconformity where the avant-garde pop culture
manufactured by Warhol acted as a surreal bridge between the worlds of civility and
subversion.
The film’s documentarylike exposition of New York City’s underworld of sex, pros-
titution, and homosexuality rendered it controversial when it was released in 1969; it
also garnered it a dreaded “X rating”—no one under 18 allowed—which limited its
distribution to select theatres across the country. Despite these handicaps, the film
was critically well received, earning seven Academy Award nominations and winning
three, including Best Picture. For all its controversy and radical artistic vision (it
employed an expressionistic style of editing and cinematography that became charac-
teristic of the New Hollywood era during the late 1960s and 1970s), Midnight Cow-
boy’s power derives from the vulnerability displayed between Joe and Ratso, whose
mutual quest for love and acceptance remains timeless.

References
Bianco, Anthony. Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America’s Most Infamous Block. New York:
HarperCollins, 2004.
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Kenny, J. M., prod. After Midnight: Reflecting on the Classic 35 Years Later. Special feature on
Midnight Cowboy (Collector’s Ed.) MGM Home Entertainment DVD, 2006.
—Ryan J. Kirkby

350
 Million Dollar Baby

MILLION DOLLAR BABY. Million Dollar Baby (2004) is the story of Maggie
Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), who wants to box; Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood), an
overly cautious trainer; and “Scrap Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman), an ex boxer
who works in Dunn’s gym. This film explores success, love, faith, human frailty, and
choice in Maggie and Frankie, while Scrap Iron narrates behind the scenes. The film
represents the growing importance of success for American women, through a classic
icon of American film, the boxer’s story. It was adapted for the screen from F. X.
Toole’s 2000 fiction collection Rope Burns.
Boxing is an especially apt means for exploring the irony of strength and vulnerabil-
ity in a character and of the individual’s relationship to society, themes this film com-
plicates in interesting ways with a female in a typically male role. Certainly, the
relationship that develops between Maggie and Frankie is different than any boxer-
trainer relationship in the history of American film. Frankie is almost squeamish about
the dangers of boxing and has a history of holding his boxers back. His tendency to
overprotect raises issues about the changing place of women in American society, as
he struggles to define himself in relation to his estranged daughter, who sends his let-
ters back unopened, and to Maggie, who becomes the daughter he is determined not
to fail.
The question of Frankie’s success or failure as a father reveals the use of boxing as a
metaphor for the success or failure of American attitudes toward women. Like 1980s
films about women integrating into the workplace, Million Dollar Baby shows a woman
succeeding in an arena previously belonging to men. But, while those films tended to

Scene from the 2004 film Million Dollar Baby, starring Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank. Directed
by Clint Eastwood. (Photofest)

351
Million Dollar Baby

show ideal working women as ultrafeminine, like Dolly Parton in Nine to Five (1980)
and Melanie Griffith in Working Girl (1988), Maggie is physically and emotionally
tough. Even among tough women in film, though, her strength is exceptional, as it
derives from training and practice rather than superpowers, virtual reality, or guns.
The development of Frankie’s character depends on giving up control. When he
first meets Maggie, he refuses to train a girl. Maggie wins him over, and he trains
and manages her career. But in his determination to succeed with her where he failed
with his daughter, Frankie supports Maggie’s choices no matter how self-destructive
they are. With Maggie’s rising success in the ring, he begins to set her up with ever
more dangerous fights, until finally she faces “Billy the Blue Bear” for the World
Welterweight Championship. Known as a dirty fighter, Billy knocks Maggie down
with an illegal blow, and she awakens in the hospital with a severe spinal cord injury.
Finding her situation unbearable, Maggie asks Frankie to help her die.
The film’s ending angered many, as it seemed to suggest that death is preferable to
life with a disability. But in light of Frankie’s character, his determination to do right
by Maggie where he failed his daughter, and the issue of women’s self-determination
that the film suggests, his actions hint that America may be ready to let women make
their own choices and live, or die, with the consequences. In this light, the medical
establishment in the film, which protects Maggie from attempted suicide, is aligned
with the paternalism of an earlier time in American culture. In contrast, Frankie’s deci-
sion to support her choice works to legitimate it, through the casting and character of
good guy Frankie Dunn.
It is ironic, given his avoidance of harmful situations, that Frankie decides to assist
Maggie’s suicide. It is also ironic that his decision to let her fight dangerous opponents
was motivated by compassion. But the ultimate irony is in Maggie’s decision to die. As
a boxer, Maggie’s success depended on the will to fight, while suicide, many would argue,
is a form of giving up. As Maggie sees it, however, she is fighting to escape a miserable life.
Million Dollar Baby succeeded in developing a believable female boxer who risks
everything to follow her dream. Like that very popular boxer in American film, Rocky
Balboa, Maggie is an underdog in her story. She also represents a group of underdogs
in American life—female boxers, and perhaps by extension, women in general. This
film not only helped give women’s boxing legitimacy; it succeeded as a film by telling
the story of a passionate fighter who happens to be a woman.
See also: Eastwood, Clint; Sports Film, The

References
Lutfiyya, Zana Marie, Karen D. Schwartz, and Nancy Hansen. “False Images: Re-Framing the
End-of-Life Portrayal of Disability in the Film Million Dollar Baby.” In Shapshay, Sandra,
ed. Bioethics at the Movies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Stokes, Robert. “ ‘Baby’ Spotlights Disconnect between Disabled, Able-bodied.” USA Today,
February 8, 2005. Available at http://www.proquest.com/.
—Susan de Gaia

352
 Miracle on 34th Street

MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET. Miracle on 34th Street has been regarded as a clas-
sic Christmas season offering since the original version of the film was released
in 1947; the film was remade and rereleased in 1994. Adapted from the novella by
Valentine Davies (who won an Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story),
the popular picture was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award in 1947.
The original version of the film takes place in New York City after the Macy’s
Thanksgiving Day Parade, and tells the story of a little girl, Susan Walker (Natalie
Wood), who does not believe in Santa—until she meets him in the Macy’s department
store. Susan has been influenced by her pragmatic, though well-meaning mother,
Doris (Maureen O’Hara), who wishes to protect her daughter from the disappoint-
ment that comes with discovering the mundane truths that lie behind those things in
the world that seem so wonderfully magical, including mythical beings such as Santa.
Susan’s mother works for Macy’s, and Susan is well aware that actors are hired to play
Santa in the store’s children’s department; Susan, then, has empirical evidence that
Santa is purely an invention created for commercial gain. However, she comes to
believe that Santa is real once she encounters Kris Kringle, an elderly gentleman who
sincerely believes he is Santa, and who is employed as the store’s Santa after the man
initially hired to play the part in the parade arrives drunk.

John Payne (left), Maureen O’Hara, Edmund Gwenn (dressed as Santa Claus), and a young Natalie
Wood stand before a Christmas tree in a still from director George Seaton’s film Miracle on 34th
Street. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

353
Miracle on 34th Street

Significantly, Santa Claus became a major figure in movies only after World War II,
as America climbed out of the Depression and became the “Affluent Society” of the
1950s. Prior to the original version of Miracle on 34th Street, Santa had made very
few film appearances. The emergence of a postwar consumer culture, it may be argued,
was needed to bring the mythical figure of Santa to celluloid life in the shape of Kris
Kringle. Indeed, that Miracle on 34th Street connects Santa to the Macy’s parade high-
lights the fact that this mythical figure and shopping co-exist, as the traditional
Thanksgiving day extravaganza is generally considered the inaugural moment of the
nation’s annual period of Christmastime consumption.
The name Kringle is related to the German term Christkindlein, meaning a messen-
ger of God or gift-bearer; and the Kringle of Miracle on 34th Street does seem to have
magical, even miraculous, powers. Portrayed by Edmund Gwenn in the 1947 film (he
won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, one of the film’s four Academy Awards),
Kringle speaks many languages, allowing him to talk to a Dutch girl who is distraught
at being away from her family during the Christmas season. (In the 1994 version,
Kringle, now played by the avuncular Richard Attenborough, communicates with a
deaf child using sign language). It is this ability to truly communicate with all children
that proves to the audience that Kringle is the real Santa. Of course, what makes
Kringle miraculous is not simply that he is a gifted polyglot, but that his powers of
communication allow him to connect, almost on a spiritual level, with each and every
child—and that they, and we, know that he truly understands them.
The 1994 remake goes even further than the 1947 version, suggesting that Kringle is
more than enchanting and magical; the later version hints that Kringle may have genu-
inely miraculous powers. Several times in the latter film, for instance, Kringle and God
are referred to in the same sentence; an asylum warden genuflects before Kringle; and
Kringle, like Jesus, proclaims himself a symbol of hope in a time of hateful selfishness.
The later version also provides audiences with a courtroom scene in which Kringle’s
Christlike nature is emphasized. In an attempt to assist Bryan (Dylan McDermott),
Kringle’s attorney, who is involved with Susan’s mother Doris (Elizabeth Perkins), in
proving that Kringle is, indeed, Santa—Kringle will be committed to an asylum if
Bryan cannot make his case—Susan (Mara Wilson) hands the presiding judge a Christ-
mas card containing a banknote bearing the words “In God We Trust.” Not only does
this nationalistic motto blur the boundaries between church and state, here it also sug-
gests that while there is no conclusive proof of God’s existence, the American people at
least have faith that God exists. If faith alone is enough to prove that God exists, reasons
Bryan, then surely it is enough to prove that Kris Kringle is Santa.
Miracle on 34th Street not only suggests that faith is sufficient to make something
real, it also implies that our faith will be rewarded, both spiritually and materially.
Thus, in the 1947 version, Susan’s newfound belief in Santa will apparently bring her
the father for whom she longs—Doris and Kringle’s attorney, Fred ( John Payne), we
are assured, will eventually be married. Interestingly, in the remake, Susan’s faith is
rewarded by Kringle granting her a wish. Earlier in the film, Susan tells Kringle that
she will believe that he is Santa only if he can provide her with a father—and a house.
In the end, Susan does gain the father she desires when, in the manner of the original

354
 Modern Times

film, her mother marries Kringle’s attorney, Bryan. Now, though, the newly formed
family also receives a house that they can make into a home. For modern audiences,
it seems, spiritual well-being must be accompanied by material comforts.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The

References
Connelly, Mark. Christmas: A Social History. London: I. B. Tauris, 1999.
Connelly, Mark, ed. Christmas at the Movies: Images of Christmas in American, British, and Euro-
pean Cinema. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000.
Marling, Karal Ann. Merry Christmas! Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000.
Raymond, Diane Christine, ed. Sexual Politics and Popular Culture. Madison, WI: Popular
Press, 1990.
Strick, Philip. “Miracle on 34th Street.” Sight & Sound, January 1995: 49–50.
—Victoria Williams

MODERN TIMES. In Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Chaplin used the
adventures of the lovable, familiar character of the Tramp to highlight the injustice
of American industrial capitalism amid the Great Depression. Based in part on
Chaplin’s working class background in England and his extensive travels—including
a tour of the Ford Motor plant and discussions with individuals such as socialist author
Upton Sinclair, Modern Times represented a departure from the more conventional
American comedies that dominated the 1930s. Chaplin served as director, producer,
composer, and, as the lead character, remained silent as the film used only background
sounds. The result was an entertaining comedy that appealed to the general public
while including a scathing indictment of the ways in which management, technology,
and law enforcement conspired to dehumanize workers. Together with two later
Chaplin films, The Great Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Modern Times
signaled Chaplin’s emergence as an artist committed to the kind of politically relevant
films that fueled decades of FBI investigations and his eventual departure for Europe.
Modern Times opens with the declaration that the film is “a story of industry, of
individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.” Chaplin jux-
taposes his reference to the Declaration of Independence with depictions of a herd of
sheep and faceless, anonymous laborers entering a factory for a day of work. The tramp
joins the workers on an assembly line only to discover that the heartless company
president controls the relentless pace of the meaningless, repetitive work. The “Electro
Steel Corporation” uses modern technology to invade the workers’ privacy during
breaks and, in a hilarious scene that symbolized the goal of reducing human workers
to productive machines, the Tramp finds himself strapped to a mechanical feeding
machine designed to enable workers to eat while on the assembly line. The machine’s
impracticality—the Tramp is more abused than fed—is both funny and a dire warning
regarding the power of modern work to rob individuals of personal autonomy. Soon
Chaplin’s character is driven mad by the assembly line; and, in the film’s most

355
Modern Times

Actor and director Charles Chaplin, wearing overalls and holding a wrench, sits on an enormous set
of gears in a still from his film Modern Times. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

emblematic scene, the Tramp is literally consumed by work as the acrobatic Chaplin
travels through the huge gears of the factory system.
After his arrest, the Tramp spends time in both prison and a mental hospital and
falls in love with a young girl played by Paulette Goddard, Chaplin’s third wife. The
young girl’s father has been killed in a food riot, and much of the film revolves around
the couple’s many confrontations with unsympathetic police determined to control the
increasing number of unemployed. At one point, the Tramp is accidentally swept up in
a revolutionary labor demonstration and returns to prison, a place he finds far happier
and secure than the modern factory. The Tramp remains a kind, innocent figure
increasingly marginalized by a social order committed more to exploitation and class
hierarchy than democracy.
Despite a plot centered on class inequalities within American life, Modern Times
also reflected aspects of middle-class sensibility as the Tramp is hopelessly optimistic.
In a fantasy sequence, the Tramp and his love interest achieve the dream of middle-
class domestic tranquility with security and homeownership. The film concludes with
the pair, happy yet still homeless and marginalized, walking hand in hand into the
sunset.
The production of Modern Times from 1933 to 1936 generated substantial
rumors as to its political message, and its debut did little to dampen such discus-
sions. The film grossed $1.4 million, less than Chaplin’s three previous films, and

356
 Moulin Rouge!

only made a profit with foreign distribution. Promotion of the film downplayed its
political significance, but Chaplin’s apparent goal of a profitable mainstream film
with a progressive dose of social realism proved difficult. Critics on the left generally
lauded Modern Times, yet Chaplin distanced himself from rumors that communists
contributed to the film that only escalated after positive reviews in radical publica-
tions such as the Daily Worker and Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet
Union. The FBI began investigating Chaplin during the 1920s and such harassment,
which included the Internal Revenue Service, only intensified during World War II
and the renewed conservatism of the Cold War. Chaplin left the United States for
Switzerland in 1952.
See also: Chaplin, Charlie

References
Chambers, Colin. Here We Stand: Politics, Performers, and Performance. London: Nick Hern
Books, 2006.
Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989.
Mellen, Joan. Modern Times. London: British Film Institute, 2006.

—Richard L. Hughes

MOULIN ROUGE! Moulin Rouge! (2001) is a multiple-award-winning and popu-

lar film musical directed by Baz Luhrmann. It tells the story of Christian (Ewan
McGregor), a young poet who makes his way to Paris during the “summer of love”
of 1899. Once there, he joins a team of Bohemian actors and playwrights who are pre-
paring a new musical play for the Moulin Rouge, a nightclub that Christian describes
as a “kingdom of night-time pleasures.” On the evening that they present their ideas to
Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent), the owner of the Moulin Rouge, Christian meets and
falls in love with the famous singer and courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman). She also
falls in love with him, but their blossoming relationship is threatened by the arrival
of the Duke (Richard Roxburgh), who has demanded Satine in exchange for the
money Zidler needs to transform the Moulin Rouge into a real theater (and Satine into
a real actress). The ensuing conflict between Christian and the Duke over Satine’s
attention and affection plays out as a battle between the desire for material security
and the rewards of true love.
Moulin Rouge! follows in the tradition of the backstage musical. Like all such musi-
cals (and arguably all film musicals), it is highly self-reflective (Everett, 2008). The
film foregrounds issues of performance and commercial music making through “Spec-
tacular Spectacular” (the show-within-the-show), the setting at the Moulin Rouge,
and the anachronistic use of several decades of contemporary popular music within
the soundtrack. It also exhibits awareness of the history of musicals (by borrowing text
and music from The Sound of Music) and the expanding interest in Bollywood film in
America today.

357
Moulin Rouge!

By using contemporary popular music, especially “Your Song,” “All You Need Is
Love,” and “Pride (In the Name of Love),” the production team further emphasizes
the themes of personal authenticity and authentic love—embodied in the Bohemians’
oft-repeated slogan “Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love”—that are at the center of the plots
of both “Spectacular Spectacular” and the framing narrative of the film. The conceit of
authenticity sits at the heart of American popular song culture, encompassing matters
of performance persona, musical style, and textual or emotional expression, particu-
larly in songs related to love. Furthermore, this dedication to the aesthetic of authentic-
ity merges with broadly held commitments within American society to authenticity as
the hallmark of acceptable personal, social, and political behavior. As a result, popular
culture regularly construes the quality of love as the principal marker of personal char-
acter and integrity. The recurring lyric (from the song “Nature Boy”), “the greatest
thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return,” which also is heard in both
the play and the framing narrative, echoes this phenomenon. Therefore, Moulin Rouge!
again displays its self-reflective nature as a film musical by incorporating these impor-
tant aesthetic and social tenets of American society and popular culture.
This is not to say that the film necessarily endorses these tenets. Several narrative
and production techniques in Moulin Rouge! highlight the conventionality (and thus
artificiality) of the plot, disrupt the suspension of disbelief, create ironic distance, or
undermine the thematic and plot emphases on authenticity and authentic love. For
example, the proscenium arch and rising/falling red curtain that appear at both ends
of Moulin Rouge! imply that the entire film is a collective fantasy that is not quite
believable. The abrupt cessation of empathetic orchestral underscoring—which sounds
as if a record player is suddenly switched off—at the moment when Satine realizes that
Christian is a writer rather than a nobleman gently mocks both film conventions and
audience expectations. Most telling, however, is Satine’s comment to Christian that
the courtesan is paid to make men believe what they want to believe. Together these
suggest that commercial entertainment culture also functions as a societal courtesan
who is paid to give people what they want to see, hear, and feel. In that case, the
emphasis on authenticity and love found so readily in contemporary America is itself
a cultural commodity, and so the film’s refrain of “truth, beauty, freedom, love” is
self-serving and may ultimately ring hollow.
See also: Musical, The; Music in Film

References
Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Altman, Rick, ed. Genre: The Musical: A Reader. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Everett, William A., and Paul R. Laird, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 2nd ed.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Smith, Susan. The Musical: Race, Gender, and Performance. London: Wallflower, 2005.
—Stanley C. Pelkey II

358
 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN. Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town aimed to
please the Depression-era audiences of 1936. The film offered viewers a chance to
laugh while also creating a space for reflection on some of the era’s significant issues.
The film tells the story of an unlikely heir to a fortune and the lengths to which he
has to go in order to give it away.
Screenwriter Robert Ruskin developed the screenplay from Clarence Budington
Kelland’s serialized 1935 story from American Mercury magazine, “Opera Hat.” In the
film, Gary Cooper’s Longfellow Deeds inherits a $20 million estate. Coming to Manhattan
from Mandrake Falls, Vermont, Deeds moves awkwardly among the city’s elites.
Jean Arthur’s Louise “Babe” Bennett offers Deeds a romantic peer. A reporter for
the New York Mail, Bennett competes against male reporters for the opportunity to
infiltrate Deeds’s entourage in search of material for racy headlines. A tough-talking,
sophisticated reporter with a heart of gold, Bennett poses as a stenographer in order
to befriend Deeds. Ultimately, she falls in love with him. Even as she does so, however,
she continues to write newspaper articles ridiculing his behavior as “Cinderella Man.”
One drunken evening, Deeds feeds donuts to a horse, prompting a farmer, delirious
with the hunger and frustration common to the era, to confront him: “All you ever
thought of was pinching pennies, you money-grabbing hick. You never gave a thought
to all those starving people standing in the breadlines, not knowing where their next
meal was coming from.”
Chagrined, Deeds tries to rectify the situation through philanthropy. He plans to
distribute 10-acre farms to 2,000 families. In the film’s most poignant scene, hundreds
of shabby, jobless applicants crowd into Deeds’s mansion, desperate for an opportunity
to earn their own living.
Most of the remainder of the film depicts the efforts of capitalist lawyers to have
Deeds declared mentally incompetent. Capra frames Deeds’s philanthropy as humane,
morally sound and in keeping with American values. Offering the unemployed not
charity but the opportunity to earn a living, Deeds meets their needs without denying
them self-respect. In marked contrast to Deeds’s sensitivity, lawyers, politicians, and
organized charities emerge as corrupt, greedy, and callous forces.
Deeds’s own legal team charges him with insanity, worried that they will lose profits
as a result of his philanthropic efforts. Deeds is subjected to a legal hearing to deter-
mine his mental competency. Individuals who had witnessed comical events earlier in
the film reappear as witnesses, testifying to his alleged insanity. It falls to Bennett to
make the case for Deeds. She declares her love for him, arguing that his ethic of philan-
thropy reflects greater sanity than that of the rest of those in attendance.
Capra would reprise these themes in Meet John Doe (1941). In that film, Cooper
returns as John Willoughby, a former baseball player turned hobo. A newspaper
presents a staff writer’s columns and speeches as Willoughby’s, as part of a publicity
stunt. Filled with platitudes and vague anecdotes harkening to a mythic, simpler era
when individuals trusted and aided one another, the articles inspire individuals to
form voluntary associations. Quiet, meaningful scenes focus on the small-town resi-
dents who joined the “John Doe Clubs.” They describe their communal efforts to

359
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

alleviate suffering and their befriending of social outcasts, including “Gruebel,” who
ate from trash cans. Upon investigation, they had learned that he did this not out of
eccentricity, but because accepting relief would wound his pride. They had found
work for Gruebel and aid for other needy individuals within the community, without
governmental assistance.
As in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Capra posed private philanthropy and voluntarism as
the most appropriate solutions to the era’s problems. Capra struggled to find a satisfy-
ing resolution to the film, ultimately shooting five endings, including one in which
Doe commits suicide. Capra’s multilayered plots critiqued not only political leaders
and media empires, but also the likeable characters whose idealistic values offered
few practical solutions in the modern political realm.
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best
Director, Best Screenplay (Robert Riskin), Best Actor (Gary Cooper), and Best Pic-
ture. In 2002, the film was remade as an Adam Sandler vehicle, Mr. Deeds.
See also: Capra, Frank

References
Capra, Frank. The Name above the Title: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Neve, Brian. “Populism, Romanticism, and Frank Capra.” In Film and Politics in America: A
Social Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1992: 28–55.
Pells, Richard H. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the
Depression Years. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

—Ella Howard

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON. Political films have long been popular
with American audiences. Over the past 40 years, pictures such as Franklin Schaffner’s
The Best Man (written by Gore Vidal), Sidney Lumet’s All the President’s Men, Oliver
Stone’s Nixon and JFK, and Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog and Man of the Year have
sought to expose the often disquieting inner workings of politics. All of these films, it
seems, owe much to director Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).
Released during Franklin Roosevelt’s second term in office and while the Depression still
lingered, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is representative of the cinematic social commen-
taries produced by Capra. Expressive of the mood and hopes of the time, its populist
message resonates with other works made by Capra during 1930s and ’40s: It Happened
One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe, and It’s a Wonderful Life.
The plot revolves around the appointment of Jefferson Smith to a vacant Senate
seat. Smith, played by the irresistible Jimmy Stewart, is an idealist. The son of a crusad-
ing journalist who was murdered for attempts to expose corruption, he is exceedingly
popular with a group of Boy Rangers in his district, who look up to him as one whose
hopes and dreams still match their own, even as he has entered adulthood. They are
ecstatic when they hear that one of the projects for which Smith hopes to gather

360
 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Congressional support is the building of a youth camp on vacant land that seems to
have little value for anyone else.
Smith is taken under the wing of the state’s senior senator, Joseph Paine (Claude
Rains), a popular but crooked politician who happened to be the best friend of Smith’s
late father. On the train to Washington, Paine, who assumes a paternal attitude toward
“the boy,” shares fond, sentimental memories of Smith’s father. Arriving in Washington
and taking in the aura of the Capitol dome with an open-eyed gaze, Smith hops on a
sightseeing bus, which visits the monuments of the nation’s capital—most notably the
Lincoln Memorial. Duly inspired, Smith enters his office ready to get to work. He is
assisted by his secretary, the bright, energetic Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur). Known sim-
ply as “Saunders,” she seems much more qualified for politics than does the rather naive
Smith. Saunders’s devoted journalist-friend Diz Moore (Thomas Mitchell) provides a
cynical perspective as an insider newsman who can’t quite believe that Smith is authentic
or in any way cut out for the job he has assumed. Both he and Saunders are bemused and
astonished to see Smith express his democratic ideals and reverence for the Constitution
and refer to him as “Don Quixote.” Indeed, Senator Paine tells Smith at one point that
he is “fighting windmills.” Satire and humor abound in this picture; but reflective of the
majority of Capra’s work, there are also unsettling moments of darkness.

In a scene from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart examines numerous letters from bas-
kets as well as those littered on the floor of the Senate. The film, in which Stewart plays idealistic pol-
itician Jefferson Smith, was one of the first to portray the U.S. government as corrupt. (Library of
Congress)

361
Music Man, The

As expected, Smith confronts the agents of corruption he encounters in Washing-

ton, one of whom is Senator Paine, who is beholden to Boss Jim Taylor (Edward
Arnold), a greedy and ruthless figure who has his own interests in Smith’s home state.
Seeking to expose the fraudulent activities of his Senate colleagues, Smith eventually
loses all his allies in Washington, except for Saunders and a Senate staffer who continue
to believe in him. The story builds to a climax when it is revealed that the land Smith
intended to use to build his youth camp is coveted by Boss Taylor and Senator Paine,
who will go to any lengths to acquire it. With Saunders’s help, Smith fights on in
Washington, while back at home the Boy Rangers struggle against Taylor’s agents. In
one of those Capraesque dark moments, the media makes Smith out to be the villain,
leading him to be accused of corruption and fraud himself. As in other Capra films,
however, the protagonist, on the verge of being overwhelmed, is ultimately redeemed.
Capra’s populist social-commentary films, although sometimes criticized for being
overly sentimental, not only gave expression to the despair suffered by those living
through the Depression and WWII, but also held out hope that Americans could once
again proclaim, “It’s a wonderful life.”
See also: Capra, Frank; Politics and Film

References
Capra, Frank. The Name above the Title. New York: Da Capo, 1997.
Carney, Ray. American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1996.
McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000.
—Alexander Varias

MUSIC MAN, THE. The film version of The Music Man (1962), produced and
directed at Warner Bros. by Morton DaCosta, was based on Meredith Willson’s Broad-
way hit, which ran for 1,375 performances beginning in 1957. The stage version
earned eight Tonys, including Best Musical, and it was revived on Broadway in 1980
and again in 2000–01. In 2003, Disney Studios produced a television movie that fea-
tured Matthew Broderick and Kristin Chenoweth in the leading roles. Despite the later
TV version, it is the 1962 film starring Robert Preston (reprising his Broadway role),
Shirley Jones, and a powerful supporting cast that continues to define this film musical.
The plot, in the formula of golden age musicals, is a classic boy-meets-girl story, set
in mythical River City, Iowa, in 1912. The title character, Professor Harold Hill
(Preston), is a con man who travels by rail through America’s heartland convincing
small-town citizens of their need for a boys’ band, even though he has neither plans
nor the ability to create one. Once orders are taken and payments made for instru-
ments, uniforms, and books, he makes off with the money and moves on to the next
unsuspecting town. Also a ladies’ man, Hill targets the River City librarian, Marian

362
 Music Man, The

Paroo (Jones), who initially rebuffs him, despite her mother’s concern that he may be
her very last chance” at happiness.
In the style of a revivalist preacher, Hill uses the opening of a pool hall to generate
fear among the citizens that there’s “Trouble, right here in River City!” The way to
keep the devil out of the community is a boys’ band. Hill’s pitch raises the suspicion
of Mayor Shinn (Paul Ford), who demands Hill’s credentials. Hill slickly eludes the
mayor and actively pursues Marian, since she is the most likely to expose him: she is
the local piano teacher and also runs the town library, giving her access to information.
His interest piques upon hearing gossip about Marian and the late Mr. Madison, who
left the library to the town but “all the books to her.” Ultimately Marian has a change
of heart when she sees the magic Hill has worked on the town, and especially on her
shy little brother, Winthrop (Ron Howard). In the end, she comes to love Hill, and
tries to stop the town’s hot pursuit of him once his scam is revealed. As it turns out,
the boys have been learning music in his absence, and the story ends on the triumphant
notes of “Seventy-Six Trombones.”
One of the reasons for The Music Man’s immense popularity was that it capitalized
on America’s nostalgia for the big production numbers of the classic age of the movie
musical. Willson used America’s longing for the past to his advantage in penning a
number of timeless songs for the film including: “Being in Love” (replacing “White
Knight” from the stage version), “Goodnight, My Someone” (the same tune as
“Seventy-six Trombones”), and the now-standard “Till There Was You.” The show’s
choreographers followed Willson’s lead, presenting audiences with spectacular dance
sequences that helped to move the narrative powerfully from point to point.
Given this nostalgia for a bygone era, however, 1960s America was not marked sim-
ply by a longing for an idealized past. It was also characterized by a certain tension
between past and present, and between the lure of the city and the “family values” of
rural life. The Music Man cleverly played on these tensions in ways that broadened
its appeal. Viewers distressed by the rapid social changes of the Cold War/civil rights
era could escape to a mythical mid-America, while others could appreciate the under-
tone of irony that complicated the film’s bucolic setting and story.
The film’s exceptional cast, memorable music, and superior production values led to
its nomination for numerous cinematic awards. Singled out for six Academy Awards,
including Best Picture, it won for Scoring of Music and Adaptation or Treatment,
while splitting the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy with That Touch of
Mink. Proving the enduring popularity of the film and the high regard it still com-
mands in the American cinematic community, The Music Man was added to the
National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2005.
See also: Music in Film

References
Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004.

363
My Darling Clementine

Oates, Bill. Meredith Willson: America’s Music Man. Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2005.
Willson, Meredith. “But He Doesn’t Know the Territory.” New York: Putnam’s, 1959.

—Vicki L. Eaklor

MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. One of director John Ford’s most acclaimed films,

My Darling Clementine (1946) is, in part, a cinematic adaptation of Stuart N. Lake’s
book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall (1931). Based on the story of the gunfight at the
O.K. Corral, the film draws its plot from ongoing tension between the Earp brothers:
Wyatt (Henry Fonda), Virgil (Tim Holt), Morgan (Ward Bond), and James (Don
Garner); and the Clanton family: outlaw brothers Ike (Grant Withers) and Billy (John
Ireland), led by Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan). The film’s title and theme song
derive from the western folk ballad, “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” signaling the cen-
trality of the female lead in this tale of bringing civilization to the West.
Cited by the British Film Institute as Ford’s most poetic western, the film reinter-
prets the classic showdown between good and evil, while at the same time telling the
story of Wyatt Earp’s brief stint as marshal, his friendship with Doc Holliday (Victor
Mature), and his love for Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs). The troubled town of
Tombstone is the site of a struggle not only for the characters’ physical survival but
for their moral welfare, as well. In this, Tombstone stands as a microcosm of the West
and the struggle to create a new era of order and civilization on the frontier.
Set in 1882, the film opens as Wyatt Earp and his brothers, driving cattle westward
to California, encounter the Clantons, who aggressively offer to “take the cattle off
their hands.” The Earps decline the offer but take Old Man Clanton’s suggestion to
ride into Tombstone, a “wide open town,” leaving James, the youngest, to watch over
the herd. Arriving in town, which is effectively run by the notorious Doc Holliday,
the brothers find chaos, with the law and residents alike terrorized by gunplay, graft,
and wanton recklessness. After quelling a drunken rampage, Earp is asked to replace
the town’s cowardly marshal. He refuses; but when the brothers return to camp to find
their cattle rustled and young James dead, Earp immediately takes the job in order to
seek revenge for his brother’s murder.
In the scenes that follow, Earp and Holliday engage in a cautious dance of domi-
nance and submission, negotiating authority over the town and each other. The two
slowly develop a mutual respect that ultimately aligns them in the battle against the
outlaw Clantons. When Holliday’s jilted fiancée, Clementine Carter, arrives from
Boston, however, relationships become more complicated. The arrival of a “lady”—a
symbol of civilization—elicits an awkward attraction from Earp; jealousy from Holli-
day’s girl, Chihuahua (Linda Darnell); and disdain from Holliday, whom Clementine
has tracked from one dusty town to another across the vast western frontier. Holliday
is not moved by her entreaties, any more than he is moved by Chihuahua’s jealous
clinging. Full of self-loathing for sins of the past, the escape offered by the bottle, or
a stagecoach, seems to be all that is left for him. Earp and Clementine connect as awk-
wardly bonded kindred spirits—the hero and the lady—but by film’s end, that, too, is
not to be.

364
 My Darling Clementine

When Chihuahua provides Earp with evidence against his brother’s murderer, the
killing begins. One after another, the characters fall—Chihuahua, Billy Clanton, Virgil
Earp—until Old Man Clanton challenges Marshal Earp to a showdown at the O.K.
Corral, a gunslinging settling of scores between the two families—the Clantons repre-
senting the Old West, with its archaic, dispossessed men clinging doggedly to a ragged
lawlessness, the Earps representing the New West, with its freshly fashioned, still suit-
ably violent men of the law, who grudgingly embrace the justice and efficiency of civ-
ilization.
At sunrise, Earp, his brother Morgan, Doc Holliday, the mayor, and the deacon
approach the corral for the final showdown. When the dust settles, Holliday is dead,
as are all the Clanton boys. The film’s oppositions have been resolved, and Earp has,
in fact, transformed Tombstone from a lawless outpost to a civilized town. Rather than
remain, Earp takes leave of Clementine and rides off, beginning the long journey to
California where he will bury his brothers.
In My Darling Clementine, as in his other early westerns, Ford sought to capture the
spirit of the Old West, often at the expense of historical authenticity. Forsaking fidelity
to detail, his image of Tombstone is crafted to highlight the tension between the bold
lawlessness of the frontier West and the ineffectual, but orderly East. This opposition is
a mainstay of the classic westerns of the golden age (1930–1950), which emphasized
the establishment of law and order, and presented essential and ritualistic conflicts
between civilization and savagery, played out in narratives, symbolism, and character-
izations. My Darling Clementine is no exception: Tortured by inner demons, Doc Hol-
liday is unable to find his place in either the civilized world of the East or Tombstone’s
savage West; Chihuahua inhabits a world of sensuality and excess, but longs for Clem-
entine’s world of faithful innocence; the Clantons pay the ultimate price for their greed
and wanton violence; and even Earp rides back into the wilderness, alone at film’s end,
his violent independence making him an unsuitable member of the civilized commu-
nity he helped to create.
The film’s use of gender archetypes in addressing these conflicts speaks directly to a
postwar audience. When the film opens, Earp and his brothers are independent pio-
neers. He reluctantly becomes marshal only to enact frontier justice when the existing
political structure proves unable to control the outpost or the murderous Clantons.
With this shift, he assumes the role of warrior, creating a parallel to the real-life role
that reinvigorated American masculinity during World War II.
Similarly, Earp’s romantic interest, the lovely and refined Clementine, functions as the
positive feminine pole in the narrative, creating, through her relationship with Earp, the
promise of “harmonious community.” Clementine’s opposite, the mixed-blood prosti-
tute Chihuahua, is the film’s negative feminine pole. As the embodiment of a wild and
savage West, she is symbolically aligned with its chaos and danger: an exotic object of fas-
cination that will, in the end, lead to ruin. Indeed, the social constructs of the western
demand that transgressive women such as Chihuahua either repent and be drawn back
into the folds of the social fabric, or suffer the consequences of their transgressions.
While the resolution of these conflicts and oppositions is found, for most of the
film’s characters, in death, for Tombstone and the West, it results in new life. In one

365
My Man Godfrey

of the film’s most vibrant scenes, civilization stakes its claim: the town’s new church is
dedicated at a square dance social, where Earp, a symbol of both the Western frontier
and postwar masculinity, and Clementine, a figure of Eastern civilization and domesti-
cation, join hands and celebrate a new era as the showdown between wilderness and
progress comes to an end.
In 1991, My Darling Clementine was selected for preservation as part of the National
Film Registry of the Library of Congress, an honor reserved for films deemed “cultur-
ally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Although situated in the period commonly
thought of as the golden age of the western, no western films released in 1946, including
My Darling Clementine, received Academy Award nominations, despite critical praise
for the film and its eventual status as an iconic entry in this American genre.
See also: Ford, John; Western, The

References
Cowie, Peter. John Ford and the American West. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004.
Coyne, Michael. The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western.
London: I. B. Tauris, 1998.
McGee, Patrick. From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.

—Cynthia J. Miller

MY MAN GODFREY. Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) embodied a new

subgenre of comedy emerging from Hollywood in the Depression era—the screwball
comedy. While offering audiences an escapist world of slapstick humor and sophisti-
cated milieu, the film also attempted to level a scathing social critique against the wid-
ening gap between the haves and the have-nots. My Man Godfrey tells the story of a
wealthy playboy who, disguised as a Depression victim, is hired by a scatterbrained
socialite to serve as a butler for her family.
Screwball comedy employed several themes to intrigue audiences. One theme was
reverse class snobbery—to be poor was to be better, to be rich was to be “out of touch.”
Another theme was a major inversion or subversion of the character’s normality—the
heiress forced to live poor, the pauper suddenly rich. Both premises mocked the phoni-
ness of the wealthy and exalted proletarian values. My Man Godfrey sought to represent
these themes.
The film opens against the backdrop of the Depression. Godfrey (William Powell),
a poverty-stricken bum, is seen rummaging through a garbage dump. La Cava inten-
tionally chose Powell, one of the most popular and refined male stars of the mid-
1930s, to play against type, implying in the opening scene that even the debonair
Powell could find himself destitute. No sooner is the contrast made than La Cava offers
a sarcastic attack on Herbert Hoover. Godfrey places a pipe to his lips and remarks
“Prosperity is just around the corner”—Hoover’s 1931 statement that is still the sub-
ject of derision five years later.

366
 My Man Godfrey

Godfrey encounters Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard), a dizzy socialite in search of a

genuine Depression victim (a “forgotten man”) as the goal of a society scavenger hunt.
Irene is intrigued by Godfrey and brings him home to be the new family butler. It soon
appears that the forgotten man is badly needed, as the film reveals the Bullock family
to be silly and selfish, totally lacking common sense or the will to change for the better.
Employing reverse class snobbery, Godfrey teaches the family the value of money,
humility, and wisdom. The film cheats a little in its class radicalism when Godfrey is
revealed to be a rebellious wealthy son, a far cry from the democratic impulse otherwise
supported through Godfrey’s poverty.
My Man Godfrey, nevertheless, uplifted the poverty-stricken Depression-era audi-
ences through a mockery of the upper classes. Despite their wealth and prestige, the
beautiful people of New York’s high society can find no other meaningful activity than
a scavenger hunt at the city dump. The madness of the rich, unfettered by normal con-
ventions and unpaid bills, made for an escapist fantasy where the middle class could
appreciate their “normal” lives. La Cava intentionally directed his satirical lens to the
sheltered and oblivious lifestyle of these pampered folk. Irene personifies her class’s
total lack of reality when she asks Godfrey why he lives in the dump when there are
so many nicer homes in which to live. The wealthy had not fully comprehended the
fact of the Depression and the abject plight of the masses. Only the level-headed for-
gotten man can bring society back to its original democratic ideals of equality and
justice.
The narrative of the film set up an opportunity for the triumph of the common
man. Godfrey, seemingly a humbly born butler, has more manners, intelligence, and
courtesy than the nobly born Bullocks; far from being their inferior, he becomes their
superior. Ironically, however, My Man Godfrey wound up placating upper-class sensi-
tivities. By making Godfrey the Bullocks’ social equal, the film loses much of its satiri-
cal sting. Godfrey has the manners of a gentleman because he is a gentleman. It would
not have been possible for a true forgotten man to exemplify such etiquette.
Through its juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, creating an entertaining spectacle
for film audiences, My Man Godfrey typified films that emerged during the Depression
era. While it ultimately failed in its attempt to critique the divisions of class and
wealth, it is nevertheless notable as one of the first screwball comedies.

References
Beach, Christopher. Class, Language, and American Film Comedy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
Gehring, Wes D. Screwball Comedy: A Genre of Madcap Romance. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986.
McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. New York: Wallflower,
2007.
Sikov, Ed. Screwball: Hollywood’s Madcap Romantic Comedies. New York: Crown, 1989.
—Anna Burke

367
This page intentionally left blank
 MOVIES IN
AMERICAN HISTORY
AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
Volume 2

Philip C. DiMare, Editor

Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a
review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Movies in American history : an encyclopedia / Philip C. DiMare, editor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978–1–59884–296–8 (hardcopy (set) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–1–59884–297–5 (ebook (set))
1. Motion pictures—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—
United States—Biography—Encyclopedias. 3. Motion picture producers and directors—
United States—Biography—Encyclopedias. 4. Motion picture industry—United States—
Encyclopedias. I. DiMare, Philip C.
PN1993.5.U6M68 2011
791.4309730 03—dc22 2011006901
ISBN: 978–1–59884–296–8
EISBN: 978–1–59884–297–5
15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.
Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.
ABC-CLIO, LLC
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
 v
N
NIXON. Oliver Stone has been one of the most controversial directors in Holly-
wood since the mid-1980s. Key to this controversy has been the director’s claim to
be doing history in films such as Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991), and
The Doors (1991). This claim has sparked widespread debate, increasing the director’s
and his work’s exposure, and helping to increase his box-office revenues. One of Stone’s
most controversial films was Nixon (1995), his dramatization of the life and volatile
career of one of America’s most infamous political figures.
Nixon purports to be a psychological biography of the only man in history to resign
the presidency of the United States. Beginning by examining his meager beginnings as
the son of a failed lemon farmer father and a devout Quaker mother, Stone depicts
Nixon’s youth as sadly dysfunctional, and likely responsible for the many psychological
foibles that eventually led to his political downfall. Stone goes on to reiterate a theory
that had been suggested in a number of his other “historical” films: that during the
1960s, particularly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the
government of the United States was taken over by unscrupulous, and dangerous,
members of what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” In
Nixon, Stone goes so far as to imply that Nixon himself actually had knowledge of con-
spiratorial activities swirling around Kennedy’s death, and that he may ultimately have
benefited from these shadowy activities as he moved along his path toward the White
House.
As with all of Stone’s pictures that claim to be historically based, Nixon elicited com-
ment from highly regarded historians such as Stephen Ambrose and Arthur M. Schle-
singer Jr. Ambrose, whose historical views tend toward the conservative, attacked
Stone’s work as a gross—even fraudulent—misrepresentation of the former president.
Schlesinger, whose work represents the more progressive side of the historical debate,
thought that the film, although certainly taking some dramatic license, was basically
correct in its portrait of the tortured former president. For his part, Stone staunchly
defended the accuracy of his film, pointing out that he had done extensive research,
including interviewing many former Nixon staffers and listening to hours of previously
unreleased Nixon White House recordings. Indeed, said Stone, beyond engaging in

369
Nixon

hours of labor intensive research simply because he wanted to make Nixon a first-rate
film, he also conducted this research because he knew that he would be subject to
attacks from historians once the picture was released.
Nixon was such a complicated figure—odd looking, even he had to admit, and fre-
quently off-putting—“When they look at you,” he says to a portrait of Kennedy in
Nixon, “they see what they want to be; when they look at me, they see what they
are”—it is difficult to know who could possibly be successful in playing him on-
screen. Rip Torn tried it in the 1979 mini-series Blind Ambition, based on the John
Dean book of the same name; and more recently, Frank Langella portrayed the post-
White House Nixon in Ron Howard’s Frost-Nixon (2008). Interestingly, though, the
lead role in Nixon did not go to an American-born actor but to the Welshman
Anthony Hopkins. Transforming himself into a perverse caricature of Nixon—who
at times during his political career almost seemed to be a caricature of himself—
Hopkins earned one of his many Academy Award nominations for Best Actor. Hop-
kins portrays Nixon as a sympathetic character, deeply affected by the deaths of his
two brothers when he was young, close to his Quaker mother, and often bound up
by the almost oppressive strictures of his faith. Politically astute—he became one of
the most sought-after advisors for Republican candidates late in his life—and disgust-
ingly coarse in his personal relationships with his male companions, Nixon seemed
almost painfully shy in public, especially given that he was a nationally recognized pol-
itician. Some of the most poignant moments in Nixon are shared between Nixon and
his wife, Pat, played with élan by Best Supporting Actress nominee Joan Allen. Unsure
of himself, even in this most intimate of relationships, Nixon seemed always haunted
by his crippling insecurities. Indeed, the Stone/Hopkins Nixon is a profoundly private
man who so desperately wanted to be loved that, ironically, he entered the most public
of professions, politics. Ultimately, suggests Stone, it was Nixon’s insecurities that led
to his downfall. Fearful of his enemies—both real and imagined—he made choices
that today seem bizarrely self-destructive, especially in regard to Watergate.
Perhaps less accurate than his film portrayals of the Doors or Alexander the Great,
and less compelling than his political thriller JFK, Nixon remains an important film,
examining as it does the life and career of an important, tragically flawed, and often
misunderstood leader in American history.
See also: JFK; Politics and Film; Stone, Oliver

References
Ambrose, Stephen E. “Nixon: Is It History?”; Schlesinger, Arthur J. Jr. “On JFK and Nixon”; and
Stone, Oliver. “On Nixon and JFK.” In Toplin, Robert Brent, ed. Oliver Stone’s USA: Film,
History, and Controversy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
Kunz, Don, ed. The Films of Oliver Stone. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997.
Silet, Charles L. P. Oliver Stone: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series). Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
—Richard A. Hall

370
 No Country for Old Men

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. In the stories of the ancient Greeks, tragedy was
marked by the unfolding of fate, brought down on the protagonist because of one
tragic flaw, the mortal weakness within the hero that allowed the gods to have their
way with him. Sometimes the gods acted directly. At other times the Furies would be
unleashed to wreak their terrible and implacable vengeance. Set against a hardscrabble
landscape, and richly cruel in its depiction of fate, the harsh tragedy of the 2007 film,
No Country for Old Men, is like one of those ancient tales brought to life in the Ameri-
can Southwest. As in ancient tragedy, the hero brings his fate on himself, in this case by
performing an act of mercy, and as in Greek tragedy his fate is personified by a fright-
eningly unstoppable personal Fury.
Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, and based on a 2005 novel of the same name by
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men won four Oscars including Best Picture,
an unusual award for a film in which nearly all the characters with whom one would
ordinarily identify are killed. But even the best of the characters in this film come across
as hard-edged, existing in a West Texas desert landscape, a trailer park of the soul.
Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, is out hunting on foot when he comes across
deserted vehicles, bodies, bags of drugs, and a case containing a great deal of money.
The only survivor is inarticulate with pain and dehydration, and can only beg Moss
for a drink of water. Moss has no water, and he pragmatically leaves the wounded
man at the scene while taking the bag with the money for his own. In the harsh rules
of this dog-eat-dog land, Moss has done well for himself. He has left little trace of him-
self at the scene and has come away with a life-changing amount of money. Never-
theless, his survivor sensibilities are overcome by pity, and Moss drives into the desert
to bring water to the wounded man, only to find him dead. No good deed goes unpun-
ished, and it is this foolhardy act of kindness that sets the hunters on his trail.
The primary and ultimately successful hunter is one of the most frightening villains
in film, a smoothly coiffed hitman named Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem.
Chigurh is inscrutable, unstoppable, unemotional and reasonable, as only a madman
can be. If he were merely venial and greedy as so many movie villains are made out
to be, he would be much less chilling. It is his deranged but logical personal ethic that
drives him ruthlessly forward. His twisted sense of justice leads him to kill not only
Moss, but anyone who interferes with his prey. He even goes out of his way to kill
Moss’s wife, not as revenge but as a kind of insane justice. If given a chance to speak
before they are killed, his victims try to convince the killer that he doesn’t “have to
do this,” that the future is not fixed, that events are not inevitable. But Chigurh must
kill. As the inexorable hand of fate, his actions are fixed, a theme underscored by
Chigurh’s habit of tossing a coin, heads or tails, to offer his victims the hope of a 50-
50 chance at mercy.
Meanwhile, circling the edge of this vortex of violence and inescapable fate is the
enigmatic character of Sheriff Bell, played by veteran actor Tommy Lee Jones. The
sheriff serves as witness and storyteller, narrator and commentator. Like the ancient
Greek bard Homer, who set his tales of fate and the cruel and inexplicable will of the
gods in a mythic era, the sheriff narrates these events as a tragic and completed past.
The film is bracketed by his reminiscences, buttressing the inevitability of the

371
No Country for Old Men

characters’ actions and reactions with the immutability of the perfected past tense. Like a
solo version of the ancient Greek theatrical device, the chorus, Sheriff Bell’s comments
provide distance, context, and monumentality. Through the soft Texas drawl of his
words, the story is framed as an epic tragedy, beyond the law of man even as represented
by the office he holds and the badge he wears. And yet, in the country that is no place for
the old, it is the voice of Sheriff Bell, the old man, that survives to tell the tale.
See also: Coen Brothers, The

References
Corrigan, Robert, ed. Classical Tragedy, Greek and Roman. New York: Applaus, 1990.
Nussbaum, Martha Craven. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Phi-
losophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Visser, Margaret. Beyond Fate. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2002.
—Helen M. York

372
 v
O
OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN, AN. Written by Douglas Day Stewart and
nominated for an Academy Award, An Officer and a Gentleman grossed nearly
$130 million after its 1982 release. Directed by Taylor Hackford and distributed by
Paramount Pictures, the film stars Richard Gere, Louis Gossett Jr., and Debra Winger.
An engaging, military love story, An Officer and a Gentleman is a tale of immutable
challenges, acquired valor, self-actualization, and sensitivity.
Basically a traditional coming-of-age story set in the context of a war film, the pic-
ture’s narrative unfolds on several complex levels. A Naval Aviation Officer candidate,
Zack Mayo (Gere), is a talented college graduate, though a socially maladjusted young
man. The son of an enlisted Navy man, who must endure his mother’s suicide and the
failed parenting of his alcoholic and womanizing father, Zack has grown into a dis-
placed loner, searching for a purpose in life. His quest takes him to a 13-week Aviation
Officer Candidate School program, during which he will be trained, and parented, by
Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley (Gossett). There is a love interest, a
woman, blue-collar factory worker Paula Pokrifki (Winger). Paula is young and ethi-
cal, and clearly relegated to the social and economic fringes of American culture, with
little hope of self-empowerment. She and her good friend Lynette Pomeroy (Lisa
Blount) remain optimistic that they will find husbands from among the candidates
training in their hometown, young men who will take them away from the debilitating
drudgery of their community.
In his typical fashion, Zack attempts to use his superior intellect, physical skills, and
charm to make his way through the program with as little effort as possible. He cons
his classmates and uses Paula: “I’ve loved you since I met you,” says Paula. “I don’t want
you to love me. I don’t want anyone to love me,” responds Zack. He even tries to fool
Sergeant Foley: “In every class,” says Foley, “there’s always one joker who thinks that
he’s smarter than me. In this class, that happens to be you. Isn’t it, Mayonnaise?” Real-
izing his tremendous potential, however, Foley rides Zack to the breaking point. In one
of the film’s most poignant scenes, with Foley trying to force Mayo to quit, Zack begs
Foley, through tears of anguish and despair, not to kick him out of the program:

373
Officer and a Gentleman, An

Movie poster for the film An Officer and a Gentleman featuring actors Richard Gere and Debra
Winger, 1982. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“DON’T YOU DO IT! DON’T! YOU . . . I got nowhere else to go, I got nowhere else
to g . . . I got nothing else.”
Allowed to stay in the program, Zack becomes the leader, and the friend that the
other candidates, and Paula, desperately need. Maintaining a thematic balance among
romance, action, and drama, the film winds toward a rather predictable conclusion:
Officer Zack Mayo, resplendent in naval whites, and having come to understand loy-
alty, heroism, and self, strides into the local factory, sweeps Paula up in his arms, and
carries her off to the cheers of those who must remain behind.
The film fits neatly within the cultural, political, and economic context of
Reagan-era America. Suffering through the ignominy of a humiliating defeat in
Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and failed presidency of Richard Nixon, and the
“malaise” of the Carter administration, American’s were in the mood for redemptive
narratives, especially those that were framed by a thematic of military heroism.
Expressing the possibility that the hopes and dreams of those who had been relegated
to the margins of American society could indeed be realized, the film was an over-
whelming success, cashing in at the box office and garnering a Best Actress nomina-
tion for Winger and Oscars for Best Supporting Actor for Gossett and Best Song for
“Up Where We Belong.”

374
 On the Waterfront

References
An Officer and a Gentleman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Officer_and_a_Gentleman.
An Officer and a Gentleman. Available at http://www.fast-rewind.com/.

—Gloria Sawyer

ON THE WATERFRONT. Hollywood and organized labor were both among the
earliest targets of the Cold War’s witch hunts for communist subversion. It is not sur-
prising, then, that the 1954 working-class drama On the Waterfront did not depict a
strike or other solidarity movement, and instead celebrated apolitical individualism
while condemning union corruption. Based in part on a series of prizewinning news-
paper articles about New Jersey longshoreman’s unions, On the Waterfront relocates
the action to Brooklyn. The narrative revolves around the question of whether dock-
worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) will testify against labor bosses after he witnesses
the murder of another worker who had provided information about union racketeering
to the Waterfront Crime Commission. Directed by former Communist Party member
Elia Kazan, who in 1952 angered many when he revealed the names of former commu-
nist associates to the House Un-American Activities Committee, On the Waterfront
raised questions about the filmmaker’s motives; some argued that Kazan made the
movie to justify his own willingness to name names. In any case, audiences and critics
applauded, and On the Waterfront became American cinema’s most decorated labor
film, winning eight Academy Awards in 1955, including Oscars for best picture, direc-
tor, screenplay, actor (Brando), and supporting actress (Eva Marie Saint).
Although On the Waterfront stands as a representative product of Cold War Holly-
wood, the film has endured largely because of its ability to both draw on and transcend
conventions of mid-1950s popular culture. Enlivened by a sophisticated Leonard
Bernstein soundtrack, the movie successfully combines elements of film noir, contem-
porary urban television shows, and live theater. Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schul-
berg have said that they wanted to make an “eastern”—a film featuring themes
common to westerns but set on the East Coast. Indeed, in many ways the picture
recalls High Noon (1952), also the story of a principled man taking action while others
do nothing, and a film that was interpreted by many as an allegory about public sub-
missiveness during the Cold War.
On the Waterfront may indeed function as a New York western; however, the film’s
protagonist exhibits something more complicated than the rugged individualism of
the typical western hero. Brando’s much-celebrated rendering of the hard-edged and
sensitive sides of ex-boxer Terry Malloy represents a landmark among Hollywood’s
portrayals of American masculinity. In the film’s iconic scene, Malloy rides in a taxi
with his brother Charley, a union insider assigned to convince him not to testify or,
if unsuccessful in that effort, to kill him. Terry disarms Charley by reminding him that
years ago, determined to win a lucrative bet, he asked Terry to deliberately lose a fight
and thus ruin his boxing career. “You don’t understand,” he says, “I coulda had class,
I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody. . . .” While that is the most

375
Ordinary People

oft-quoted moment, Brando’s performance flourishes over the course of the several
scenes depicting Terry’s courtship with Edie (Saint), the sister of the murdered worker.
Edie has no reason to trust Terry but nevertheless seems drawn to him. Connecting vis-
cerally in the silences of their awkward conversations, their love is based on pure intu-
ition, the same kind of animal instinct that compels Edie’s love for her cat and inspires
Terry to care for a flock of pigeons on an apartment rooftop. So there is solidarity in
On the Waterfront after all, but a kind not based on any ideology nor impelled by strug-
gles for group rights.
On the Waterfront was as much a postwar film as it was a Cold War production, for
it reflected anxieties about rapid modernization and urbanization. It appealed to yearn-
ings for a society based on instinctual moral decisions rather than the wheelings and
dealings of labor bosses, corporations, and city bureaucracies. Still, the film remains a
cultural artifact of American Cold War liberalism: Poor working conditions are blamed
not on employers but on corrupt unions, the film celebrates the power of individuals
who counter groupthink, and in the climactic scene the workers’ triumph is that they
no longer have to bribe union officials to be able to answer the shipping company
magnate’s call, “Let’s go to work!”
See also: Brando, Marlon; Hollywood Blacklist, The; HUAC Hearings, The; Kazan,
Elia

References
Bodnar, John. Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American
Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Bromwich, David. “Brando and On the Waterfront,” Threepenny Review 65, Spring 1996:
19–21.
Zaniello, Tom. Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films
about Labor. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2003.
—Kenneth F. Maffitt

ORDINARY PEOPLE. Opening his 1980 film Ordinary People with a series of
dazzling dissolves reminiscent of those used by Orson Welles to guide us into the mys-
terious realm of Xanadu in Citizen Kane, first-time director Robert Redford draws us
seductively into a pristine upper-class world of manicured lawns and perfectly
appointed Colonial homes. Redford lingers over these shots, as if to make us envious
of this wonderfully safe and secure space, one that seems so different from those that
most of us inhabit simply because it is anything but ordinary. There are secrets to be
revealed, though, about the perfect families that populate this world and that initially
appear all but immune to the dross and strain of everyday life.
The film centers on the three remaining members of an emotionally tortured family
trying to deal with the death of a son and a brother. Conrad (Timothy Hutton), or some-
times Connie or Con, as his father and best friends call him, struggles to reconcile the
loss of his older, heroic brother, Buck (Scott Doebler), who died tragically in a boating

376
 Ordinary People

accident. Anxious, unable to concentrate, distraught—we learn that Connie tried to kill
himself and spent months in a psychiatric hospital after his brother’s death—Conrad is
gently prodded by his well-meaning father, Calvin (the superb Donald Sutherland), to
keep their agreement and to visit the psychologist who has been recommended to the
family. Connie reluctantly agrees to go, and so begins his relationship with Dr. Berger
(Judd Hirsch), who will slowly, sometimes painfully draw out Conrad’s story.
Although he loves her dearly and desperately seeks her approval, Conrad’s relation-
ship with his mother, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore playing as far against type as one can
imagine), is distant, at best. Haunted by memories of her golden boy Buck, Beth
seems incapable of feeling anything for anyone else in her life. Seeking merely to exist,
she orders every minute detail of her life—her house, her clothes, her appearance, the
lives of her husband and son, indeed of her sons, as Buck’s room remains just as it was
before he died, a shrine to the extraordinarily gifted athlete, student, friend that he
was. Conrad tries everything he knows to break through the barriers that his mother
has erected, but there is no way in for him. It is as if Beth believed that she and her
family, and especially Buck, were somehow not “ordinary people,” that the unique
qualities they possessed, and that had allowed them to rise above so many others,
would forever keep the world at bay. Beth knows different now, though; for, since
she lost her son, she understands the fragility of human existence—“Ward,” she cries
hysterically to her brother, “you tell me the meaning of happy. But first you better
make sure your kids are good and safe, that they haven’t fallen off a horse, been hit
by a car, or drown in that pool you’re so proud of.”
The problem, of course, is that Beth and her family, despite what they have accom-
plished, are, in fact, ordinary people; and just like the rest of us, they must deal with
what life gives us over to—heartache, sickness, death. Beth, finally, cannot cope with
what has come her way. As her husband says to her: “You’re determined Beth; but
you know something? You’re not strong. . . . We would have been all right if there
hadn’t been any mess. But you can’t handle mess. You need everything neat and easy.
I don’t know. Maybe you can’t love anyone.”
Because his father is right, because his mother cannot love him, and especially
because she is not strong but merely determined, Connie turns to two other figures
in his life for support: his doctor and a budding love interest, Jeannine Pratt (Elizabeth
McGovern). Dr. Berger, an avuncular, terribly gifted analyst, is able to bring Connie to
the point where he comes to realize, to his great surprise, that he is still alive and his
brother dead because Buck—much like their mother, it seems—was just not strong
enough: “It hurts to be mad at him, doesn’t it?,” asks Dr. Berger. “God I loved him.
It’s not fair. You just do one thing wrong,” says Connie. “And what was the one wrong
thing that you did?” “I hung on. I stayed with the boat.”
While his relationship with Dr. Berger gives Connie what he needs to survive, his
relationship with Jeannine gives him what he desires. Lovely, talented, and self-
possessed enough to be self-deprecating, Jeannine seems hopelessly out of Connie’s
league—and yet, she is drawn to him because of all the things that make him so won-
derfully special in his ordinary way. Unlike glorious, tragic Buck, Connie represents
the best of us.

377
Ordinary People

See also: Melodrama, The

References
Ebert, Roger. Four-Star Reviews: 1967–2007. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing,
2007.
Grant, Barry Keith, ed. Film Genre Reader III. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Kawin, Bruce F. How Movies Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
—Philip C. DiMare

378
 v
P
PAPER CHASE, THE. Based on the 1970 novel by John J. Osborn Jr., The Paper
Chase tells the story of Harvard Law student James T. Hart (Timothy Bottoms), who
struggles to perform while maintaining his integrity in the face of withering attacks
by a storied professor. An insider look into the lives of Ivy League law students during
the 1970s, The Paper Chase received three Academy Award nominations, with the bril-
liant John Houseman winning the Oscar for his supporting role as Professor Charles
W. Kingsfield.
The film opens with first-year students filing into their first session of Kingsfield’s
course on contract law. Setting the scene for what is to come, Kingsfield calls on Hart,
requesting that he recite the facts of a particular case. When Hart reveals that he has
not read the assignment, Kingsfield reprimands him for his lack of preparedness. Rec-
ognizing the amount of pressure he and his classmates are under, and seeking to ensure
that he is never again unprepared, Hart locks himself in his dorm room and studies for
hours on end. Based on terrifying stories he has heard about Kingsfield from third- and
fourth-year students, Hart comes to idolize, and fear, this intimidating mentor. Realiz-
ing that they can never cover every element of the law themselves, the students divide
up into study groups, each member agreeing to outline the material for one legal area.
Hart’s group is comprised of Ford (Graham Beckel), Brooks (James Naughton),
Anderson (Edward Herrmann), Bell (Craig Nelson), and O’Connor (Robert Lydiard).
Methodical in producing his outlines, Hart nevertheless takes time to relax, swimming
in the university pool and sometimes breaking into campus buildings.
As he moves through the term, Hart’s reverence for Kingsfield turns into an obses-
sion to impress this mentor. In preparation for spring exams, Hart breaks into a
restricted area of the library and steals Kingsfield’s legendary notes on contract law,
notes that the professor had created when he was a Harvard law student. By the end
of the school year, overwhelmed by the pressures of a law program, several members
of Hart’s study group have either dropped out of the group or out of Harvard
altogether; Brooks even attempts suicide. Disgusted at what he has become, Hart
begins to wonder if a law degree is worth the grueling effort required of those who
pursue it.

379
Passion of the Christ, The

Though on one level he has come to despise him, however, Hart is still inspired by
his teacher. Initially thrilled when Kingsfield takes him on as a student researcher, Hart
drives himself to the breaking point in order to complete his assignment. Having
stayed up for five straight days, but not quite finished with the task, Hart approaches
Kingsfield and shamefacedly asks the professor for more time. Kingsfield dismisses
him, informing him that the assignment has now been given to a third-year student
and that Hart’s contribution is no longer needed.
Stunned and embarrassed, Hart does what he has promised himself he would never
do again: he attends class unprepared. After being called on by Kingsfield, he is pub-
licly humiliated. Given a dime by Kingsfield, Hart is instructed to call his parents
and to inform them that he will be dropping out of law school. Exiting the lecture hall,
Hart pauses, turns to the professor, and yells out: “You are a son of a bitch, Kingsfield.”
“Mr. Hart,” Kingsfield calmly replies, “that is the most intelligent thing you’ve said to-
day. You may take your seat.” After final exams, which he aces, an exhausted Hart goes
to Cape Cod to relax. Having been forwarded his grades in the mail, Hart hesitates
before opening the envelop that will reveal his future. Leaving the envelop sealed, he
swiftly folds it into an airplane and sends it sailing into the sea.
Although no longer in vogue, Kingsfield’s intimidating style was practiced by some
professors in 1970s law schools. Thought by some the only way to teach lawyers to
stand up under fire, legal historians point out that Kingsfield’s tactics were nonetheless
rare in real law schools (Koch, 1983). Although popular, some critics felt that The
Paper Chase could have done more to portray the legal profession more positively.
Hart, they point out, unlike some of his classmates, seemed interested in the law only
because of his obsession with Kingsfield (Kael, 1973).
See also: Melodrama, The

References
Kael, Pauline. “The Current Cinema: Un-People.” New Yorker, October 29, 1973: 153–59.
Koch, Kevin, James. Seeing the Light: Law School and the Law Student. Master’s thesis. Univer-
sity of Iowa, 1983.
Ledwon, Lenora, ed. Law and Literature: Text and Theory. New York: Garland, 1996.
—Jennifer K. Morrison

PASSION OF THE CHRIST, THE. Released in 2004, actor/director Mel Gibson’s

The Passion of the Christ became the most successful, and the most controversial, reli-
gious film in the history of American cinema. Gibson produced The Passion through
Icon, his own production company, using $25 million of his own money. Acted
entirely in Latin and Aramaic with subtitles, and containing extremely graphic and
bloody violence, the film seemed an unlikely hit. Nevertheless, The Passion of the Christ
has become the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time and challenged Peter Jackson’s
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King for the top-grossing film of 2004.

380
 Passion of the Christ, The

Scene from the controversial 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, starring James Caviezel. Directed
by Mel Gibson. (Photofest)

The film revolves around the last few hours of the life of Jesus (James Caviezel) in
which he is arrested, beaten, scourged, mocked, and finally crucified. Gibson leaves little
to the imagination in his portrayal of Jesus’s torture and death. There are few references
in the film to other aspects of the life of Jesus beyond his crucifixion. Tightly edited flash-
backs (most under a minute) give the viewer brief moments of respite from the violence.
The Passion of the Christ became for some a deeply religious experience, while others
found it theologically, historically, and even morally problematic. The themes, implicit
and explicit, of the film ensured that it would be at the center of a cultural and religious
firestorm. Numerous religious leaders from the both the Jewish and Christian commu-
nity claimed that the film drew on the centuries-old anti-Semitic tradition of the
Passion Play. Staged as part of European liturgical traditions since the late Middle Ages
and into modern times, the Passion Play typically portrayed the crucifixion of Christ as
the responsibility of “evil Jews.” These public spectacles, often performed on Good Fri-
day, frequently led to outbreaks of violence against Jewish communities. Many critics
believed Gibson’s film drew too freely on this tradition.
Some Christian critics have also suggested that the film’s emphasis on the violence
of the crucifixion obscured the life and ethical teachings of Jesus. Noted biblical scholar
John Dominic Crossan referred to it as “a hymn to a savage God,” a celebration of vio-
lence for its own sake. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reissued a 1988 docu-
ment in which they had urged that any portrayal of the crucifixion of Jesus must, as a
matter of conscience, ensure that no imagery or symbolism used could have anti-
Semitic overtones, even if that imagery came from the Gospels themselves.

381
Philadelphia

Gibson, a traditionalist Catholic who rejects all of the changes that have come to the
Church since the second Vatican Council in the 1960s, argued that the film simply
portrayed the final hours of Jesus’s life based on the Gospels and, he finally admitted,
on the mystical visions of a nineteenth-century nun named Catherine Emerich. In an
unlikely cultural alliance, many Protestant evangelical Christians joined Gibson in
defending the film. They also rejected the idea that the film contained anti-Semitic
imagery and symbolism and viewed attacks on it as part of a generalized secular assault
on Christianity in America. Evangelical leaders have been the film’s staunchest sup-
porters, and are often fulsome in their praise of its alleged historical accuracy and fidel-
ity to the Gospel accounts.
Critics have admitted that The Passion shows flashes of technical excellence while
generally decrying the film on other grounds. Some have connected its appeal to the
shock cinema of Quentin Tarantino and Gasper Noé. Historian of the American “Jesus
film” W. Barnes Tatum praised Gibson’s artistic vision while concluding that it was
“theologically problematic, historically unlikely and literally uncritical” (Tatum,
2004).
Controversy over the film briefly reignited in the summer of 2006 when Mel
Gibson was stopped for speeding in Malibu Beach, California. A drunken Gibson
unleashed a tirade at the arresting officers, hurling anti-Semitic epitaphs and claiming
that Jews were responsible “for all the wars in the world.” He subsequently made a pub-
lic apology for his statements.
See also: Gibson, Mel; Religion and Nationalism in Film

References
Beal, Timothy K., and Tod Linafelt. Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and The
Passion of the Christ. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Corley, Kathleen E., and Robert L. Webb. Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
London: Continuum, 2004.
McDannell, Colleen. “Votive Offering: The Passion of the Christ.” In Catholics in the Movies.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008: 317–45.
Tatum, W. Barnes. “The Passion in the History of Jesus Films,” Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion
of the Christ. London: Continuum, 2004.
—W. Scott Poole

PHILADELPHIA. TriStar Pictures and Clinica Estetico released Philadelphia on

December 23, 1993. Marketed as the first mainstream Hollywood film to deal with
AIDS and homosexuality (Connant, 76), Philadelphia is a statement about the neces-
sity for social tolerance. It is clear from the film’s opening title sequence, a visual explo-
ration of urban Philadelphia accompanied by Bruce Springsteen’s somber “Streets of
Philadelphia,” that the movie is entering into a cinematic discussion of American social
ills. Philadelphia made AIDS and homosexuality legitimate areas of exploration in the
entertainment industry. When Philadelphia was released, the medical world, and to a

382
 Philadelphia

Scene from the 1993 film Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks (left) and Denzel Washington. Directed
by Jonathan Demme. (Photofest)

degree the larger American public, were aware that HIV and AIDS impacted a much
larger demographic than the gay community. However, popular culture still associated
AIDS primarily with male homosexuality. Significantly, although providing a sympa-
thetic image of those suffering from the disease and opening up a profoundly impor-
tant social dialogue, Philadelphia also reinforced the notion that AIDS was
synonymous with male homosexuality and deviant sexual behavior.
Produced and directed by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) and starring
audience-friendly actors Tom Hanks (Big) and Denzel Washington (Glory), Philadelphia
is a courtroom drama that tells the story of Ivy League corporate attorney Andrew Beck-
ett (Hanks). Several minutes into the film Beckett is seen in a fraternal environment,
smoking cigars, having cocktails, and exchanging workplace jabs with the senior partners
at his prestigious Philadelphia law firm. Here, Beckett is dubbed the “golden boy” and
informed that he will be the firm’s next partner. Shortly after this promotion, the film
audience discovers that Beckett has AIDS and is gay; his co-workers only begin to
suspect the truth. After working tirelessly on an important brief, Beckett is framed to
look incompetent and then fired. Convinced that this abrupt turn of events was an in-
stance of workplace discrimination, Beckett decides to sue his former employer.
Unable to find anyone to take his case, Beckett approaches ambulance-chasing attorney
Joe Miller (Washington). Initially reluctant to take the case, Miller finally agrees to

383
Philadelphia

represent Beckett, bringing cinematic life to the tagline on the movie’s one-sheet “No
one would take his case . . . until one man was willing to take on the system.” In a dra-
matic courtroom speech, Miller looks directly into the camera and condemns not only
the wrongdoings of Beckett’s former law firm but also society’s fears of AIDS and homo-
sexuality.
Originally named Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome (GRIDS), AIDS was
both medically and socially linked with the male homosexual community, at least in
the United States. Americans, however, ultimately came to realize that the disease
was not exclusive to the gay community, and thus became somewhat more sympathetic
to those who contracted it. The highly publicized story of Ryan White captured the
hearts of Americans, for instance. Interestingly, though, White was a young boy who
acquired the disease through a blood transfusion, and because of this, his story was
seen as a socially acceptable anomaly. Images of male homosexuals as sexually deviant
remained ubiquitous in the pop culture media. Indeed, Jonathan Demme himself
had been criticized for his portrayal of homosexuality in his film Silence of the Lambs
(1991), in which Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), a psychotic killer, is, among other things,
seen cross-dressing in a women’s suit made from the skins of his female victims. Given
this, some critics felt that Philadelphia was simply Demme’s way of apologizing for the
way he portrayed deviant sexuality in Silence of the Lambs. Although the director main-
tained that Gumb was not supposed to be viewed as being gay, he did admit that audi-
ences could have perceived the character in that way (Green, 1994, 58). Although the
portrayal of homosexuality is quite different in Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia,
the latter film does reinforce the connection between AIDS and male homosexuality.
In Philadelphia, it is made clear that Beckett contracted HIV/AIDS during a random
sexual encounter in a gay porn theater, clearly linking the disease with male homo-
sexuality, sexually deviant behavior, and promiscuity.
For all its controversy, however, Philadelphia did usher in an era when television
shows and films dealing with homosexuality became more commonplace. The fact
that Beckett was played by a nonhomosexual also reinvigorated a conversation about
gay and lesbian actors in Hollywood. Hanks won an Oscar for his performance, mak-
ing the film a significant turning point for his career, as well. After this film, Hanks
became a serious A-list actor and Hollywood heavyweight. Philadelphia, although on
a certain level dangerously stereotypical, was nonetheless a compassionate film that
changed both the trajectory of Hanks’s career and the discussion of sexuality in American
society.
See also: Washington, Denzel

References
Connant, Jennet. “Tom Hanks Wipes That Grin off His Face.” Esquire, December 1993:
74–83, 146.
Green, Jesse. “The Philadelphia Experiment.” Premiere, January 1994: 54–58.
—Laurie Chin Sayres

384
 Philadelphia Story, The

PHILADELPHIA STORY, THE. The Philadelphia Story premiered in Decem-

ber 1940. It was the fifth collaboration of director George Cukor and star Katharine
Hepburn. The film marked Hepburn’s return to Hollywood, and initiated the second
wave of her career. In 1938, after the box-office failures of two films now considered
classics, Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Holiday (1938), she was labeled “box-office poi-
son” by exhibitors and driven out of Hollywood to Broadway where playwright Philip
Barry (who also wrote Holiday) wrote The Philadelphia Story specifically for Hepburn.
It addressed precisely those derided qualities that had become a part of her star per-
sona: articulateness, arrogance, and an upper-class sensibility. The men in the narrative
repeatedly accuse Tracy Lord (Hepburn) of arrogance, a theme especially pronounced
in a harsh diatribe from her father, whom Tracy chastises for adultery. He, in turn,
berates her for maintaining impossibly high standards for herself and others (even
blaming her inability to be a “sympathetic daughter” for his infidelity). Tracy’s flaw
is, essentially, not having any flaws, at least in her own mind; thus, she must learn to
“have some regard for human frailty.” As viewers, we see her suffer this series of con-
demnations until, by the end, she feels enough like an imperfect human to declare—
as she gets married—”You know how I feel? Like a human, like a human being!” Pre-
sumably, audiences transferred Tracy’s lessons onto Hepburn, who won widespread
critical praise and public acceptance for her performance, paving the way for a series
of excellent leading roles in romantic comedies with Spencer Tracy, beginning with
her next film, Woman of the Year (1942).
The narrative of The Philadelphia Story begins days before Tracy’s second wed-
ding to George (John Howard), a middle-class employee of her father’s company.
She divorced, we soon learn, charming, old-moneyed, C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary
Grant) two years before. The Lords are a nationally known family living in
Philadelphia’s affluent “Main Line” suburb. Unbeknownst to Tracy (who prizes
her privacy), Dexter has struck a deal with tabloid Spy magazine to sneak in a
reporter, Macauley “Mike” Conner (James Stewart), and photographer, Elizabeth
Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), to her impending nuptials. Tracy immediately catches on,
but is unable to evict the guests after learning that Dexter’s motives were pure: in
exchange for the story, Spy has agreed not to print a dirty piece on Tracy’s father’s
affair with a dancer.
Tracy and Mike become infatuated with each other, each discovering that his or her
class prejudices may be unfounded. A love square thus emerges among Tracy, Mike,
George, and Dexter—who is masterminding the narrative’s events in an effort to win
Tracy back. In this way, the film confronts class politics explicitly by mapping class
onto the romantic leads. Most visibly, Mike must learn that “even if a fellow is born
into the pink, he can be a pretty nice guy.” Tracy, who early on espouses a liberal atti-
tude toward class difference, is forced to see that George is more interested in using her
to climb the social ladder than he is in loving her. At the end of the film, the class order
is reestablished: Tracy and Dexter remarry and Mike and Elizabeth are together. Only
George is shut out of a romantically happy ending, shunned by both upper and lower
classes. It is up to interpretation whether the film is conservative in this respect or
whether it offers a bitter take on an immobile system.

385
Piano, The

James Stewart won his only Academy Award as Best Actor for his performance.
Donald Ogden Stewart also won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. The film
was nominated for Best Picture, Hepburn and Hussey were nominated for their per-
formances, and Cukor was nominated for his direction. The Philadelphia Story was
recently ranked number 44 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Movies list,
and as the fifth Best Romantic Comedy in American Cinema. In Stanley Cavell’s influ-
ential book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, The Philadel-
phia Story is awarded a prominent place in American cinematic history as a key
member of the “comedy of remarriage,” which Cavell argues is an influential, and dis-
tinctively American, film genre.
See also: Cukor, George; Grant, Cary; Hepburn, Katharine; Romantic Comedy,
The

References
Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1981.
Hepburn, Katharine. Me: Stories of My Life. New York: Random House, 1996.
Phillips, Gene. George Cukor. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

—Kyle Stevens

PIANO, THE. The Piano (1993) is an important film for the global recognition of
Australasian cinema, women filmmakers, and its American distributor Miramax. The
film’s story focuses on a mute, mail-order bride, Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), who trav-
els from Scotland to New Zealand during the 1850s to marry a colonist, Alisdair Stewart
(Sam Neill). Ada primarily expresses herself through playing her piano, an instrument
that is sold by her new husband to a subordinate, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), who
offers it back to Ada, key by key, in exchange for escalating physical intimacies with
her. Inspired by the subversive work of the Brontës and Emily Dickinson, director Jane
Campion ostensibly wished to create a newly wish-fulfilling, female-focused cinematic
fantasy, one in which the heroine escapes Victorian constraints to finally express shame-
less sexuality with a man who physically liberates her (initially against her will).
The Piano emphasizes Ada’s threatened position as a pale-faced foreigner in an unfa-
thomable land, sidelining its broader colonial context and postcolonial awareness
(most troublingly, Maoris are portrayed as comic caricatures of “natives”). New
Zealand is viewed through breathtaking crane shots and pans that showcase the diver-
sity of its landscape as from a tourist’s photographic perspective, in parallel to Ada’s
outsider status. Though the film’s resonance in terms of New Zealand culture is widely
acknowledged, it ironically delocalizes itself by literally combining scenes filmed in the
North and South Island. In parallel to this, American critics have focused on the trans-
national significance of the film in feminist and psychoanalytic terms. Psychoanalytic
readings of the film emphasize its use of Gothic elements, its portrayal of repression

386
 Piano, The

and desire, and the Oedipal trajectory of its narrative when Ada’s daughter Flora (Anna
Paquin) rebels against maternal separation. More pervasive, feminist readings of the
film dwell on how to view the “bargaining” between Ada and Baines—as enabling
the liberation of female desire or, most troublingly, as romanticized prostitution—
and how to understand Ada’s automutism—as symbolic of female oppression or as
ironic self-empowerment through rejection of patriarchal language.
The film’s reception raises troubling questions about what it means when a mute
heroine is almost unanimously celebrated for representing female empowerment:
reviewers repeatedly emphasized Hunter’s new beauty in silence, praising the “elo-
quence” of her almost speechless performance. Ironically, Ada’s muteness is belied by
Michael Nyman’s anachronistic soundtrack which, in its modern romanticism, com-
municates her capacity for emotionally full expression outside time or place. This
emphasis is what made The Piano such a success for its independent American dis-
tributor Miramax, despite its “foreignness.” The Piano was also the first film by a
woman director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, a fact much publicized by Miramax,
reflecting that company’s promotional approach to foregrounding international
awards. Miramax aggressively marketed The Piano for Academy Awards: that it was
nominated for eight Oscars and won three bolstered Miramax’s globalizing approach
to the promotion of “art-house” cinema during the 1990s. It also increased recognition
of women filmmakers by involving a relatively high number of women in fundamental
roles: director and screenwriter (Campion), producer (Jan Chapman), editor (Veronika
Jenet), and costume designer (Janet Patterson).
The film is also important in relation to Campion’s other films, each of which focuses
on psychological tensions within female characters. Its complex sexual politics especially
resonate with Campion’s subsequent adaptation of Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady,
1996) and her most recent feature film, a female-focused neo-noir (In the Cut, 2003).
In terms of genre, The Piano has itself been classified as a contemporary women’s
film, a period film, a gothic melodrama, and a revisionist historical text. It also reso-
nates with the western because, like that genre, The Piano has been repeatedly analyzed
in terms of ideologically-loaded frontier mythology, national formation, and cultural
definition. Early shots of Ada’s prestigious Broadwood piano, transported with her
from the Old World (Scotland) and precariously placed over oncoming, “ ‘savage”
waves in the new frontier context, suggest the fragility of “civilization”: a visual message
that parallels how the isolated houses of the American frontier are shot in numerous
westerns. That parallel aside, where women are typically marginalized in westerns,
The Piano foregrounds the destructiveness of female subjugation (and/or sexuality) in
a different historical context of colonial settlement.
See also: Campion, Jane; Women in Film

References
Coombs, Felicity, and Suzanne Gemmell. eds. Piano Lessons: Approaches to The Piano. Sydney:
John Libbey, 1999.

387
Pillow Talk

Dalton, Mary M., and Kirsten James Fatzinger. “Choosing Silence: Defiance and Resistance
without Voice in Jane Campion’s The Piano.” Women and Language 26(2), 2003: 34–39.

—Elsie Walker

PILLOW TALK. Pillow Talk, released in 1959, was the first of three movies that
Doris Day and Rock Hudson would make together. The other two were Lover Come
Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964). These three films ushered in a new type
of film genre: labeled “no sex sex comedies” or “naughty but nice bedroom comedies,”
they were long on sexual innuendo—”Pillow Talk,” the trailer announced, is “what goes
on when the lights go off ”—but short on sex. As with other films that bumped up
against the forbidden topic of sexuality, Pillow Talk was still subject to the guidelines
laid down by the Hays Code, a set of regulations that had been used to control the con-
tent of films for over three decades. The film represented a significant shift in focus for
both lead actors. Doris Day, who seemed to embody the idea of the virtuous mother or
wife and had consistently been chosen for such roles, was now cast as Jan Morrow, a
single, sophisticated, and successful professional. Although Jan was still searching for
Mr. Right, she was no longer depicted as merely an asexual homemaker. The film
revived Day’s career and made her into Hollywood’s biggest female box-office draw
over the next six years. It also brought the actress her only Academy Award nomina-
tion. Hudson’s departure from his normal dramatic roles was even more striking, as
he was now cast as the romantic lead, Brad Allen, a flourishing songwriter and incorri-
gible playboy. As a result of the film’s success, Hudson began to be offered more and
more roles as the leading man in romantic comedies.
In the film, Jan and Brad share what once was called a “party line,” where two or
more telephone subscribers have to share the same phone line. Jan becomes angry
when Brad is constantly on the phone breezily wooing an assortment of women, which
makes it all but impossible for Jan to make or receive business calls. Brad eventually
finds out who Jan is, adopts a Texas accent, and uses their party line to charm her until
she falls in love with him. She later discovers who he really is and walks out on him.
Realizing that he has fallen in love with her, Brad begs Jan’s forgiveness, but to no avail.
Desperately trying to win her back, he hires Jan to redecorate his apartment, telling her
that he wants to be rid of everything that smacks of his old life as a playboy. Still hurt
that Brad had tricked her, Jan turns the tables on him, making over his apartment into
something resembling a Turkish brothel. Angrily confronting her about what she has
done, Brad finally carries Jan back to his apartment, where all is made right when he
declares his love for her and promises to remain faithful forever.
The telephone plays a critical role in Pillow Talk. Because of the auditory, nonvisual
relationship between Jan and Brad, they talk without seeing each other—although the
audience sees both simultaneously thanks to split-screen photography. When Brad
does finally get a look at Jan, he begins to play two roles—his playboy self, in their
innuendo-filled party-line conversations, and the honest, hardworking oil tycoon
who is every bit the perfect gentleman. This was not the first time that telephones
played an important role in films. Sorry, Wrong Number used the telephone to create

388
 Place in the Sun, A

suspense and terror; and in It’s a Wonderful Life, a telephone call to Donna Reed trans-
forms James Stewart into a jealous lover. But in Pillow Talk, its role is in the service of
comedy. It allows characters to have conversations from different locations. And unlike
most uses of the telephone within movies, where the audience lacks the same visual
contact as the caller, through the advanced technology of the split screen, Day and
Hudson share the same scene simultaneously.
In addition to the telephone, Hudson’s playboy bachelor pad is rigged with the same
sorts of cutting-edge predigital technology—buttons to engage door locks, drop LPs onto
record player platters, lower lights, transform couches into beds—that could be found in
James Bond’s Aston Martin, in the 1964 film Goldfinger. Playboy bachelor apartments
were an important example of modern technology used as part of the art of seduction.
See also: Romantic Comedy, The

References
Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997.
Schantz, Ned. “Telephonic Film.” Film Quarterly 56(4), 2003: 23–35.

—Rick Lilla

PLACE IN THE SUN, A. Based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy,

A Place in the Sun was released in the fall of 1951. Dreiser’s book had originally been
adapted for the screen in 1931, as the nation spiraled into the depths of the Great
Depression. Although the 1931 version of the film did poorly at the box office, direc-
tor George Stevens was able to convince studio heads at Paramount to remake the film.
A steamy romance starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, the remake was
widely popular with audiences, proving to be, it seems, a perfect filmic representative
of America’s post-WWII angst.
The film opens with George Eastman (Clift), the son of poor, uneducated church
workers, accepting a job at his wealthy uncle’s factory. It is a job with little status and
even less pay, but George works hard and shows himself to be reliable. Despite being
warned against fraternizing with the women with whom he works, George begins
secretly dating another factory worker, Alice “Al” Tripp (Shelley Winters), whom he
eventually impregnates. While carrying on his covert affair with Alice, George meets
Angela Vickers (Taylor), a beautiful socialite who is intrigued by the handsome, char-
ismatically simple young man. George falls hard for Angela, losing all interest in Alice.
He now tries to convince the forlorn Alice to have an abortion; although she tries to
accommodate George’s request, she cannot find a doctor willing to do the procedure.
Sensing George’s feelings for Angela, and terribly hurt by his betrayal, Alice threatens
to reveal her condition to Angela. Desperate, George contemplates drowning Alice in
order to clear the way to marry Angela. Renting a boat, he rows Alice out onto the lake.
As night falls, however, he realizes that he cannot go through with his plan. Alice,

389
Place in the Sun, A

Film stars Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in the 1951 Paramount film A Place in the Sun.
(Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

sensing that something is tragically wrong, stands up in order to approach and comfort
him. The boat begins to rock, finally overturning; Alice is drowned, but George makes
it back to shore. The body is eventually recovered, Alice’s pregnancy and their relation-
ship are revealed, and George is convicted of murder. The film ends with George walk-
ing to the gallows.
Clift had appeared in a number of unremarkable films before he made A Place in the
Sun—The Search (1948) and The Big Lift—but he had made a name for himself in
Howard Hawks’s powerful Western Red River (1948). Using his method-acting skills,
Clift, it seems, inspired even John Wayne’s performance in the latter picture. Perfectly
cast in A Place in the Sun, Clift was emblematic of a new breed of young actors—
Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman—who played existentially tortured
men-boys: provocative, childlike subjects of their passions who seem unable to provide
direction for themselves or others. Hauntingly attractive, Clift’s George Eastman
appears directionless and powerless when he interacts with Alice and Angela. It is Alice,
after all, who comes to George’s room after he has naively informed her of his landlady’s
restriction regarding guests; and it is Angela who whispers that he should “tell mamma
all.” Audiences thrilled at the pairing of Clift and Taylor, two of Hollywood’s hottest
young stars, seemingly unaware that in rooting for the pair, they were ignoring George’s
immoral and disturbingly irresponsible treatment of Alice and their unborn child.

390
 Planet of the Apes

Interestingly, Paramount feared that A Place in the Sun would fail at the box office,
and thus delayed its release. The film proved a commercial hit, though; it also received
nine Academy Award nominations, and took home Oscars for Best Picture, Best
Director for Stevens, Best Actor for Clift, and Best Actress in a supporting role for
Winters.

References
Pichel, Irving. “Revivals, Reissues, Remakes, and ‘A Place in the Sun.’ The Quarterly Journal of
Film, Radio and Television 6(4), 1952: 388–92.
Pomerance, Murray, ed. American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

—Rick Lilla

PLANET OF THE APES. Arriving as it did in 1968, at the height of one of the
most culturally important decades in American history, Planet of the Apes became more
than a mere science fiction adventure; it became a cultural phenomenon, posing
important questions for viewers and critics alike. Ground breaking make-up effects
and performances from legends like Charlton Heston helped to usher in an era when
science fiction films would be taken seriously as entertainment vehicles that could be
extraordinarily profitable. Planet of the Apes would spawn four successful movie
sequels, two television series, massive amounts of merchandise, and a twenty-first-
century remake.
The intriguing screenplay for Planet of the Apes was originally drafted by Rod Serl-
ing, of television’s Twilight Zone, and then fleshed out by Michael Wilson. The story
opens with four astronauts—three men and a woman—on a mission to the stars.
Placing themselves in a state of suspended animation within sealed pods, they sleep
while their ship travels thousands of years into the future. When the men awaken—
the female astronaut’s pod was damaged and she is long dead—they find themselves
on an Earth-like planet populated by intelligent apes and humans who have yet to learn
to read, write, or even speak. The ape population is rigidly divided by caste, class, and
race: Orangutans—light-skinned, light-furred and blond-headed—fill elite positions
as societal administrators, politicians, and lawyers; chimpanzees—light-skinned, dark-
furred, and dark-headed—constitute the learned class of scientists and teachers; while
gorillas—dark-skinned, dark-furred, and dark-headed—function as the police and
military. Humans are seen as nothing more than mindless animals to be captured,
imprisoned and used for purposes of experimentation and entertainment. In the end,
after barely escaping with his life, George Taylor (Heston), the only surviving astronaut,
heads into the “forbidden” territories in search of a new life with a mostly mute human
mate who is indigenous to the planet. What he discovers, in one of the most iconic end-
ings in film history—he uncovers the remnants of the Statue of Liberty in the rubble left
after nuclear war—is that he has been on Earth all along.

391
Planet of the Apes

The film raises provocative

questions about American soci-
ety, both as it was during the
1960s and as it is today. While
being taken prisoner, Taylor suf-
fers a neck wound and is initially
unable to speak, making him
seem just like the other humans
on the planet. Thrown into a
barred cell, he draws the attention
of two scientists, Zira (Kim
Hunter) and Cornelius (Roddy
McDowell), and the animus
of their administrative boss,
Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), Min-
ister of Science and Chief
Defender of the Faith. The scien-
tists begin to believe that
Taylor—”Bright Eyes,” Zira calls
him—is different from other
humans—he is intelligent, they
suggest. Ultimately recovering
his voice, he is taken before a
Charlton Heston is restrained with a leash and collar by two three-ape tribunal. Eerily, the
actors playing apemen in a still from director Franklin Schaff-
hearing touches on both the 1858
ner’s film Planet of the Apes, 1968. (Hulton Archive/Getty
Images)
Dred Scott case and the 1925
Scopes Trial. Like Dred Scott—
whom the Supreme Court decided
had no right to bring a suit against his master because he was a slave, and thus not a citizen
but merely property—because Taylor is a “man,” he has no rights under ape law. If there is
to be a trial, however, it will be, like the Scopes Trial, one that concerns an issue of scien-
tific heresy—arguing evolution over creation.
The prosecuting attorney, Dr. Honorious (James Daly), claims that his case is sim-
ple, based as it is on the apes’ First Article of Faith: that the Almighty created apes in
His image; He gave them souls and minds, and made them lords of the planet. Certain
unorthodox scientists, though, have chosen to study humans—to study evolution. Zira
and Cornelius are accused of tampering with Taylor and making him into a “speaking
monster.” For their part, the scientists argue that Taylor, who, if the prosecutor is cor-
rect, cannot have come from another planet, must be part of their planet’s evolutionary
chain—a close relative of apes—a notion the tribunal members cannot countenance.
One-by-one they literally cover ears, eyes, and mouth in a disturbing expression of hear
no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Zira and Cornelius are charged by the state with sci-
entific heresy. Threatened with emasculation and deadening experimental brain

392
 Platoon

surgery, Taylor, along with his beautiful mate, escapes with the help of Zira, Cornelius,
and Dr. Zaius.
Resonant with themes related to 1960s’ debates over religion and science, the strug-
gle for civil rights, and the specter of Cold War politics, Planet of the Apes struck a
powerful chord with audiences. The films that followed in the series would continue
to address questions related to issues of class, race, and religion.

References
Behind the Planet of the Apes, documentary. Twentieth Century-Fox DVD, 1998.
Greene, Eric. Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture. Middle-
town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
—Richard A. Hall

PLATOON. Platoon (1986) was the first film in writer/director Oliver Stone’s
Vietnam War trilogy, which also included Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Heaven
and Earth (1993). Shot on location in the Philippines for just $6 million, the film was
a critical and commercial success, garnering eight Academy Award nominations,
including wins for Best Director and Best Picture, and earning over $130 million in
its initial release. It created a sensation in the United States, prompting a special screen-
ing for political leaders in Washington, D.C., frenzied national media coverage, and
lines around the block. Platoon reinvigorated the Vietnam War-film genre and encour-
aged release of a spate of Vietnam-related films in the late 1980s.
Platoon follows the tour of duty of Chris Taylor, a naive enlistee new to Vietnam in
1967. Modeled loosely on Stone himself, Taylor is a son of privilege who rebelled
against expectations by dropping out of college to join the Army. The film is essentially
a coming-of-age drama in which Taylor confronts the harsh realities of the Vietnam
combat zone and becomes embroiled in a conflict between two sergeants, Barnes and
Elias, who represent competing leadership styles, opposing regional and political per-
spectives, realism and idealism, authoritarianism and rebellion, and, most broadly,
darkness and light themselves. The conflict between Barnes and Elias comes to a head
during the village sequence, a disturbing portrait of American soldiers run amok in
not-so-subtle imitation of the 1968 My Lai Massacre. Barnes kills a Vietnamese
woman in cold blood, Elias threatens to report him to military authorities, and Barnes
threatens to kill Elias. He eventually succeeds, cutting Elias down in the midst of a fire-
fight. The martyred Elias survives long enough to raise questions about Barnes’s role in
his death, and Taylor becomes convinced that Barnes must be killed. The film con-
cludes with a chaotic battle involving relentless attacks by a faceless Vietnamese enemy
that is blunted only by air strikes directly on the American base. Afterward, Taylor
awakens alone in an Eden-like clearing and surveys the destruction all around him.
He finds a wounded Barnes writhing in pain and seizes the opportunity to execute

393
Platoon

Scene from the 1986 film Platoon, starring (left to right) Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, and Tom
Berenger. Directed by Oliver Stone. (Photofest)

him. Wounded himself, Taylor returns home altered and scarred, having avenged Elias
by becoming like Barnes.
Critics and veterans alike hailed Platoon for its authentic portrayal of Americans’
struggles in Vietnam. Platoon’s realism was a departure from the epic expressionism
of The Deer Hunter (1978), the surrealism of Apocalypse Now (1979), and the cartoon-
ish violence of Rambo I and II (1982 and 1985, respectively), but its authenticity rested
not with the melodramatic plot but rather with the textural details of experience:
dappled light filtering through jungle canopy, the whine of mosquitoes at night, the
casual intimacy of comrades in arms, the whir and chop of helicopters, the sweat and
slang and exhaustion. The concept of authenticity lay at the core of the film’s market-
ing strategy, with the original trailer emphasizing Stone’s own status as a Vietnam vet-
eran. Platoon also launched military technical advisor Dale Dye’s Hollywood
consultancy and established actor “boot camp” as an essential feature of war film
preparation.
Despite its claim to realism, Platoon spends no time on the political dynamics of the
war, focusing instead on a host of conflicts between American soldiers. The men of the
platoon are divided by class, race, regionalism, their drugs of choice, and their relation-
ship to the military, with draftees and lifers coexisting in states of mutual resentment.
These literal, historical conflicts are reflected metaphorically in numerous references
to “friendly fire,” the act of soldiers shooting their own. In his final monologue, Taylor
reflects, “We did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves, and the enemy was within

394
 Postman Always Rings Twice, The

us.” These are arguably the most famous lines of the film. Scholars have taken issue
with the solipsism of this construction, which posits the reasons for the war—and by
extension, critiques of American foreign policy—as essentially irrelevant. With the
motives for U.S. intervention and the causes of American defeat in Vietnam so excised,
Platoon frames the war as an individual’s struggle against the elements and his own
moral failings. Ultimately, Platoon marked a turning point for Vietnam veterans,
who found redemption from the war’s brutality and futility in the film’s portrayal of
struggle, sacrifice, and victimization.
See also: Stone, Oliver; War Film, The

References
Kinney, Katherine. Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War. Oxford, UK and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Toplin, Robert Brent, ed. Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History, and Controversy. Lawrence: Univer-
sity Press of Kansas, 2000.

—Meredith H. Lair

POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, THE. Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always
Rings Twice (1946) represents the third attempt to bring James M. Cain’s 1934 novel
of the same name to the screen—the first two were Pierre Chenal’s Le dernier tornant
(1939) and Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943)—but for most American film aficio-
nados it remains, in spite of Bob Rafelson’s 1981 remake, the definitive version of
Cain’s lurid melodrama. Viewed from a 1940s perspective, however, Billy Wilder’s
Double Indemnity (1943), another Cain adaptation, cast a long shadow over crime
films of this era, and its influence on The Postman Always Rings Twice was therefore
far greater than either its French or Italian predecessors.
As an example of what later critics would call film noir, Postman exhibits many
(though not all) of the traits that define this genre. Its protagonists, Frank Chambers
(John Garfield) and Cora Smith (Lana Turner), are both adulterous and homicidal,
and their scheme to eliminate Cora’s hapless husband strikes a familiar chord in movies
where murders are committed for lust and profit. Noir husbands are generally a dispos-
able commodity, and like their counterparts in Double Indemnity, Nick and Cora’s
attempt to pass off a murder as an accident soon goes awry. As for the mutual distrust
that almost derails their relationship, that too is a familiar motif in noir couplings, and
while Nick and Cora do not actually try to kill each other, each one’s suspicions of the
other make it easy for an unscrupulous district attorney (played by Leon Ames) to turn
them against each other when their case comes to trial.
Paradoxically, Postman’s doomed lovers can almost be seen as innocents in crime,
and certainly when compared with Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff and Phyllis Die-
trichson, their fumbling attempts to finish off Cora’s husband clearly reveal a degree
of sheer incompetence that sets them apart from more practiced killers. John Garfield’s
Frank Chambers is, in fact, a drifter, a basically weak (albeit sensual) character whose

395
Postman Always Rings Twice, The

first impulse is simply to run off with Cora and take his chances on the road. As for
Lana Turner’s Cora, her character is more femme than fatale, and compared with
Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis, Turner’s Cora possesses comparatively little of the killer
instinct; her mood swings throughout the film suggest that Garnett couldn’t quite
bring himself to transform a celluloid sex goddess into a psychopathic monster. Noir
females tend to be far more single-minded—and therefore deadlier—than their male
counterparts, while Postman’s protagonists are almost equally confused by fear and
desire, as well as ambivalent about each other and about the crime they are “fated” to
commit.
Visually, Postman seldom exhibits the preference for low-key lighting, spatial con-
striction, or disorienting angles of perception that constitute the cinematic signature
of noir directors. In contrast to the haunted expressionistic interiors of noirish films
like Key Largo (1948) or Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Sidney Wagner (Postman’s cinematog-
rapher) employs a more realistic lighting scheme throughout, and as a result, our pro-
tagonists are able to move about in a bright, sunlit world, oblivious to the deadly traps
that both passion and an unseen vengeance have created for them. And though the
murder of Cora’s husband is shot in pitch darkness, on a treacherously twisty country
road—as it should be—virtually every other scene takes place in a series of well-lighted
rooms and open spaces.
However, the fierce determinism that rules over human lives and literary plotlines
in film noir at last claims both Nick and Cora as its victims, and it is this absurd twist
of fate or chance that links Postman most directly to the world of noir melodrama.
Thus, having been at last reconciled to one another, and having found themselves free
from prosecution for crimes for which they cannot be punished, Nick and Cora are
nevertheless forced to pay for their sins. Fate first strikes Cora, who suddenly dies
in an accidental drowning, and then Nick, who is immediately accused of plotting
her death, even though he is guiltless of any criminal intent. And though justice of
a rough sort is clearly served here, it is a twisted kind of justice that the noir universe
metes out, a system of absurd retributions that parody the very principle of justice
they supposedly embody. As Nick observes, ironically, on his way to the gas chamber,
the “postman” has indeed rung twice, and he will now be punished for the crime he
did not commit. Such an ending, of course, demands a curious suspension of the very
empathy for those criminal passions the entire film has labored to elicit, but that is
precisely what noir filmmakers appear to demand of their audiences: an emotional
detachment that deprives them of whatever moral satisfaction they might have
derived from a more conventional and conventionally ritualized spectacle of crime
and punishment.
See also: Double Indemnity ; Film Noir; Wilder, Billy

References
Ballinger, Alexander, and Danny Graydon. The Rough Guide to Film Noir. London: Penguin,
2007.

396
 Pretty Woman

Silver, Alain, Elizabeth Ward, James

Ursini, and Robert Porfirio, eds.
The Film Noir Encyclopedia. Lon-
don: Duckworth Overlook, 2010.

—Robert Platzner

PRETTY WOMAN. One of

the biggest box-office successes
of 1990, Pretty Woman marked
Julia Roberts’s rise to superstar-
dom and the reinvigoration of
the “woman’s film” in mass cul-
ture. The film, a latter-day cross
between Cinderella and Pygma-
lion, updates the classic conven-
tion of the damsel in distress
saved by a worthy man. This
time around, it’s Vivian Ward,
Roberts’s hooker-with-a-heart-of-
gold, who comes to the moral
and emotional salvation of
Edward Lewis, the uptight cor-
porate raider played by Richard
Gere. Marketability concerns
shaped Pretty Woman’s rosy out-
come. J. F. Lawton’s original
Scene from the 1986 film Pretty Woman, starring Richard Gere
script for 3,000—the amount
and Julia Roberts. Directed by Garry Marshall. (Photofest)
Edward pays Vivian for a week
of her services—ended the pair’s
weeklong escape on a darker
note. Only editing by veteran sitcom-writer-turned-director Garry Marshall gave
the film its happy ending: when Edward arrives in a shining white limo to sweep Viv-
ian off her feet, she informs him that the heroine of her fairy tale rescues the hero
“right back.”
The romance begins as a business transaction. Edward is in Los Angeles for work.
Dumped over the phone by his live-in girlfriend, he drives off in his lawyer’s sports
car, looking to blow off steam. A quick stop to ask for directions from the leggy Vivian
turns into a lesson on driving a stick shift as Vivian pilots the odd couple toward
Edward’s posh Beverly Hills hotel. In the days that follow, Edward exposes Vivian to
high culture, chartering a private plane to San Francisco to attend the opera and taking
her to a polo match. In return, Vivian teaches Edward to walk barefoot in the park and
to express his emotions, until then repressed on account of an unloving father (his

397
Pretty Woman

third takeover victim). From their week together, Vivian gains an upgraded wardrobe
and a new knowledge of flatware etiquette, but it is Edward who emerges the more
profoundly changed: breaking with old habits, he negotiates a friendly merger with
the owner of a shipbuilding company.
Wildly popular with audiences, Pretty Woman was criticized for idealizing prostitu-
tion and for its uncomplicated portrayal of money buying respect, if not morality or
happiness, for its characters. In one memorable scene, Vivian reenters a Rodeo Drive
boutique where earlier, dressed in her Hollywood Boulevard attire, she had been
snubbed by a salesgirl. Richard announces to the sales staff that the couple is “going to
be spending an obscene amount of money in here.” They do. Critics argued that the film
dodged the serious inequalities of Vivian’s situation and made few connections to the
broader picture of women’s sexual and economic exploitation. The movie treated the
AIDS crisis that had rocked Reagan-era America lightly in a scene where Vivian fans
out a rainbow array of condoms for Edward’s choosing.
The film also made a splash in the trade and popular presses for its target audience.
In the previous two decades, the industry had treated the female demographic as
peripheral to the success of big-budget action and horror blockbusters. Pretty Woman
was interpreted as part of a broader trend in the American film industry to target
movies at women. However, the representation of women in this new wave of wom-
en’s films was ambiguous. A number of modestly budgeted films from the late
1970s and 1980s had cast a skeptical eye on marriage and traditional romance. These
films, which included Annie Hall (1977) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), captured the
lingering tensions surrounding the push for women’s professional and sexual equality.
Some commentators viewed Pretty Woman as a retreat from the social and political
frankness of these films to the timeworn conventions of fairy-tale romance.
Yet critics who dismissed Pretty Woman as escapist stumbled over how to explain
its smashing success among female viewers. The performances remain memorable.
Roberts’s portrayal of the free-spirited, sharp-witted Vivian earned her a Best Actress
Oscar nomination. Supporting cast member Laura San Giacomo winningly human-
ized Vivian’s drug-addled hooker roommate, as did Hector Elizondo, the punctilious
hotel manager who takes Vivian under his wing. Fans of the film have argued that,
rather than patronizing women with the old Prince Charming myth, Pretty Woman
revises it, winking at audiences attuned to Hollywood fairy tales. The film leaves the
final word not to Vivian or Edward, embracing on her fire escape, but to a homeless
man wandering the streets of Los Angeles. “This is Hollywood,” he announces, “land
of dreams.” With this framing device, Pretty Woman signaled its debt to fantasy, and
audiences’ hunger for the same.
See also: Romantic Comedy, The

References
Garrett, Roberta. Postmodern Chick Flicks: The Return of the Woman’s Film. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007.

398
 Pride of the Yankees, The

Greenberg, Harvey Roy. “Rescrewed: Pretty Woman’s Co-opted Feminism.” Journal of Popular
Film and Television 19(1), Spring 1991: 9–13.
Merkin, Daphne. “Prince Charming Comes Back.” New York Times, July 15, 1990.
—Diana Lemberg

PRIDE OF THE YANKEES, THE. The Pride of the Yankees (1942) is director Sam
Wood’s dramatic biopic of New York Yankees baseball star Lou Gehrig, whose 1941
death at age 37 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease that more com-
monly bears his name, is one of the great tragedies in American sports. The film was
a critical success, garnering an Oscar for Best Film Editing and earning 10 other nom-
inations, but its long-term legacy is as one of Hollywood’s most revered baseball films,
an all-American hero story, classic romance, and triumphant meditation on the immu-
tability of the American Dream.
Damon Runyon’s prologue introduces the film as the story of a humble hero who
carried himself with modest dignity and faced his own untimely death gracefully.
Wood’s film, however, is more than mere cinematic biography. Gehrig’s life story
becomes a quintessentially American fable, a soaring affirmation of the American
Dream tinged in tragic, but simultaneously triumphal, overtones that resonated with
its World War II era audience. It is the story of what an all-American boy could
achieve, fulfilling not only his own dreams but those of his hardworking German
immigrant parents, as well. In the end, Gehrig courageously confronted his own mor-
tality, exemplified by his famous “Luckiest Man” speech at Yankee Stadium, suggesting
that while hard times loomed, Americans could persevere.
Although Wood took some license in telling the story, The Pride of the Yankees is a
relatively accurate account of Gehrig’s life. In particular, the film is faithful to the
early life of Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper)—his relationship with his immigrant parents,
devotion to his mother (Elsa Janssen), and the circumstances that led to the start of
his professional baseball career with the New York Yankees. On the other hand, there
was some fictionalization in the portrayal of Gehrig’s romance and marriage to
Chicago socialite Eleanor Twitchell (Teresa Wright), his inspirational home-run-
hitting exploits for hospitalized children, and other aspects of his baseball career.
Several real baseball stars played themselves in the film, including Gehrig’s teammates
Bill Dickey and the legendary Babe Ruth. Much of the film’s success in capturing the
essence of its protagonist can be attributed to Gary Cooper. Cooper, despite being an
abysmal baseball player who batted from the wrong side of the plate, looked much
like Gehrig and his penchant for taking on humble, stoic characters had well pre-
pared him to adopt the persona of the notoriously sober baseball superstar.
The Pride of the Yankees is often regarded as one of the best of Hollywood’s baseball
films, and is certainly a classic tale of a first-generation American’s journey from rags to
riches, but it is also a wonderfully crafted love story. In fact, it is the romance of Lou
and Eleanor Gehrig, tracing their lives from the height of his career on the diamond
through his struggle with a fatal disease, which serves as the narrative backbone of
the film. Director Wood later adopted an almost identical format for his 1949 baseball

399
Producers, The

drama The Stratton Story, starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson. To some degree the
emphasis on personal relationships, and the focus on the human elements of the story,
was meant to appeal to a largely female wartime audience. Cooper and Wright pos-
sessed such a charming chemistry, and so capably captured the simple magic of every-
day romance, that they both earned Oscar nominations for their performances. Irving
Berlin’s “Always,” a favorite tune of the real-life Gehrigs, added a personal touch to the
movie’s romantic tone.
Despite the film’s somewhat saccharine tone, it remains a classic example of both
sports and wartime cinema. Baseball, the “National Pastime,” was at the height of
its cultural prominence when The Pride of the Yankees was released. There can be
no doubt that Wood’s film, with a screenplay co-scripted by noted sportswriter Paul
Gallico, would remind wartime audiences of ideal American virtues—modesty, fair-
ness, and courageous resilience—embodied in both Lou Gehrig and the sport he
played.
See also: Sports Film, The

References
Briley, Ron, Michael K. Schoenecke, and Deborah A. Carmichael. All-Stars and Movie Stars:
Sports in Film and History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston, ed. American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
Gehring, Wes D. Mr. Deeds Goes to Yankee Stadium: Baseball Films in the Capra Tradition.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.
Most, Marshall G., and Robert Rudd. Stars, Stripes, and Diamonds: American Culture and the
Baseball Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
—Nathan M. Corzine

PRODUCERS, THE. Winning an Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and
Screenplay, The Producers (1968) is a brilliant satire that made writer-director Mel
Brooks a comedic sensation, although Brooks would later claim that Blazing Saddles
(1974) was his best work. The Producers, which Brooks resurrected as a Tony-
winning Broadway musical by the same name in 2001 and in a film adaptation of
the musical in 2005, broke new ground in American cinema by aggressively mocking
Adolf Hitler and his infamous Nazi storm troopers. The satirical play within the film,
which the character of Max Bialystock described as “practically a love letter to Hitler,”
also poked fun at the allegedly naive cheerfulness of The Sound of Music (1965), which
similarly juxtaposed carefree singing and dancing against a fascist Axis backdrop.
Banned in Germany for its relentless parody of the Third Reich, The Producers became
a cult classic among Jews on both sides of the Atlantic.
“I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast,” moans theatrical pro-
ducer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) near the end of The Producers. Throwing up his
hands and lamenting his fate as an inmate at the state penitentiary, he wonders,

400
 Producers, The

“Where did I go right?” Bialystock’s accountant-turned-partner Leo Bloom (Gene

Wilder) hysterically casts about for the pair’s doctored ledgers and threatens to turn
himself into the police in exchange for leniency. “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp
with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgarten,” Bialystock and Bloom’s patently offensive play,
had become “the biggest hit on Broadway.” But for Bialystock and Bloom, right was
wrong and success meant failure. All that the crooked duo had to do was to produce
a flop and they would walk away with $2 million. How hard could it be?
Rated PG-13 for “sexual humor and references,” The Producers opens with a scene
of Bialystock clutching and being clutched by a little old lady (Estelle Winwood)
known by the moniker “hold me, touch me.” Bloom, an accountant from the firm
Whitehall and Marks hired to balance Bialystock’s books, walks in on the middle-
aged producer and one of his octogenarian investors engaged in sexual role-playing.
Pressured by Bialystock to use “creative accounting,” Bloom discovers that with a play
guaranteed to fail, “a producer could make more money with a flop than he could with
a hit.” Bialystock quickly convinces Bloom to quit his job in order to co-produce a flop
that would make the pair millionaires in unspent seed money. Putting their greed
ahead of their antifascist ideals, the once-popular producer and his new partner in
crime don swastika armbands in order to acquire the rights to “Springtime for Hitler”
from ex-Nazi Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars).
Moving to the second phase of Bialystock and Bloom’s seemingly foolproof scheme,
Bialystock romances little old ladies until he has raised $2 million in checks made out
to “cash,” and hires Ulla (Lee Meredith), a gorgeous blonde but English-deficient
Swede, to be his new receptionist. With Bloom, Bialystock next hires the cross-
dressing Roger De Bris (Christopher Hewitt) to direct the production. Finally,
“Springtime for Hitler” opens, and smartly dressed theatergoers watch in shock as
Lorenzo St. DuBois (Dick Shawn) plays an ostentatiously bisexual Hitler and Brooks
himself appears in an acerbically satirical cameo: “Don’t be stupid, be a smartie./Come
and join the Nazi party.” However, even the show’s climactic inclusion of a spinning
swastika, comprised of leather-garbed storm troopers of the Rockette variety, fails to
sufficiently offend the theatergoing masses. Ironically, the play becomes a hit, sending
Bialystock and Bloom to Sing Sing where they plot their next production, “Prisoners of
Love.”
The Producers ranks among the best films ever produced with the goal of focusing
attention on the Holocaust. Two decades after the Nazis systematically murdered mil-
lions of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and dissidents, Brooks effectively recast—through
Jewish humor—Hitler as an object of ridicule at the mercy of Jewish producers and
commercialization. Confronted with mixed reviews for the film, Brooks explained,
“More than anything, the great Holocaust by the Nazis is probably the great outrage
of the Twentieth Century . . . if I get on the soapbox and wax eloquently, it’ll be blown
away in the wind, but if I do ‘springtime for Hitler’ it’ll never be forgotten.” Although
the 2001 musical proved instantly successful, Brooks deserves more acclaim for taking
on Hitler in America in 1968.
See also: Music in Film; Musical, The

401
Psycho

References
Brooks, Mel, and Tom Meehan. The
Producers: The Book, Lyrics, and
Story behind the Biggest Hit in
Broadway History! New York:
Hyperion, 2001.
Desser, David, and Lester D. Fried-
man. American Jewish Filmmakers,
2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press, 2004.
Simpson, Paul, Helen Rodiss, and
Michaela Bushnell, eds. The Rough
Guide to Cult Movies. London: Hay-
market Customer Publishing, 2004.
Sinyard, Neil. The Films of Mel Brooks.
New York: Exeter Books, 1987.
—Alan Kennedy-Shaffer

PSYCHO. At the time of its

release in the summer of 1960,
Psycho was a box-office sensation,
shattering attendance records for
Janet Leigh screams in the famous shower scene from the film the year. Although critics initially
Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. (Paramount gave it mixed reviews, Alfred
Pictures/Courtesy of Getty Images) Hitchcock’s low-budget black-
and-white thriller is now regarded as a cinematic masterpiece.
Based on the Wisconsin serial killer, Ed Gein, Psycho first appeared in 1959 as a
novel written by Robert Bloch. After purchasing the rights from Bloch, Hitchcock
hired Joseph Stefano to write the screenplay, but soon ran into trouble with his studio.
Paramount executives could see no commercial potential in a movie that killed off the
heroine in the first half, but this was precisely the twist that appealed to Hitchcock. He
agreed to finance the film himself once Paramount agreed to distribute it, then shot it
using his television crew on a rapid schedule.
Psycho’s plot revolves around a series of crimes. After Marion Crane (Janet Leigh)
impulsively steals $40,000 from her employer, she drives all day to meet her boyfriend
Sam (John Gavin), but becomes tired and stops at the Bates Motel where Norman
(Anthony Perkins) gives her a room. That night, she is murdered in the shower by what
appears to be a crazy old woman. Later, Arbogast (Martin Balsam), a private detective
investigating the case, is also murdered, and Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) and Sam
try to find out what happened. When Lila tries to speak with Mrs. Bates in the base-
ment, she too is nearly murdered, but Sam rescues her just in time.
Psycho succeeds as a thriller because of its cinematic technique. From the opening
credits it is clear that Psycho is a strikingly original film. Veteran Hitchcock collaborator

402
 Psycho

Bernard Herrmann uses only the string section in his orchestral score, starkly comple-
menting the crisscrossing horizontal and vertical lines of Saul Bass’s visuals. Following
the credits, Hitchcock’s camera pans the Phoenix cityscape and penetrates the hotel
window where Marion and Sam enjoy a Friday afternoon tryst—half-dressed. It is
the first of many instances in Psycho where the viewer is positioned as a voyeur. A more
overt example occurs after Norman and Marion’s mildly flirtatious dinner conversa-
tion. When Marion retires to her room, Norman removes a picture from overtop a
peephole in the adjacent room and stares at Marion in her underwear. Thanks to the
subjective camera shot, we are staring at Marion just as Norman is.
Throughout Psycho, Hitchcock plays upon the voyeuristic tendencies of the audi-
ence by provocatively revealing some details while carefully concealing others. In
1960, it was still relatively unusual to show a woman on-screen dressed only in a bra
and half-slip. Likewise, it was utterly taboo to flush a toilet as Marion does at the Bates
Motel after disposing of some scraps of paper. Distracted by these images, audiences
are less aware of what they are not seeing. Mrs. Bates, for example, speaks to Norman
throughout the film, but the viewer does not see her face until the end.
The most blatant appeal to voyeurism in Psycho occurs during the shower scene.
One of the most famous sequences in cinematic history, the shower scene powerfully
suggests erotic violence without ever really showing anything. At no point in the
78-shot, 45-second sequence does the viewer see any forbidden body parts, and only
once does the knife appear to make contact with the body. Instead the violence is
achieved through montage, substituting film cuts for cutting of the skin. The high-
pitched violin motif that Herrmann devised to accompany the murder is equally
renowned and often parodied in popular culture, as in a 1990 episode of The Simpsons,
entitled, “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge.”
Psycho spawned a whole new subgenre of horror, the “slasher,” with films like
Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) employing many of Psycho’s innovations.
Slasher films generally feature a psychologically disturbed killer who has a preference
for knives and sexually active female victims. Psycho has also inspired numerous
sequels, homages, and even a shot-for-shot remake by Gus Van Sant in 1998. Tributes
to Psycho range from lowbrow comedy, such as Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety (1977) to
art-house tragedy in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). Arguably Hitchcock’s
greatest film, Psycho continues to surprise, horrify, and elate viewers with its stunning
originality and masterful technique.
See also: Hitchcock, Alfred

References
Rebello, Stephen. Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. New York: First Harper Perennial,
1991
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. With the collaboration of Helen G. Scott. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1985.
—Joseph Christopher Schaub

403
Pulp Fiction

PULP FICTION. Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) merges classic American
crime genre techniques and characters into a single self-reflexive homage. As an exam-
ple of postmodern cinema, it also includes a barrage of musical, visual, and dialogic
popular culture references. The film is made up of three individual but interconnected
stories, each introduced with a title card. It is the references themselves that make Pulp
Fiction so attuned to American audiences, with strictly American cars, books, televi-
sion, and music constantly shown and heard in the background.
Setting the tone for this uniquely American filmic experience, the first story,
“Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife,” is preceded by a running commentary
on the differences between McDonald’s in Amsterdam and in the United States. Told
from the American perspective of hitman Vincent Vega (John Travolta), the dialogue
reveals several cultural differences between the two countries. Vincent is accompanied
by his partner Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), and though both men wear black
suits and carry guns, they’re more humanized than typical hitmen of the crime genre.
In “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife” Vincent serves as proxy on a date
with the wife of his boss, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). He takes Marsellus’s wife
Mia (Uma Thurman) to the 1950s-theme restaurant “Jack Rabbit Slim’s.” Easily the
pinnacle of American pop culture references in the film, Vincent and Mia see posters
for 1950s and ’60s movies, sit in a booth shaped like an old Chrysler, and order the
“Douglas Sirk steak” and the “Durward Kirby burger” while interacting with servers
impersonating celebrities such as Ed Sullivan, Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe, and
Ricky Nelson.

Scene from the 1986 film Pulp Fiction, starring John Travolta (left) and Samuel L. Jackson. Directed
by Quentin Tarantino. (Photofest)

404
 Pulp Fiction

In the prologue for the second story, “The Gold Watch,” a close-up of an old TV
showing the 1959 American children’s cartoon Clutch Cargo is shown. Tarantino opted
to use this reference to allude to this scene as a flashback, further emphasizing that Pulp
Fiction is best understood by American viewers.
“The Gold Watch” follows boxer Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) after double-
crossing Marsellus on a fight. Butch’s escape is complicated by his deceased father’s
gold watch, which was bestowed on him as a child by Captain Koons (Christopher
Walken), who was a POW with his father during the Vietnam War. Tarantino chooses
The Losers (1968)—a film playing on Butch’s motel TV about motorcyclists sent by the
CIA to rescue a presidential advisor in Cambodia—to abruptly wake Butch from a
deep sleep. This cultural reference reminds viewers of his father’s war, and now his
own war against Marsellus. With his gold watch still on the nightstand in his apart-
ment, Butch risks returning for it. Here Butch’s story intersects Vincent’s, as the latter
is waiting for Butch at his apartment. Butch shoots Vincent, who dies with a copy of
the Peter O’Donnell pulp novel Modesty Blaise on his lap.
The third story, “The Bonnie Situation,” begins where “Vincent Vega and Marsellus
Wallace’s Wife” left off. This segment contains more up-to-date pop and pulp culture
references, especially to Los Angeles. In this story, Vincent mistakenly shoots and kills
an informant while he and Jules are driving home from the job in the first story.
Exposed in suburban Los Angeles with a bloody car, they stop at Jimmie Dimmick’s
(Quentin Tarantino) modish house while Winston “The Wolf ” Wolfe (Harvey Keitel)
is called in to “solve problems.” Jimmie is introduced wearing a bathrobe over his
Detroit metro magazine Orbit T-shirt while giving a speech about drinking gourmet
coffee. Jimmie gives Vincent and Jules clean T-shirts of the old comic-strip character
Krazy Kat, and the “Banana Slug” campus mascot of University of California Santa
Cruz.
The film ends where it began, in the Hawthorne Grill in Los Angeles. Here, Jules
makes a final speech of redemption amidst an unrelated robbery. In his speech he refer-
ences Happy Days’ “The Fonz” when he tells one of the robbers to “be cool.”
Pulp Fiction’s effective use of nonlinear storytelling paired with its incredibly diverse
cultural references allow it to accomplish more than any traditional crime drama ever
could. The film won 43 awards, including an Oscar for Best Writing and the Golden
Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. With its extensive use of pastiche, Pulp Fiction tran-
scends the crime genre, pulling together references from popular American culture,
pulp and hard-boiled crime fiction, French New Wave, Samurai cinema, and more.
See also: Editing; Gangster Film, The

References
Polan, Dana. Pulp Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
The Internet Movie Database. “Quentin Tarantino.” http://www.imdb.com/name/
nm0000233/.
—Adam Dean

405
This page intentionally left blank
 v
Q
QUIET MAN, THE. With The Quiet Man (1952), director John Ford offered an
intensely personal film that was the culmination of an infamously extended struggle
with the Hollywood studio system. The result, more than 15 years in the making,
was a lush homage to the director’s Irish roots, combining nostalgia with something
heretofore lacking in the Fordian oeuvre: a sprightly romantic love story. The film,
arguably Ford’s most beloved, earned the director his fourth and final Best Director
Oscar.
Ford had tinkered with The Quiet Man for years after discovering Maurice Walsh’s
short story in a 1933 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. Although he made several
attempts in the 1930s and 1940s to produce a film version, Hollywood’s major studio
heads insisted that Ford’s pet project had no commercial potential. Nevertheless, he
continuously played with the story, adding dramatic depth, and casting the film with
regulars from his other projects—Maureen O’Hara, John Wayne, and Victor McLaglen
among them—years before he actually found a studio willing to back it.
In the end, Ford was able to convince a second-tier studio, Republic Pictures, to
take on his Irish “Taming of the Shrew” tale. Although Ford had spent years tweaking
the somewhat thin, mood-based plot of the original short story, commentators still
argued that his version of The Quiet Man was nothing more than a superficial idyll.
Many Irish critics despised the film, offended by its unrealistic, stereotyped portrayal
of Irish communities and rituals. Studio head Herbert Yates, convinced the project
was a mistake, thought the film’s Technicolor green was overwhelming. More point-
edly, a generation of feminist critics derided the film, despite the presence of a
strong-willed central female character, for perceived misogyny.
Beneath The Quiet Man’s simple veneer, however, is a well-crafted romance that still
connects with contemporary audiences. The plot involves the return to his Innisfree
birthplace of Sean “Trooper” Thornton (John Wayne), an Irish American boxer who
has killed a man in the ring and who hopes to escape his brutal, materialistic American
past by exiling himself to his dimly remembered childhood home. There he runs afoul
of local bully Squire “Red Will” Danaher (Victor McLaglen) when he purchases ances-
tral land coveted by Danaher. This strained relationship is further complicated by

407
Quiet Man, The

Thornton’s courtship of Danaher’s sister—the fiery Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen

O’Hara). When Mary Kate refuses to consummate her marriage to Thornton until
she receives her dowry, held from her by her brother, the former boxer is forced to over-
come his personal demons and confront Danaher. Once Thornton chooses to use his
fists again, the two men meet in one of Hollywood’s most celebrated fight sequences,
a bare-fisted brawl that takes them across the Innisfree countryside surrounded by a
swarm of local onlookers.
How Green Was My Valley author Richard Llewellyn drafted the screenplay for The
Quiet Man, and the script’s sentimental feel recalls that from Ford’s 1941 Best Picture
Oscar winner. The setting for this fable of two people who must tame themselves
before they can live happily together is a magical community whose values represent
the antithesis of the American obsession with individualism and accumulation. Ford’s
Innisfree is a place where time has no meaning. His Ireland is the sort of dreamscape
that could exist only in the mind of the Irish exile—and Ford was exactly that. Cutting
elements that would have addressed internecine political conflicts—in one version
Sean Thornton would have joined the IRA—Ford instead envisioned a space where
Catholics and Protestants lived in relative peace, where pub patrons broke into sponta-
neous song, and where traditional courtship rituals were painstakingly overseen by
local tippler Michaeleen Oge Flynn (Barry Fitzgerald).
Ultimately, The Quiet Man served as a semiautobiographical cinematic home-
coming for Ford. Although his Ireland was by turns too green, too comic, and too
musical, it was also a place that resonated with American audiences eager to escape
to a simple and beautiful place after the years of World War II and early Cold War tur-
moil. Subsequent audiences, beset by different stresses, have proven just as eager to
escape, even if only for a while, to Innisfree.
See also: Ford, John; Melodrama, The

References
Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999.
Ford, Dan. Pappy: The Life of John Ford. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979.
McBride, Joseph, and Michael Wilmington. John Ford. New York: Da Capo, 1988.
Roberts, Randy, and James S. Olson. John Wayne: American. New York: Free Press, 1995.
—Nathan M. Corzine

408
 v
R
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. Rebel Without a Cause (1955), directed by Nicholas
Ray, received Oscar nominations for Supporting Actress (Natalie Wood), Supporting
Actor (Sal Mineo), and Writing for a Motion Picture Story (Ray). The renowned
movie is best known for its lead actor, James Dean, who played the malcontented teen-
ager, Jim Stark. This role, in addition to Dean’s tragic death in a 1955 car accident at
the age 24, made him into an iconic representative of teenage angst.
Rebel Without a Cause is about juvenile delinquency. More interesting are its sour-
ces. The three main characters, Jim, Judy (Wood), and “Plato” (Mineo), are estranged
from their parents. Jim refers to his family not as a place of refuge and support, but as a
“zoo.” He feels alienated from his father’s effeteness and his parents’ bickering; Judy’s
father refuses her the affection she needs; and Plato’s parents are separated and absent.
Yet—viewing the film as an historical source—the teenagers’ discontent is also the by-
product of 1950s affluence and the resulting cultural emphasis on materialism. This is
manifest in the lecture scene at the planetarium. Dr. Minton (Ian Wolfe), commenting
on the end of the world, states that “We will disappear into the blackness of the space
from which we came, destroyed as we began, in a burst of gas and fire. . . . And man,
existing alone, seems himself an episode of little consequence.” Surely the monologue,
and especially the teenagers’ troubled reactions to it, are symbolic of their alienation
from their parents (which they perceive); but it also reflects anxiety over the purpose-
less and superficial existence of a materially driven life (which they do not readily per-
ceive). Industrial-capitalist America’s emphasis on the material self at the expense of
the spiritual self, it appears, bred a sense of a lack of fulfillment, especially in its more
sensitive teenaged members. Jim is dejected despite the fact that his father, Frank Stark
(Jim Backus), buys him “everything” he wants. Before the so-called “Chickie Run,” Jim
asks his antagonist, Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen), “Why do we do this,” to which
Buzz replies, “You got to do something.” That is, ostensibly, “you got to do something”
to divert one’s attention from the unfulfilling, one-dimensionality of materialist
American life. A more explicit anxiety derived from affluence is reflected in the
feminization—synonymous with the weakening—of Jim’s father, which expresses a
fear that affluence cultivates effeteness. Frank is subject to a domineering wife and

409
Rebel Without a Cause

Actors (left to right) Sal Mineo, James Dean, and Natalie Wood in a still from director Nicholas
Ray’s film Rebel Without a Cause. (Warner Bros./Getty Images)

mother, who together, Jim claims, “make mush out of him.” This feminization reaches
its apogee when Jim discovers his father in an apron.
As a 1950s film, Rebel Without a Cause is generally read as a product of the cultural
conformity fostered by the so-called second Red Scare—because a direct confrontation
with the Soviet Union was not a policy option, anticommunism intensified domesti-
cally, which fostered a consensus around conservative values (Whitfield, 1996). Indeed,
it may be argued that despite its negative portrayal of middle-class family life, the film
actually reinforced Cold War conformity by evaluating personal relationships, rather
than assessing economic, political, or social issues (Shaw, 2007). Yet, if the film
explores personal relations, it also expresses an anxiety with American affluence and a
cultural emphasis on materialism. And it might be—even if it reinforced Cold War
militarism—that the feminization of Jim’s father was an acute warning that affluence
was not only damaging family dynamics, but also was weakening America society
during the Cold War—could any 1950s viewer imagine Jim’s apron-wearing father as
capable of fighting the Soviets? Furthermore, Jim is symbolically a refutation of cul-
tural conformity; the red jacket does indeed represent his angst, but it also marks
him as an individual who exists in a metaphorically black-and-white world. He
befriended Plato, after all, Judy points out, “when nobody else liked him—[and] that’s
being strong.” Some cultural commentators believe that Dean’s fashionable

410
 Rio Bravo

rebelliousness helped precipitate the upheavals of the 1960s; if this is the case, then the
film may be understood not merely as a cinematic reflection of 1950s (anti)orthodoxy,
but also as a cautionary tale foreshadowing the cultural conflicts that exploded during
the 1960s.

References
Shaw, Tony. “Hollywood’s Cold War.” In Culture, Politics, and the Cold War. Amherst: Univer-
sity of Massachusetts Press, 2007.
Whitfield, Stephen. The Culture of the Cold War. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996.
—Mark D. Popowski

RIO BRAVO. Director Howard Hawks made no secret of the fact that his film Rio
Bravo (1959) was a response to the 1952 Fred Zinnemann picture High Noon. Hawks
found the Zinnemann film politically objectionable, suggesting that it was a thinly
veiled attack on the HUAC hearings and the blacklisting of members of the cinematic
community. Hawks thought that the adoption of this political position was cowardly,
and even dangerously “unpatriotic,” as in his mind it failed to take seriously the com-
munist threat issuing from the Soviet Union. He believed that High Noon was a cin-
ematic representation of just such a weak-willed political stance, especially in regard
to the film’s portrayal of its protagonist Will Kane (Gary Cooper), a less than heroic
sheriff, who is neither “good enough” to confront a crazed band of killers himself or
wise enough to hire real “professionals” to help him turn back the deadly outlaws.
In the end, Hawks found the storyline of High Noon absurd, particularly its conclu-
sion, which depicted Kane having to be saved by his “Quaker wife” (Grace Kelly) and
ultimately “riding into the sunset,” not as the traditional Westerner but as what might
be understood by someone like Hawks as an antiviolence liberal, who, in a final act of
political defiance, flings his badge into the dust and turns his back on his community.
Casting film star John Wayne as his protagonist in Rio Bravo, Hawks set out to make
what he believed was a real western. Wayne was the perfect leading man for the picture,
as he had already established himself as an iconic American film hero; he also agreed
wholeheartedly with Hawks’s interpretation of High Noon.
In Rio Bravo, Hawks positioned his protagonist, Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne), in
a similar situation to Will Kane’s in High Noon. Chance, marshal of Rio Bravo, must
confront an angry rancher, Nathan Burdette (John Russell), and his loyal gunmen after
Chance arrests the rancher’s younger brother Joe (Claude Akins) for murdering an
unarmed man during a saloon brawl. Chance must hold the killer in jail until the
deputy marshal shows up in six days’ time to take him away. Nathan Burdette is not
about to let Chance turn his brother over to the marshal, though. Unlike Sheriff Kane
in High Noon, Chance turns to professionals to deal with his precarious situation,
rejecting an offer made by his devoted friend Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) to let Chance

411
Rio Bravo

Actors John Wayne (right) and Ricky Nelson (left) star in the western Rio Bravo, 1959. (Archive
Photos/Getty Images)

deputize his ranch hands: “Well-meaning amateurs, most of them worried about their
wives and kids,” grumbles Chance. Chance’s deputy, the alcoholic Dude (Dean
Martin), and an old, crippled jailer, Stumpy (Walter Brennan), stand beside the sheriff.
When Wheeler recklessly tries to convince the town’s citizens to help Chance,
Burdette’s men ambush him. Wheeler’s ex-bodyguard, Colorado (Ricky Nelson), ulti-
mately joins Chance after rescuing the sheriff in a shoot-out. The sheriff even falls for a
mysterious, and wholly un-Quaker-like, woman (Angie Dickinson), who knows how
to talk, shoot, and even love him. Eventually, Burdette’s gang abducts Dude and
arranges an exchange for Joe. In an explosive finale, the resourceful heroes thwart
Burdette’s plans to free Joe and kill Dude.
When Rio Bravo was released in 1959, it was hailed by critics and audiences alike as
a superlative western; and today, it is often chosen as one of the best genre films in the
history of the American cinema. Interestingly, however, although the picture is clearly
an example of a classic western, complete with its traditional “heroic loner” protago-
nist, at least on one level it may be understood as a cinematic declaration of the Cold
War politics of Hawks and Wayne. Indeed, it may be argued that Rio Bravo, with its
emphasis on professional men who are called upon to protect the community from
murderous interlopers, is expressive of the antipathy both Hawks and Wayne, and
many others in the United States, felt toward the Soviet Union, Communism, and

412
 Risky Business

what they perceived as unpatriotic Americans, Zinnemann and Cooper included.

Wayne had established his own anticommunist credentials in his 1952 thriller Big
Jim McClain, in which he portrayed a HUAC investigator searching for “Reds” in
Hawaii; and in Blood Alley (1955), in which he contended with the Red Chinese.
But despite the contemporary settings and the clear-cut anticommunist sentiments of
these latter two films, it may be that Rio Bravo is really the most obvious statement
of the Cold War ideology shared by Hawks, Wayne, and many nervous Americans
during the 1950s.
See also: Hawks, Howard; Wayne, John; Western, The

References
McBride, Joseph. Hawks on Hawks. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982.
McCarthy, Todd. Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. New York: Grove, 1997.
Wood, Robin. Rio Bravo. London: British Film Institute, 2003.

—Van Roberts

RISKY BUSINESS. Risky Business (1983), writer-director Paul Brickman’s directo-

rial debut, is many things: among them a satire of the capitalist 1980’s; a suburban
coming-of-age story; and the film that launched Tom Cruise toward superstardom.
Strongly reviewed as more sophisticated than bawdy movies like Porky’s (1982) that
were finding teen audiences at the time, the picture earned 10 times its modest budget
and evoked comparisons to what many considered the emblematic coming-of-age film
of its generation, The Graduate (1967). Risky Business remains a classic cinematic work
of the 1980s and one of Cruise’s best movies.
The film’s plot, full of spirited hijinks and serious themes, revolves around Joel
Goodsen (Cruise), literally the “good son” raised with all the comforts of the tony
Chicago suburbs. He and his friends worry about college admissions, but they also
are seriously concerned, as teens often are, about sex. When Joel’s parents take an
out-of-town trip, they leave Joel home alone, reassuring him of their trust and
reminding him of his long-shot interview with a Princeton admissions officer, which
is to take place while they are gone.
However, Joel, counseled by his friend Miles (Curtis Armstrong), begins to “say
‘what the fuck’ ” and take chances; which, Miles argues, will “make your future.” After
dancing around the living room to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” in the film’s
iconic (and most parodied) scene, Joel begins to break rules: he drives his father’s
Porsche against strict orders, and he calls Lana (Rebecca De Mornay), the streetwise
prostitute who will make him a man sexually and give him his real education. After
Joel accidentally dumps the Porsche into Lake Michigan, he accepts Lana’s suggestion
to bring her prostitute friends together with his rich ones in order to earn the money
to fix the car. The plan works, but more than that, it reconciles the competing sides
of Joel, the good son who will go to the Ivy League school and the hormone-ravaged

413
Rocky Horror Picture Show, The

teen who wants sex. Joel’s interview with the Princeton representative, which mistak-
enly takes place during a party and appears doomed, actually makes his future by con-
vincing the interviewer that “Princeton can use a guy like Joel.”
The film works on several levels and can be interpreted in different ways. Clearly, it
satirizes the money-loving 1980’s. Joel wants to major in business, and his friends wish
to “just make money” in their careers. Joel’s main extracurricular activity is “Future
Enterprisers,” though when Lana calls him a “Little Enterpriser,” it is obvious whom
the viewer should see as the real businessperson. Furthermore, Joel, whose record is
“not really Ivy League” quality, acts excessively and illegally, as many future financiers
will, and is rewarded with admission to Princeton. Indeed, if Joel had truly matricu-
lated at Princeton in 1983, he might well have been working for Gordon Gekko, the
character from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987). In this reading, Joel is no longer the
good son; rather, he has been corrupted by his no-rules, money-obsessed culture.
However, such a reading seems too dark when the movie is seen as a suburban
coming-of-age tale. After all, Joel starts the film as an anxious boy, worried about ruin-
ing his future with his natural desire for sex. Indeed, the film’s opening scene, his
“dream,” which is “always the same,” is all about his urges ruining his chances at col-
lege. But the film also makes it clear that Joel lives in a lifeless suburban culture. Thus,
one may ask whether his transformation is corrupting or liberating. After all, while
prostitution is illegal, the prostitutes in the movie love these clean suburban boys; Joel’s
friends, with their sexual urges but limited experience, “need the service” that Lana and
her friends provide; and, while Lana is a hooker, she is also Joel’s “girlfriend,” and there
is never a hint that Joel treats her with any disrespect. It may be, then, that as a coming-
of-age story, the film reads more positively, as a good boy finding the confidence to
take chances and escape a repressive suburban environment.
Risky Business’s “corruption or liberation” thematic ambiguity is one among several
parallels to The Graduate, a film that ends on a strikingly ambiguous, melancholy note.
Other commonalities include the generation gap, the protagonists’ rule-breaking sex-
ual awakenings, and the lead characters’ shared concerns about their futures.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The

Reference
Ebert, Roger. “Risky Business.” Chicago Sun Times, January 1, 1983. Available at:
www.rogerebert.com

—Derek N. Buckaloo

ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, THE. The film version of The Rocky Hor-
ror Picture Show was released in 1975. Over the last 30 years its growing popularity has
made it a phenomenon in the United States; indeed it has become a cult classic (Wein-
stock, 2008). In 1973, a rock-and-roll show, The Rocky Horror Show, opened at the
Royal Court’s experimental Theatre Upstairs in London. Written by Richard O’Brien,

414
 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The

the stage version opened to great success and was moved twice to accommodate the
increasing number of fans who flocked to see it. It moved to the United States when
American film and music producer Lou Adler and producer Michael White agreed
to open it at Adler’s rock club, The Roxy, in Los Angeles (Weinstock, 2008). This
is where Twentieth Century-Fox executive Gordon Stulberg saw the show and
decided to invest $1 million to bring it to the big screen. The stage production
opened on Broadway before the release of the film, but it was “an unmitigated criti-
cal and popular disaster” (Weinstock, 2008). Even though the picture flopped in
most areas of the United States when it was released in September 1975, it devel-
oped a small but devoted audience that continued to view it—in ritualistic fashion—
over and over again. The watershed moment for Rocky Horror came when it opened
at the Waverly Theatre in New York City’s Greenwich Village on April Fool’s
Day 1976. By the end of the 1970s, the raucous musical had become a pop-culture
“must see,” with 200 prints of the film circulated in various locations across America
(Weinstock, 2008).
Narrated by a criminologist (Charles Gray), the film follows newly engaged couple
Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) as they set out to
meet their old science teacher, Dr. Everett V. Scott (Jonathan Adams). On a remote
road, in the midst of a driving rainstorm, they experience a flat tire. They decide to
set off on foot in order to find help; eventually—and ominously—they spy a castle
light off in the distance. When they knock on the door, Brad and Janet are greeted
by Riff Raff (Richard O’Brien), the butler, and Magenta (Patricia Quinn), the maid.
Invited in, they discover they are unexpected guests at a party thrown by mad scien-
tist Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), a transvestite from the planet Transsexual in
the galaxy Transylvania. With his groupie Columbia (Nell Campbell), Frank-N-
Furter, on this particular night, unveils his creature, Rocky (Peter Hinwood). Due
to their situation, Brad and Janet are forced to spend the night in the eerie castle,
where they experience an unsettling world of gender reversal and debauchery. In
the finale, the characters come together in an orgy in a swimming pool, which is
the fulfillment of a plan devised by Riff Raff and Magenta to return to the planet
of Transsexual. While Brad, Janet, and Dr. Scott escape, Riff Raff and Magenta kill
Frank-N-Furter and Columbia with a laser that emits “pure anti-matter” before the
castle-spaceship lifts off.
On one very important level, The Rocky Horror Picture Show maintains its distinctly
perverse allure because it continues to function as a sort of filmic doppelganger of the
truly bizarre ritualistic ceremonies in which its ecstatic audience members participate.
On another level, it seems that the film’s popularity has much to do with its connection
to two sub-cultures within American society: glam-rock, which it embraces, and sci-
ence fiction cinema, which it mocks. Rocky Horror incorporates drama, satiric humor,
and gender role ambiguity, for example, three major elements of the 1970s glam-
rock subculture (Marchetti, 1982). These elements have become associated with gay
street culture, especially with drag, for which Frank-N-Furter has become a kind of
cultic poster boy—the character, after all, spends the entire film in lingerie, fishnet

415
Roger & Me

stockings, and platform heels (Marchetti, 1982). In regard to science fiction, the
picture-as-phenomenon, unselfconsciously playing on its own outlandish notions of
filmic doubling, defines itself, almost vampishly, within what seems to be an orthodox
sci-fi framework in the very moment that it consistently acts as a parodic foil to the tra-
ditional sci-fi films of the late 1930s (Matheson, 2008). Despite its enigmatic charac-
ter, however, a generation after it was first released, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, at
least for one segment of the cinematic public, shows no sign of losing its oddly power-
ful appeal.

References
Marchetti, Gina. Film and Subculture: The Relationship of Film to the Punk and Glitter Youth
Subcultures. PhD dissertation. Northwestern University, 1982.
Matheson, Sue. “ ‘Drinking Those Moments When’: The Use (and Abuse) of Late-Night Dou-
ble Feature Science Fiction and Hollywood Icons in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” In
Weinstock, Jeffrey A., ed. Reading Rocky Horror: The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Popular
Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Weinstock, Jeffrey A. “ ‘It’s a Jump to the Left’: The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Popular Cul-
ture.” In Reading Rocky Horror: The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Popular Culture. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

—Jennifer K. Morrison

ROGER & ME. Roger & Me (1989) is one of Michael Moore’s early documentaries
that won international attention. It describes the effects of General Motors’ decision to
close plants in Flint, Michigan, where Moore is originally from, and to shift work to
less expensive manufacturing sites such as Mexico.
At the outset of the documentary, Michael Moore is hired by Mother Jones with
headquarters in San Francisco. Although Moore quits his job and leaves his beloved
Flint to move from the Midwest to the West Coast, he fails miserably and needs to
return. Just the fact that he cannot distinguish between all the different coffee flavors
offered in fancy cafés in San Francisco aligns him with the blue-collar workers of
Michigan, where he feels he belongs. However, ridiculing the working class is also part
of his strategy; he shows regular people as foolish and creates a somewhat superior posi-
tion of observation for himself.
Moore’s cinematic style is different from other documentary filmmakers for two
main reasons: first, he is present as a highly personal narrator and as a sort of investiga-
tive reporter who also asks the tough questions of his subjects. He pursues a political
agenda in making his films that has been described as overtly critical of mainstream
Republican politics. Secondly, his storytelling is cynical and self-reflexive. Bill Nichols
(1991) has remarked, “The use of stylistic devices to achieve a reflexive effect runs the
risk of manipulating social actors” (71). Nichols detects the possibility that Moore’s
characters “will fall into the narrative slots reserved to donors, helpers, and villains”
(71). Moore shows the audience how he structures the film and displays openly the

416
 Roger & Me

building blocks that constitute this genre. He establishes himself as a specialist on the
topic in a comedic way by outlining the legacy of his own family and the automobile
industry in Michigan.
Moore has been criticized for his exploitative style of interviewing well-intentioned
subjects, such as a middle-aged woman who is economically so depressed that she
makes additional money by raising and illegally skinning rabbits in her backyard.
The filmmaker also shows his failed attempts to contact Roger B. Smith, the former
CEO of General Motors, by going to the GM headquarters and trying to get access
to the executive suite. When prompted by the security guards to identify himself,
Moore pulls out all kinds of insignificant cards he carries in his wallet but fails to pro-
vide proper ID. Next, he stops by the country club that Roger Smith frequently visits
and engages the front desk clerk in an awkward description of game and alligator
dishes that the wealthy clients at this exclusive resort consume. The description of
decadent consumption is contrasted with the documentation of evictions of former
GM workers, now laid off, who lose their homes. Moore follows the eviction officer,
a sleazy and unlikable man who unsympathetically throws entire families out on the
street on Christmas day, along with their plastic Christmas trees.
Roger & Me establishes numerous contrasting scenarios. On the one hand, there is
the grim reality of GM workers who are losing their jobs and livelihoods and in some
cases end up emotionally damaged, such as one of Michael Moore’s childhood friends
who experienced a mental breakdown. On the other hand, there are the desperate
attempts of an economically deprived town to stay optimistic and generate revenue
through wacky attempts to attract tourists. Some performers who grew up in Flint still
come to visit but are frequently as shady as some of the people who live in the town
they are supposedly trying to revive. Moore gets access with his camera team to several
exclusive events such as a garden party where living beings pose as statues for the
upper middle class. Ultimately, Moore manages to get inside a GM convention where
Roger Smith gives the Christmas Message to his employees while laid-off workers
continue to be evicted from their homes in Flint. Moore confronts the chairman
and is asked to leave. When he refuses, security guards carry him outside of the con-
vention room.
This physical intervention of the filmmaker is a style that Moore continued to per-
fect in his subsequent films, such as Bowling for Columbine (2002), a documentary
about gun control in the United States that was successful abroad; the internationally
acclaimed Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004); and Sicko (2007), about the health insurance crisis
in the United States.
See also: Moore, Michael; Documentary, The

Reference
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

—Karen A. Ritzenhoff

417
Rosemary’s Baby

ROSEMARY’S BABY. Controversial director Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby

appeared in American theatres in 1968. Based on Ira Levin’s popular novel of the same
name, the film echoed a number of social, cultural, and religious anxieties that
emerged as the 1960s drew to a close. Polanski’s film both portrayed and critiqued
these anxieties, as Rosemary’s Baby joined a chorus of voices condemning the traditional
family and excoriating religion for what was seen by its enemies as its tendencies
toward hypocrisy, superstition, and political corruption.
The film opens with the sounds of a comforting lullaby accompanying a camera
panning the New York cityscape and stopping over a gothic apartment building (called
“the Bramford” in the film but actually the historic Dakota building). A young couple,
Guy (John Cassavetes) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow), move into an apartment next
door to two elderly, quirky, and garrulous neighbors, and we learn that Guy and Rose-
mary want to have a child. Polanski managed to keep his late 1960s audience off-
balance with these plot points since they all suggested the beginnings of a Doris Day-
type romance. The tone of the film quickly becomes dark, however, and we learn that
the kindly old couple is part of a large conspiracy of Satanists who have promised Guy
success in his acting career in exchange for the use of his wife’s womb. In one harrow-
ing scene, Guy drugs and rapes Rosemary while the Satanists watch. The Devil appears
to take over Guy’s body and impregnate Rosemary. Throughout the rest of the film,
the mother-to-be has a growing awareness that her husband and their neighbors are
controlling her every movement. Everyone to whom she turns for help appears to be
part of the larger conspiracy. She slowly begins to believe that she is giving birth to
the Antichrist. At the end of the film, when her child is born, she appears to agree to
raise it, even though he has “his father’s eyes,” which glow a demonic red.
Horror historian David J. Skal views Rosemary’s Baby as the beginning of a series of
films that reflected American society’s anxieties over the sexual revolution, the chang-
ing nature of parenthood, and the feminist revolution. Polanski released the film eight
years after the oral contraceptive Enovin, known popularly as “the Pill,” became avail-
able and in the same year that Pope Paul VI released the controversial encyclical
Humanae Vitae, strongly restating the papal condemnation of contraception. Skal fur-
ther notes that films such as Rosemary’s Baby began to be released soon after it was
revealed that profound birth defects were linked to Thalidomide, a tranquilizer that
had been widely prescribed to expectant mothers. Receiving worldwide media atten-
tion, the Thalidomide crisis was one of the factors that rekindled the public debate
on abortion, a debate that ultimately culminated in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v.
Wade decision. In this context, Skal sees Rosemary’s Baby as “a brilliant metaphorical
distillation of the widespread ambivalence and anxiety over sex and reproduction.” Sig-
nificantly, during the 1970s and 1980s, horror films focused on demonic gynecology
or monstrous births—such as It’s Alive (1974), The Brood (1979), and most spectacu-
larly, Alien (1979)—would become extremely popular (Skal, 2001).
Beyond being read as a cautionary tale that addresses anxieties about sexuality and
reproduction, Rosemary’s Baby can also be understood as a critique of gender oppres-
sion and patriarchal mores. A number of critics have noted that the Satanists who
impregnate, supervise, and control Rosemary are merely acting out a slightly altered

418
 Rosemary’s Baby

version of the conservative moral

response to 1960s liberalism.
Rosemary’s effort to escape the
clutches of her husband and his
satanic allies is an effort to control
her body, her sexuality, and the
right to bear a child when and if
she wishes. The unforgettable
end of the film, when Rosemary
agrees to care for the child and
sees his monstrous eyes, horrifies
in part because Rosemary’s resis-
tance to the patriarchal pressures
pressing in upon her has been
turned aside and she quietly
accepts her demon-inspired biol-
ogy as destiny. The frequent
references to Catholicism and
the use of Catholic symbols fur-
ther strengthen this theme. As
film historian Tony Williams sug-
gests, Polanski sought to show
that “Catholicism and Satanism
. . . both wish their subjects to be
fruitful and multiply” (Williams,
Mia Farrow, wearing a plaid maternity dress, holds a book in
1996). a still from the film Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman
See also: Polanski, Roman Polanski, 1968. (Paramount Pictures/Courtesy of Getty
Images)

References
Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: Faber & Faber, 2001.
Williams, Tony. Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Cranbury, NJ:
Associated University Presses, 1996.

—W. Scott Poole

419
This page intentionally left blank
 v
S
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Saving Private Ryan is a 1998 World War II drama
about a small group of American infantrymen on a mission in France during the Allied
invasion of Normandy. Directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Robert Rodat, it
uses characters and situations familiar from 1940s combat films, but overlays them
with a distinctly modern sensibility. Along with Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book The
Greatest Generation, published the same year, it became a focal point of popular adula-
tion for the aging veterans of World War II.
The film is framed by scenes set in the present, showing one such veteran on a pil-
grimage to the American military cemetery above Omaha Beach—site of the heaviest
fighting on D-Day. The old man kneels before a grave marker, the present dissolves
into the past, and for the next 23 minutes the viewer is immersed in the struggle to take
and hold Omaha Beach on the morning of June 6, 1944. The combat scenes are unre-
lentingly chaotic, but a company of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, led by Captain Miller
(Tom Hanks), gradually becomes the focal point. The beach taken, Miller is assigned
a new mission: to locate Private James Francis Ryan—a paratrooper whose three broth-
ers have recently been killed in combat within days of each other—and bring him to
safety. Miller chooses five men from his company, and the battalion commander
assigns a sixth: a corporal from headquarters who is fluent in French and German.
The small unit thus formed is—like those in countless films made during World
War II itself—a collection of stock characters. It includes Reiben (Edward Burns), a
wisecracking machine-gunner from Brooklyn; Jackson (Barry Pepper), a pious
Southern sharpshooter; Caparzo (Vin Diesel), a tough-looking but soft-hearted Italian
American rifleman; and Upham (Jeremy Northam), the bookish translator, who has
never seen combat. Miller, the war-weary captain who only wants to go home to his
family, and Horvath (Tom Sizemore), the fiercely loyal sergeant who has been at his
side for the duration, are—like the melting-pot unit they lead—familiar figures.
The incidents that form the plot of the film are equally familiar. Caparzo, attempt-
ing an act of mercy in the midst of a skirmish, is killed by a sniper. Upham, the “new
guy,” is gradually accepted into the unit and taught the basic skills of a combat soldier.
Miller, at a critical moment, lets his men see a glimpse of the human behind the mask

421
Saving Private Ryan

Tom Sizemore and Tom Hanks during the D-Day landing in Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film Saving
Private Ryan. The movie received seven Academy Award nominations and was a major box-office
success. (Paramount/Photofest)

of command he usually wears. The group enjoys a moment of rest in a bombed-out

town, listening to recordings of Edith Piaf on a salvaged gramophone. The final battle,
in which Miller’s small unit joins forces with Ryan’s to hold a strategic bridge against a
German counterattack, echoes the to-the-last-man climaxes of wartime films such as
Wake Island, Sahara, and especially Bataan (all 1943). The battle ends in the best
Hollywood fashion, with American reinforcements arriving and routing the Germans
just as all hope seems to be lost.
Despite these structural similarities, however, Private Ryan’s depiction of the experi-
ence of war is far removed from that of its 1940s antecedents. War appears—as it does
in Vietnam-influenced films from M*A*S*H (1970) to Apocalypse Now (1979) and
Full Metal Jacket (1987)—as inherently chaotic and frequently surreal. Death is seldom
painless and never clean. The opening combat scenes on Omaha Beach—an unrelent-
ing stream of images of sudden death, agonizing wounds, and paralyzing fear—have
the graphic brutality of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or The Wild Bunch (1969), but not
their terrible beauty. Freed from the Production Code that governed the films of the
World War II and postwar eras, the soldiers in Private Ryan swear often and inven-
tively. When the naive Upham asks what “FUBAR” means, the answer is not the tradi-
tional all-audiences version, “Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition,” but the historically
accurate “Fucked Up.” Even Wade, the gentle and compassionate medic, becomes pro-
fane when the man whose wound he has just stabilized is shot through the head by an
unseen German rifleman: “Just give us a fucking chance, you son of a bitch! You son of
a fucking cocksucker!”

422
 Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932)

The soldiers in Private Ryan occupy a middle ground between the plaster saints of
wartime combat films and the tortured nihilists of Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket.
They have much in common with the men of postwar films like Battleground (1949),
Flying Leathernecks (1951), and Stalag 17 (1953): recognizably human heroes limited,
but not crippled, by their flaws. Miller and his men grow weary, frustrated, and con-
fused as the mission drags on without the prospect of an end. They make questionable
decisions and outright mistakes—sometimes fatal ones. They gripe about the war and
the army, and debate the wisdom of risking eight men to save one. Private Reiben
angrily questions Miller’s judgment, crossing over the line of insubordination and edg-
ing close to mutiny. Corporal Upham is terrified in combat and fails, during the final
battle, to carry out his assigned task of bringing ammunition to the others. Ultimately,
however, all the soldiers act with dedication and valor. They do what they do—and
most of them give their lives—not to preserve democracy or spare Mrs. Ryan the loss
of her sole surviving son, but because they see it as their duty.
Duty is, ultimately, the theme that connects Saving Private Ryan to The Greatest
Generation and, more generally, to the public tributes paid to World War II veterans
in the late 1990s. A sense of duty—a willingness to do what society expects, no matter
the personal cost—was seen as the World War II generation’s defining quality, and
Spielberg and Rodat use it to define Miller, Ryan, and the others. Miller, dying at the
foot of the bridge, gasps out his last words to young Ryan: “Earn this.” The scene dis-
solves back to the present and the Omaha Beach cemetery where the old man—who
we now realize is Ryan, kneeling before Miller’s grave marker—asks his wife, in a trem-
bling voice: “Tell me I’m a good man . . . tell me I’ve lived a good life.” His implied
question—“Have I been worthy of these men’s sacrifices?”—is clearly one that Spiel-
berg and Rodat wish the film’s audiences, and the nation as a whole, to ask themselves.
See also: Spielberg, Steven; War Film, The

References
Auster, Albert. “Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism.” Journal of Popular Film and
Television 30(2), 2002, 98–104.
Bodnar, John. “Saving Private Ryan and Postmodern Memory in America.” In Martel, Gordon,
ed. The World War Two Reader. London: Routledge, 2004, 435–48.
Landon, Phil. “Realism, Genre, and Saving Private Ryan,” Film and History 28(2), 1998, 58–63.
—A. Bowdoin Van Riper

SCARFACE: THE SHAME OF A NATION (1932). Scarface is mysteriously

absent from director Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Howard Hughes, The Aviator
(2004), overshadowed instead by the productions of Hell’s Angels (1930), The Outlaw
(1943), and Hughes’s disastrous ownership of the film studio RKO. Perhaps its absence
in The Aviator speaks to an anxiety of influence—Scorsese being the contemporary
director most associated with the gangster genre—as Scarface is not only Hughes’s most

423
Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932)

acclaimed contribution to Hollywood history but a film that continues to influence

today’s cultural landscape.
When Hughes began work on Scarface in early 1931, and hired Howard Hawks to
direct, the gangster cycle was already highly contested and the Hollywood studios
under the leadership of Will Hays had begun promising to halt the production of
gangster films. The situation had only deteriorated in May when a script was readied
with the help of Ben Hecht and W. R. Burnett. William Wellman’s The Public Enemy
(1931) had just hit theaters, and it was being widely reported that Scarface was going
to deal with the life of real-life gangster boss Al Capone, still at large and nicknamed
“Scarface,” and to include many infamous events, such as the St. Valentine’s massacre.
Consequently, Hughes was now strongly encouraged not to make the film by the Hays
Office or alternatively to make extensive changes to the script. Although Hughes con-
ceded in the end to numerous suggestions—among other things, inserting rhetorical
social messages and having the gangster “turn yellow” at the end—Scarface was to
become the most explosive gangster film of its time, if not of the studio era altogether.
It was extensively censored or banned outright, and marked the point at which the
excessively violent gangster pictures of the early 1930s declined precipitously.
In a remarkable performance, Paul Muni plays Tony Camonte, who like so many
other film gangsters rises from rags to riches, only to be killed at the end of the film.
Throughout, he is amply assisted by his faithful friend Guino Rinaldo (George Raft);
that is, until Tony discovers Guino has become involved with his sister Francesca
(Ann Dvorak) and promptly shoots him dead. If this gangster plot is mostly typical
of the early 1930s cycle and has become a standard of the genre today, it is in the psy-
chology of the characters and their interrelations that the film stands out. The incestual
desire between Tony and Francesca is almost explicit, strikingly so for a film made
during the early 1930s, while Tony’s violent behavior is driven by mania and even
some sort of psychosis. However, Scarface stands out in more ways than one.
Scarface was an independent production developed and fought for by Howard
Hughes and inconceivable as a standard studio production. It has few if any of the
social problem elements so typical of the gangster films made by Warner Bros.—the
studio that specialized equally in gangsters and social problem films. Even if James
Cagney had become legendary for playing “psychotic” gangsters from The Public
Enemy to Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), their psychology is explained sociologically,
and it is perhaps not until White Heat (1949) that one finds in his work a mania com-
parable to Muni’s in Scarface.
The extremity of Scarface’s characterization finds its stylistic equivalent in the film’s
mise-en-scène, its lighting in particular. Much has been made of the 1930s gangster
cycle’s indebtedness to German Expressionism, but arguably only Scarface could con-
vincingly be described as expressionistic. Its opening on a dark street with an eerie light
post is suggestive of both German Expressionism and its American heir, the horror
film, as is Tony’s excessive character and conspicuous scar; the visual “X” leitmotiv;
the extensive play with shadows; and, in retrospect, the casting of horror icon Boris
Karloff as one of Tony’s antagonists. Scarface is further distinguished by numerous
and sometimes elaborate tracking shots more typical of late silent German cinema than

424
 Schindler’s List

the classical Hollywood continuity editing of which director Howard Hawks was the
quintessential example. Sound effects help to accentuate the violence at the heart of
the film, while also emphasizing its ethnic specificity, as many characters speak with a
stereotypical Italian accent and in broken English.
More than any other film, Scarface contributed to the temporary elimination of
gangster films from the American screen; but it was also the one film that had the
greatest impact on the development of violence in American movies. And when the
gangster genre returned with a vengeance in the New Hollywood era, Scarface was at
its center, culminating with Brian De Palma’s remake in 1983, the latter also creating
something of an uproar and becoming yet another cornerstone of popular American
cinema.
See also: Gangster Film, The; Hays Office and Censorship, The; Hawks, Howard

References
Maltby, Richard. “The Spectacle of Criminality.” In Slocum, J. David. Violence and American
Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2001: 117–52.
Munby, Jonathan. Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to
Touch of Evil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Prince, Stephen. Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cin-
ema, 1930–1968. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

—Björn Nordfjörd

SCHINDLER’S LIST. Schindler’s List, adapted from Thomas Keneally’s book

Schindler’s Ark (titled Schindler’s List in the United States), dramatizes the story of
Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a womanizing German industrialist who employed
Jewish slave labor in his enamelware factory outside Krakow, Poland during the Nazi
occupation. As the Nazi noose tightens, the initially self-centered protagonist becomes
increasingly committed to the laborers and their families. Together with Jewish book-
keeper Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), Schindler conspires against SS commander Amon
Göth (Ralph Fiennes) to save the lives of some 1,100 Jews. By the end of the film, as
the Jewish survivors are liberated by Soviet troops in the present-day Czech Republic,
a penniless Schindler and his wife flee westward, carrying little more than a letter
explaining Schindler’s efforts on behalf of the Jews.
Schindler’s List appeared in 1993, amidst the flurry of 50th-anniversary Holocaust
commemorations and World War II remembrances that shaped both popular and aca-
demic culture in the mid-1990s. The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture,
Best Director, and Best Original Score (John Williams), and became a lightning rod
for discussions on the appropriate way to remember and reproduce Holocaust history.
Supporters emphasized the film’s attention to historical detail and contextualization of
iconic imagery, noting Spielberg’s quest for his own Jewish roots and his own descrip-
tion of Schindler’s List as a cinematic memorial to the millions murdered by the Nazis.

425
Schindler’s List

Director Steven Spielberg and actor Liam Neeson on the set of Schindler’s List in 1993. (Universal/
The Kobal Collection)

Detractors condemned what they saw as a reprehensible attempt to dramatize and

profit from an act of terror that defies artistic representation.
Film critics often compared Schindler’s List with Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 docu-
mentary Shoah. While both films draw on the memories and stories of Holocaust sur-
vivors, Schindler’s List attempts to contextualize historical events and personal
memories, dramatizing a specific chapter of the Holocaust and challenging dichoto-
mies of good and evil, victim and perpetrator. Some reviewers accused Spielberg of
humanizing the wrong people (i.e., the German perpetrators), reinforcing cultural ster-
eotypes, objectifying the female body, and sensationalizing mass murder, but most
appreciated his effort to balance the enormity of the Holocaust with an acknowledg-
ment of individual agency. The final scene, in which both the actors and actual Holo-
caust survivors climb a hill toward Schindler’s grave, reminds viewers that Schindler’s
List, while directed by a master of fantasy, depicts the experiences and memories of real
people.
Technically, Schindler’s List exemplifies late twentieth-century realism, blurring the
boundaries among documentary, drama, and art film. Unlike Spielberg’s earlier block-
busters, such as Jaws (1975), E.T. (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler’s List
engages real-life crises, and embraces narrative complexity; scenes of graphic violence
contrast with images of everyday life under Nazi rule. With the exception of a brief
introductory scene and fleeting glimpses of a young girl in a red coat, the film is shot
in black and white, a decision that was both lauded as emphasizing the bleakness of
the subject and criticized as attempting to claim historical authenticity. Numerous

426
 Searchers, The

point-of-view shots convey the perspective of individual witnesses to public acts of ter-
ror in the Krakow ghetto and at Auschwitz, scenes which are juxtaposed against images
of opulent dinner parties and the comparatively normal home lives of Göth and
Schindler. Heroes, villains, and victims are all depicted as multifaceted individuals
whose actions are informed, but not predetermined, by the Nazi regime.
Although not particularly innovative in theme, story, or cinematic technique, Schin-
dler’s List marked several turning points for American film. Spielberg’s own work
shifted from a fantasy genre noted primarily for special effects to more serious topics.
A similar shift can be seen throughout the film industry, resulting in the release of
numerous Oscar-winning historical dramas in the 1990s, as well as greater collabora-
tion between film professionals and trained historians. More broadly, the heated,
well-publicized debates about the appropriateness and truth value of Schindler’s List
helped bridge not only the traditional divide between elite and popular culture, but
also between academic and lay audiences.
See also: Spielberg, Steven; War Film, The

References
Bernstein, Michael Andre. “The Schindler’s List Effect.” American Scholar 63, Summer 1994:
429–32.
Eley, Geoff, and Atina Grossmann. “Watching Schindler’s List: Not the Last Word.” New
German Critique 71, Spring/Summer, 1997: 41–62.
Manchel, Frank. “A Reel Witness: Steven Spielberg’s Representation of the Holocaust in Schin-
dler’s List.” Journal of Modern History 67(1), 1995: 83–100.
“Schindler’s List: Myth, Movie and Memory.” Village Voice 39(13), March 29, 1994: 24–31.

—Kimberly A. Redding

SEARCHERS, THE. John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) was based on Alan Le May’s
The Avenging Texan, a serial published in 1954 in the Saturday Evening Post. Consid-
ered by many to be Ford’s masterpiece and one of the finest westerns ever produced,
it recounts the story of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), a Confederate veteran who
returns home to his brother’s ranch on the Texas frontier in 1868. His three-year
absence since the end of the Civil War is a matter of some concern to his brother Aaron
(Walter Coy) and sister-in-law Martha (Dorothy Jordan). Captain Samuel Johnston
Clayton (Ward Bond), the leader of a local group of Texas Rangers, even implies that
Ethan may be responsible for a string of crimes. For his part, Ethan is happy to be
reunited with his nephew Ben and nieces Lucy and Debbie, although he is bothered
to see Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), a young man with partial Cherokee ancestry.
(Ethan saved Martin from a Comanche raid when Martin was a child, and Martin sub-
sequently grew up in Aaron’s household.) The possibility of a peaceful homecoming is
shattered when news of a cattle raid draws the local men and Rangers out into the
wilds. The raid turns out to be a ruse engineered by Comanche warriors led by a chief

427
Searchers, The

named Scar (Henry Brandon) who slaughter Aaron, Martha, and Ben. Ethan and
Martin then spend five years searching for the kidnapped Lucy and Debbie.
The Searchers explores the meaning of masculinity and the civilizing potential of
family through the juxtaposition of the different experiences of younger and older
men. Similar concerns appear in other westerns of the 1950s and 1960s, including,
The Tin Star (1957), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(1962), Hud (1963), and El Dorado (1967). In The Searchers, these themes are embod-
ied in the contrasting attitudes and experiences of Ethan and Martin. Domesticity can
be considered the broader of the two themes: the film begins with the image of a door
opening and ends with another one closing. We see Ethan for the first time through the
first door, but unlike Martin, he remains outside—ever the wandering loner—after the
second has closed.
Although David Thomson has accused Ford of invalidating the western as a form,
relying on “clichéd panoramas,” and creating films whose collective message is “trite,
callous, and evasive,” even he has acknowledged that The Searchers is a moving film
that treats its subject seriously (Thomson, 2002). The Searchers has been described as
being morally ambiguous (Coyne, 1997), especially in relation to its treatment of race
and racism, and Ethan Edwards has been called both Ford’s first antihero (Buscombe,
1988) and a racist (Coyne, 1997). Such characters were increasingly common in west-
erns of the 1950s, as were the treatment of racial prejudice and rape and the presenta-
tion of more graphic violence (Loy, 2004). In these ways, The Searchers was very much
a reflection of contemporary American society and culture (Loy, 2004). Scholars do
not agree, however, on how to interpret the film’s stance toward Native Americans.
R. Philip Loy, for example, sees it as anti-Indian (Loy, 2004). Contrarily, Kathryn
Kalinak argues that the sheer amount of music associated with Indians in the film—
stereotypical though some of it may be—and the use of folk songs from the American
South combine to form a complex musical world that demands a nuanced reading of
the film’s treatment of race, miscegenation, and violence (Kalinak, 2007). Kalinak
has also noted that several disintegrated nations—the Confederacy, the Republic of
Texas, the Spanish New World, and the Comanche people—haunt the narrative. This
is reflected sonically through the interruption of songs (such as “Shall We Gather at the
River?”) throughout the film (Kalinak, 2007).
The influence of The Searchers on American popular culture has been widespread.
Ethan Edwards’s catchphrase “That’ll be the day” inspired a 1957 Buddy Holly song,
while directors such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas have bor-
rowed from the film’s imagery and themes (Fagen, 2003).
See also: Ford, John; Western, The

References
Buscombe, Edward. The BFL Companion to the Western. New York: Atheneum, 1988.
Coyne, Michael. The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western.
London: I. B. Tauris, 1997.
Fagen, Herb, ed. The Encyclopedia of Westerns. New York: Facts on File, 2003.

428
 Serpico

Kalinak, Kathryn. How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford. Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2007.
Loy, R. Philip. Westerns in a Changing America, 1955–2000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.
Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

—Stanley C. Pelkey II

SERPICO. Released at the end of 1973, Sidney Lumet’s Serpico captured an

America struggling with a crisis of identity: weary of ineffective leftist political activ-
ism, yet distrustful of government authority after stories of local and federal corruption
became increasingly common. Adapted from the Peter Maas biography of the same
name, the film traces the experiences of New York City police officer Frank Serpico
as he works to expose police racketeering from 1967 to 1972. Considered a misfit by
both his colleagues and the members of his own private-life community, Serpico fully
embraces the antiauthoritarian sentiments of the 1960s counterculture while maintain-
ing an unwavering allegiance to the law and order sensibilities of Nixonian America.
Winning a Golden Globe for Al Pacino’s lead performance and receiving Academy-
Award nominations for Pacino and screenwriters Waldo Scott and Norman Wexler,
Serpico remains an engaging example of Lumet’s ability to depict the contradictions
that defined America in the early 1970s.
Deviating from the linear style typical of Lumet’s films, Serpico is primarily structured
as a flashback, beginning with Serpico’s rush to the emergency room after he is the victim
of a suspicious shooting during a drug bust. Having established the fact that Serpico has
developed a less than stellar reputation within the NYPD, the film goes on to explore his
early years as a first-generation Italian American patrol cop. Driven to become the best
cop he can be, Serpico enrolls in police forensics programs, audits New York University
courses, learns Spanish, and cultivates an interest in ballet. Ironically, his inherent curios-
ity and work ethic, coupled with his adoption of a counterculture lifestyle, eventually
make him a pariah among his NYPD partners. Bored with his work and uneasy over
his squad commander’s accusations that he is a “weirdo cop” and a homosexual, Serpico
approaches Captain Inspector McClain (Biff McGuire) and requests a transfer. He fares
no better with the members of his new unit, however, as he refuses the free meals and
cash payoffs that his colleagues readily accept. Serpico’s actions, considered by other cops
as not only unorthodox but somehow unethical, give rise to a great deal of hostility.
Increasingly marginalized, and beginning to fear for his life, Serpico turns informant
with the help of McClain, his corruption-loathing superior; Inspector Lombardo (Ed
Grover); and internal affairs officer Bob Blair (Tony Roberts). Although he survives
being shot and testifies before a specially organized session of the Knapp Commission,
he finally becomes disillusioned with police work. Rejecting the highly coveted detec-
tive’s shield that he has dreamed of wearing, Serpico resigns from the force. Lumet ends
the film with an alienated Serpico standing on a corner with his sheepdog, as title cards
explain that he now leads a transient life “somewhere in Switzerland.”
Despite clearly sympathizing with his lead character, Lumet refused to present audi-
ences with a sanitized version of Serpico’s life. Though his adoption of the

429
Serpico

counterculture ideals of the 1960s

allowed him to define a certain
foundational ethic, it also seemed
to foster in him a somewhat
obsessive desire to expose corrup-
tion within the NYPD and an
inability to entertain the possibil-
ity of marrying and having a fam-
ily. It may be argued that in
presenting Serpico as a character
unable to succeed either within
the legal system or within the
nuclear family, the film addresses
the precarious status of urban
Italian American males in a
1970s America marked by white
flight and deindustrialization.
Retaining immigrant stigmas
despite wider representation in
prominent social positions and
in Hollywood film, working-
Al Pacino, as officer Frank Serpico, waits in a hallway before class, Italian American males
apprehending drug dealers in a scene from Sidney Lumet’s tended to remain tethered to two
police corruption drama Serpico, 1973. (Paramount Pic- cultural roles: the neighborhood
tures/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) beat cop, such as Serpico, or,
ironically, the underworld crime
figure, such as those played by Pacino in the Godfather trilogy, Dick Tracy, and Donnie
Brasco. Sadly, unfulfilled as a beat cop and abhorring the corrupt activities of his pre-
dominantly Italian colleagues, Serpico is unable to locate a place for himself within
American culture, ultimately rejecting the nation altogether.
See also: Lumet, Sidney; Pacino, Al

References
Bowles, Stephen E. Sidney Lumet: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.
Ray, Robert. A Certain Tendency in the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1985.
Wilson, Christopher P. “Undercover: White Ethnicity and Police Exposé in the 1970s.” Ameri-
can Literature 77(2), June 2005: 349–77.

—Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield

430
 Sex, Lies, and Videotape

SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE. Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape cap-
tured the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989. Along with
other independent films, such as Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts (1989) and Family
Viewing (1987) and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1982), Soderbergh’s film
focused on viewer fascination with video recording, especially in ways that radically
reshaped the meaning of public and private space and relationships of power between
men and women. Ostensibly a film that instantiates the idea of the “male gaze,” as
Soderbergh, the male director, records his male protagonist recording his female sub-
jects, the film tropes this notion by placing the video recorder in the hands of a woman
who turns her gaze back on the men who seek to control her.
Sex, Lies, and Videotape tells the story of Graham Dalton, played with eerie charm
by James Spader, who interviews attractive women about their private lives while he
films them. He is in control of the camera, acting to construct the imagistic reality that
he is recording. As Laura Mulvey suggested in her seminal 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema,” the male observer is the active, dominant partner during
moments of scopophilia, whereas the female subject remains passive. Significantly, in
a key scene in the film, the camera, and thereby the balance of power, changes hands,
when one of Graham’s subjects, Ann Bishop Mullany (Andie MacDowell), turns the
camera on the filmmaker himself. Stripped of his videographic means of defense,
Graham becomes increasingly insecure and self-conscious. As Mulvey suggested, these
scenes expose the male gaze for what it is: an expression of patriarchal power that is
subject to destabilization when its boundaries are transgressed. Forced to reveal his
own sexual inadequacies, Graham develops a perverse visual connection with Ann,
who is unhappily married to his college friend John Mullany (Peter Gallagher), a
pathological womanizer and liar.
Learning of the unusual relationship between his wife and his friend, John, who has
been competing with Graham for years, enters Graham’s apartment and discovers a
video recording on which Ann has made clear her feelings about her sexually unsatis-
factory marriage. Although John has been continually unfaithful to Ann, going so far
as to carry on a sexual relationship with her sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), he
cannot abide his wife’s act of carnal betrayal and divorces her. As the film draws to a
close, we learn that John is ultimately punished for his sins by losing his prized position
at a prestigious law firm, while it seems that Graham and Ann, with the aid of their
video mediator, will eventually be able to negotiate their way through their psychologi-
cal minefields and end up together.
Demonstrating the potential of independent films to attract large audiences, Sex,
Lies, and Videotape appeared to seduce viewers by making them into socially acceptable
voyeurs. Blurring the boundaries between public and private, and between domains of
male and female power, Soderbergh plays on the appeal of the home video market by
creating a film that explores complex notions of narrative authenticity.
See also: Feminist Film Criticism; Male Gaze, The; Women in Film

431
Shadows

References
Desbarats, Carole. “Conquering What They Tell Us Is Natural.” In Atom Egoyan. Ontario:
Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation, 1993: 9–32.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Erens, Patricia. Issues in Feminist
Film Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990: 28–40.
—Karen A. Ritzenhoff

SHADOWS. As John Cassavetes’s directorial debut, Shadows (1961) is remarkable

both for its bold portrayal of the complex social issues of 1950s American society
and for its mythologized role at the start of the experimental, independent filmmaking
tradition. Shadows grew from cinematic theories that emerged in the same New York
ethos that inspired Charlie Parker’s bebop jazz and the Beat literature of Jack Kerouac;
as such, it shares a developing rejection of capitalist establishment values and a vital
exploration of the visceral emotions and gritty realities of modern urban life. Shadows
began in Cassavetes’s acting workshop as an experiment with his best students where he
assigned roles that they used to improvise scenes. These experiments were so effective
that Cassavetes soon planned a film project; by appealing for donations, he freed his
creative vision from the studio system and became an originator of independent film.
Ironically, unable to make Shadows a purely improvisational film, he added scenes that
were carefully scripted.
Much of the film is improvised, however, and as such it tends toward raw emotion
and natural reaction instead of carefully plotted narrative development. The central
characters are African American siblings of mixed parentage living in New York. The
dark-skinned elder brother, Hugh, heads the family; his younger siblings Bennie and
Lelia are mixed race, and so light-skinned that they often “pass” for white. This inter-
relational dynamic frames the film’s exploration of a broad spectrum of social concerns,
including race, miscegenation, feminism, family, and love. Though narrative threads
connect the siblings, at its most basic level the film seeks to record the quotidian lives
of this set of sophisticated, urbane, creative African Americans. Although it does not
address them directly, Shadows resonates with the issues of the nascent civil rights
movement of the 1950s—Brown v. Board of Education; the Montgomery bus boycott;
the Freedom Riders; and the Civil Rights Bills of 1957 and 1960.
Early in the film, we find Bennie in a club, isolated and imperious, seemingly
unable to reconcile the racial issues that plague him, and America. Significantly, a cen-
tral conflict occurs when Lelia, who is young and intelligent but somewhat naive,
meets a white man named Tony at a party and sleeps with him soon afterward. Cer-
tainly Lelia’s willingness to lose her virginity with a man she hardly knows would have
upset mainstream audiences during the 1950s, but so too would the portrayal of an
interracial sexual relationship. The crisis comes when Tony meets Hugh; thinking that
Lelia is white, Tony is shocked when he meets her dark-skinned older brother and real-
izes that he has slept with a mixed-race woman. Lelia is disturbed not because she has
slept with a white man, but because she cannot conceive that race should even be an

432
 Shaft

issue: she sees herself as a vibrant and artistic individual, not as a racialized object sub-
ject to a (white) man’s approval.
Tony, like so many white Americans, then and now, prides himself on being a
progressive thinker; and later, once he has explored his feelings, seems honestly
appalled by his rejection of Lelia because of her mixed heritage. For the first time, it
seems, he understands his own latent racism and feels genuinely repentant. He goes
to Lelia’s apartment to rectify things but must entrust Bennie with an emotional mes-
sage: “I realize now there’s no difference between us. . . . Just tell her that Tony said,
‘I’m sorry.’ ” Bennie’s unsympathetic laughter following Tony’s departure reveals how
much difference he knows really does exist between his sister and Tony.
At the end of the film, Cassavetes once again locates Bennie in a club. Still angry
and still isolated, he eventually walks off into the night seeking a “normal life.” His
shadows remain, however, insuring that his desire for normality will not be easily con-
summated.
See also: Independent Film, The

References
Carney, Raymond. Shadows. London: British Film Institute, 2001.
Cassavetes, John. Cassavetes on Cassavetes. London: Faber & Faber, 2001.
Charity, Tom. John Cassavetes: Lifeworks. London: Omnibus, 2001.
Fine, Marshall. Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film.
New York: Hyperion, 2005.
Kouvaros, George. Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

—Kelly MacPhail

SHAFT. The NAACP gave up trying to persuade Hollywood to cast more African
Americans in films and television shows in 1963, ultimately resorting to legal measures
and economic sanctions to effect changes. As a result of these efforts, blacks began to
appear in both major and minor screen and television roles in greater numbers. Actor
Sidney Poitier, for instance, emerged in the late 1960s as the first truly popular African
American actor and qualified as an example of “the model integrationist hero.” By the
1970s, African Americans had turned up not only in ghetto-themed movies but also in
every other film genre and in diverse settings on television shows.
Eventually, the pendulum swung from one extreme to the other, as racist depictions
of African Americans as subservient Sambo characters—prevalent before the 1960s—
gave way to the portrayal of blacks as Superspades in films representative of what came
to be called blaxploitation pictures. The brief golden age of blaxploitation movies
stretched from 1970 through 1975, with these pictures targeted primarily at black
audiences. Blaxploitation heroes and heroines displayed a social and political
consciousness—a street ethic that allowed them to work within the system but also
to do whatever it took to improve the African American community. Not surprisingly,

433
Shaft

Scene from the 1970 film Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree. Directed by Gordon Parks, 1971.
(GAB Archive/Redferns)

blaxploitation heroes often clashed with whites; but filmmakers—both white and
black—refused to depict whites in strictly monolithic terms. Good whites and bad
whites jockeyed for prominence in these films. Although one NAACP official
described blaxploitation as just “another form of cultural genocide,” African American
audiences flocked to see these pictures.
Based on a novel by Chester Himes, director Ossie Davis’s urban crime thriller Cot-
ton Comes to Harlem (1970), about two African American NYPD cops, Coffin Ed
Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) and Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge), paved
the way for the production of other films in the short-lived movement. When the film
premiered, critics did not categorize Cotton as blaxploitation. Interestingly, the term
“black exploitation” first appeared in print in the August 16, 1972, issue of the show
business newspaper Variety, in which the NAACP Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch
president Junius Griffin coined the phrase to describe the derogatory impact these
films had on the African American community. Later, the phrase black exploitation
was abbreviated as blaxploitation.
Two films that historians point to as instrumental in shaping the movement
were Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and Gordon Parks’s
Shaft (1971). In his film, Peebles expanded the narrative content of Davis’s Cotton
Comes to Harlem by adding sequences devoted to sex and violence, and Sweetback’s

434
 Shane

success—especially with black audiences—triggered the blaxploitation craze, one of

the most profitable in cinematic history. Major Hollywood film studios rushed to pro-
duce similar films. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, for instance, followed Sweetback’s success
with their adaptation of Ernest Tidyman’s literary private eye thriller Shaft (1971).
Shaft starred model-turned-actor Richard Roundtree as a sort of latter-day, ultrahip
version of Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade character from The Maltese Falcon. As a
detective movie, the picture observed all the conventions of the genre. The action
opens with the trench-coated protagonist wearing out shoe leather in Manhattan to
the tune of Isaac Hayes’s evocative, Oscar-winning rendition of “Theme from Shaft.”
The lyrics of the song provided a thumbnail sketch of the hero’s persona: private detec-
tive John Shaft is “the cat who won’t cop out when there’s danger all about.” An infa-
mous Harlem crime lord, Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn), loosely based on real-life
criminal Bumpy Johnson, hires Shaft to locate his missing daughter Marcy. Eventually,
Shaft discovers that the Italian mafia has abducted her and he assembles a motley crew
of black militants to help him rescue Marcy.
Although it became an instant success, African American leaders and film critics
excoriated the film for perpetuating the stereotype of young black males as violent
and sexually promiscuous. Ironically, some critics complained not about the film’s ster-
eotypical characterization of its protagonist, but about the fact that Shaft simply substi-
tuted blacks in roles that were traditionally played by whites. Yet, for all the criticism
that came its way, the picture was wildly popular, ultimately spawning two sequels—
Shaft’s Big Score (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973)—and later, a short-lived television
series. It also paved the way for the release of other significant blaxploitation offerings,
including Super Fly (1972), Cleopatra Jones (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974), the latter
two starring female action stars Tamara Dobson and Pam Grier.
See also: African Americans in Film

References
Lawrence, Novotny. Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2008.
Leab, Daniel J. From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

—Van Roberts

SHANE. Long regarded as one of the classic westerns, George Stevens’s Shane
embodies nearly all of the central myths of this genre, and does so with a simplicity
and dramatic economy that distinguish this film from its numerous predecessors.
Based on the 1949 novel by Jack Schaefer, adapted for the screen by A. B. Guthrie
Jr., Shane tells the story of a handsome drifter and ex-gunfighter, of shadowy origins,
who frees a small frontier town in Wyoming from the violent and tyrannical rule of
the Ryker family, and of its irascible patriarch, Rufus Ryker.

435
Shane

Scene still from Shane, starring Alan Ladd (left) and Van Heflin, 1953. (Paramount/The Kobal
Collection)

Schaefer’s novel is set in 1889, but the conflict between ranchers and homesteaders
that lies at the heart of Shane is more nearly reflective of the Wyoming range wars
of the 1890s, and Stevens draws extensively on the history of this period to give his
movie the look and feel of the late nineteenth-century frontier. Shot on location in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming, against the majestic backdrop of the Grand Tetons, Stevens
clearly hoped to capture some of the grandeur of the natural setting for his drama of
second chances and the domestication of the Wild West.
In place of the first-person narration that Schaefer employs throughout his novel,
Stevens adopts a subtler and more cinematic device of foregrounding the impressions
of eight-year-old Joey Starrett, as he responds to the mysterious stranger in his midst,
a man in buckskins known only by one name, “Shane.” In what became his signature
role, Alan Ladd portrays Shane as a soft-spoken yet potentially menacing figure, who
rides out of the mountains one day in search of a new life and finds it, however briefly,
within the Starrett family circle. Joe Starrett (Van Heflin) and his wife Marion (Jean
Arthur) are drawn to Shane’s quiet manner and obvious helpfulness, though it is
Marion whose connection to Shane is deepest, and (in spite of herself ) clearly
romantic. And though Joe insists that he doesn’t want Shane to “fight his battles for
him,” that is precisely the role Shane ultimately plays, as the Ryker brothers, deter-
mined to drive the homesteaders from “their” land, hire a gunslinger from Cheyenne
named Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) to frighten the few homesteading families that
remain into leaving. Shane’s shootout with Wilson is one of the most realistically

436
 Shane

filmed gunfights in the history of a genre that often glorifies gun culture, but it also
serves as a sobering climax to a film that seriously weighs the moral costs of violence.
Shane’s confession to Joey that there’s “no going back from a killing” captures perfectly
both the poignancy and the tragic heroism of Shane’s doomed attempt to leave his
gunfighting days behind him.
The actual shooting of Shane was completed in 1951, but for the next year and a
half Stevens edited and reedited his film until it was released in 1953, leaving Para-
mount Studios in doubt that the film would ever be released or turn a profit. The
film’s subsequent success—it was nominated for six Academy Awards and won for
Best Color Cinematography—confirmed Stevens’s reputation as a director (and in this
case, producer as well) who would settle for nothing less than the best his crew was
capable of. Cinematographer Lloyd Griggs shot the movie in a widescreen ratio that
was later adapted to a CinemaScope format, and the expansive horizontality of the
projected screen image was reinforced throughout by Griggs’s use of long shots,
emphasizing the expanse of the Wyoming grazing lands where much of the action
takes place. In an effort to achieve as much dramatic realism as possible, Stevens
dressed his actors in period costumes, even to the extent of showing his audience a
close-up of a Sears and Roebuck catalog from the 1890s, and having them comment
on changing fashions. But in sharp contrast to other western movies of the ’50s (and
particularly those on TV), Shane never glamorizes violence, nor does it unambigu-
ously identify masculinity with the gun. Shane is one of the few films set on the
western frontier that depicts farmers doing real labor—splitting logs, clearing stumps,
and fixing fence posts—as opposed to cowboys on horseback, forever pursuing out-
laws in black hats.
However, Shane is not deficient in western iconography, nor does it seriously chal-
lenge the heroic narrative of westward expansion. Shane himself exists at just one
remove from the knight-errant of the romance tradition, and his willingness to sacrifice
his happiness (and perhaps even his life) to secure the well-being of a community that
only reluctantly accepts him, resonated powerfully with audiences that had begun to
demand more of this genre than the familiar “horse opera.” Victor Young’s soaring
score and A. B. Guthrie’s often understated dialogue, along with some of the finest
screen performances of this decade, will likely ensure Shane’s place in the hierarchy of
western filmmaking for years to come.
See also: Western, The

Reference
Countryman, Edward, and Evonne Von Heussen-Countryman. Shane. London: British Film
Institute, 2008.

—Robert Platzner

437
Shawshank Redemption, The

SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, THE. Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemp-

tion (1994) tells a simple story—almost too simple for contemporary audiences who
frequently seek films with adrenaline-like pacing, flashy violence, and soundtracks set
to hipster music—but in its simplicity it cuts to the core of some of life’s most complex
and enduring themes. Among them are hope and friendship. It’s also about humanity,
which is unusual for a movie that deals almost uniquely with convicted prisoners in a
Maine penitentiary. But Darabont does not allow his characters to be defined as crimi-
nals; instead, he sees these ostensibly dangerous, misguided misfits for what they truly
are: human beings. The warden might not see them as such, nor might the prison
guards, but to the audience they become honest, fragile characters who struggle to
maintain hope, to be free, and most of all to be human.
Based on Stephen King’s novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,”
the film chronicles the prison life of Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a banker who
is convicted for killing his wife and her lover in cold blood. The narrative is told from
the perspective of Shawshank’s resident conman, Ellis “Red” Redding (Morgan
Freeman), who quickly befriends Andy, striking a bond thicker than the fortified
walls, barbed wire, and rusted fencing that surrounds the facility. Through Red’s nar-
ration, the film unfolds as a series of episodes that depict Andy chafing under the con-
strictions imposed on him by his surroundings, and the quiet encouragement his
disobedience imparts to his friends. As an educated banker, Andy uses his skills to
subvert the realities of his environment: he offers his financial services to the head
guard in return for some beers to be shared among his comrades; after procuring a
large collection of used books and records for the prison, he expands the library and
begins administering high school equivalency tests for inmates. All of these subtle
cases of defiance build to the grand act of insubordination: Andy’s escape. But that
is merely a plot point. The real liberation occurs not for Andy but for Red. Andy suf-
fers in prison, but he suffers more as a result of his refusal to acquiesce; Red, by con-
trast, suffers because he acquiesces, yet by the end of the film, through his relationship
with Andy, he learns how to be free.
“Prison is no fairy-tale world,” states Red, and he is correct. Darabont reveals prison
life to be violent, repressive, and dehumanizing; yet he does so dispassionately, never
reveling in its abuses. Nor is he concerned with traditional questions of guilt versus
innocence. Andy is innocent, Red is not, but none of that matters because Darabont
sees his characters as humans first and prisoners second. This is a motif he repeated
in his 1999 prison drama The Green Mile, and it works. It is also instructive. Just as his-
torians of the 1960s and 1970s illustrated the necessity of uncovering the agency of
working people, bondspersons, and women, Shawshank raises important points con-
cerning how scholars might approach convicted persons in their studies—that is, with
openness and honesty, not nihilism and prejudice. This seems especially pertinent in
the post-9/11 world where the troubling revelations of abuse and torture at Abu
Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay have generated fierce debates about the treatment
of prisoners.
The emotional power Shawshank generates, however, is not limited to its narrative
of prison life. The film’s emphasis on humanity and hope are universal themes

438
 Shining, The

designed to touch audiences on a multitude of levels, which is a primary reason for its
enduring success. Frequently regarded as one of the best films of its time, it is surpris-
ing to think that, despite garnering seven Academy Award nominations Shawshank was
a commercial failure. Today it stands alongside other treasured classics, including Citi-
zen Kane and It’s A Wonderful Life, as an overlooked film saved by the reverence of a few
dedicated followers. Like these works, Shawshank not only entertains its audience, it
inspires and provokes them, as well.

References
Darabont, Frank, Morgan Freeman, and Tim Robbins. Interviewed by Charlie Rose. Charlie
Rose. PBS, September 6, 2004.
Davis, Angela. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1974.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1977.
—Ryan J. Kirkby

SHINING, THE. Released in 1980 and starring Jack Nicholson, The Shining is a
horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick and screenwriter Diane Johnson
adapted the screenplay from Stephen King’s 1978 bestseller of the same name. Nichol-
son plays tortured writer Jack Torrence, who, looking to earn a little extra money while
working on his novel, agrees to act as the off-season caretaker at the Overlook Hotel in
Colorado. Enthusiastic about the appointment, Jack packs up his wife, Wendy (Shelley
Duvall), and their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), and the family heads off on their winter
adventure.
Arriving at the Overlook on the day it is shutting down for the season, the family is
taken on a tour of the facility by the hotel’s director. As they move through the cavern-
ous spaces of the hotel, the group encounters the hotel’s aging chef, Dick Halloran
(Scatman Crothers), who offers to take Danny down to the kitchen for some ice
cream. While sharing his treat with Mr. Halloran, Danny reveals to him that he is
afraid of the hotel, particularly room 237. Mr. Halloran surprises Danny by commu-
nicating with the boy telepathically; he also tries to reassure him by telling Danny that
his psychic abilities are really a gift, what Halloran calls “shining.” Before they leave
each other, Halloran warns Danny to stay out of the hotel’s abandoned rooms, espe-
cially room 237.
Danny’s curiosity gets the better of him and he enters the room, where he meets a
ghost woman. Jack also ventures into the forbidden room, encountering the same
woman, but lies to Wendy about his experience. Jack’s madness accelerates as his writ-
ing goes nowhere and his supernatural visions increase at an alarming rate. Wendy wit-
nesses this madness when she discovers his manuscript with the words “All work and
no play make Jack a dull boy” repeating throughout the pages. When she confronts
him, he threatens her. Wendy knocks him unconscious with a baseball bat and drags
him to the kitchen’s walk-in freezer, locking it behind her. The ghost of the Overlook’s

439
Shining, The

previous winter caretaker, Delbert

Grady (Philip Stone), releases
Jack and sends him after his fam-
ily. In the bedroom, Danny writes
“Redrum” on the door to try to
warn his mother. Seeing the word
reflected in a mirror, Wendy real-
izes her son has really written
“Murder!,” and she rushes to save
Danny. Jack hacks his way to her
through a bathroom door with
an axe and sticks his face through
the wood, yelling, “Heeeeeeeeere’s
Johnny!” Wendy and Danny
escape through the hotel’s hedge
maze, taking Dick’s abandoned
vehicle, leaving Jack to freeze to
death. The final shot of the film
is a photograph of the hotel dated
July 4, 1921, with a young and
smiling Jack front row and center.
The Shining proved to be a
great commercial success, but
was met with mixed reviews from
Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, 1980. critics. Roger Ebert concluded
(Photofest) that the film was decidedly
ambiguous, and that it was diffi-
cult to connect with any of the characters. Stephen King publicly disapproved of the
picture, arguing that though it was a solid film, it failed to address the major themes
of alcoholism and the disintegration of the family that were prevalent in his novel.
King also felt that the possession of Jack in the earlier parts of the film denied “the
entire tragedy of his downfall.”
Of all the film adaptations of King’s work, The Shining has received the most critical
and scholarly attention. Tony Magistrale argues that The Shining receives more praise
than any other Kubrick film or King adaptation because it must be “read carefully, in
a process that is akin to experiencing a poem or viewing a complex oil painting.”
The subtle nuances of its scenes make it “too artistic to work as a horror film,” but
“whatever Kubrick sacrifices in visceral or psychological terror, he more than rewards
in visual evocative brilliance.” Setting the horror in a place of intimacy (the bedroom)
allows the characters to expose greater levels of vulnerability, as those places are usually
the most private of all spaces, demonstrating that terror comes not from the shadows
but from well-lighted areas associated with intimacy and trust (Magistrale, 2003).
The film remains one of the greatest horror pictures of all time. After reconsidera-
tion many years later, Ebert added it to his series of “Great Movie” reviews in 2006,

440
 Shrek Series, The

and it is on the American Film Institute’s (AFI) Top 100 list. Stephen King, though he
had softened his views on the Kubrick adaptation, produced his own TV miniseries of
The Shining in 1997, which starred Steven Weber as Jack. Most recently, Jack’s axe
from the film helped to break a Hollywood auction record, adding to a $7.8 million
dollar profit made by a four-day Hollywood auction.
See also: Horror Film, The; Kubrick, Stanley

References
Falsetto, Mario. Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis, 2nd ed. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2001.
Magistrale, Tony. Hollywood’s Stephen King. New York: Macmillan, 2003.
Walker, Alexander, Ulrich Ruchti, and Sybil Taylor. Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
—Jennie Woodard

SHREK SERIES, THE. Shrek (2001), directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky
Jenson, is the first in a series of American computer-animated films (Shrek; Shrek 2;
Shrek the Third) about a grumpy, green ogre (voiced by Mike Myers) with certain
heroic qualities. The film was based on the book Shrek! (1990), by American cartoonist

The animated cast of the 2001 film Shrek. Shown (from left) are Donkey (voice: Eddie Murphy),
Shrek (voice: Mike Myers), Princess Fiona (voice: Cameron Diaz), and Lord Farquaad of Duloc
(voice: John Lithgow). (Photofest)

441
Shrek Series, The

William Steig, and established Dreamworks Animation as one of the leaders in the
world of animated motion pictures. Before this, Disney’s Pixar films had dominated
the scene. Recognized for its appeal to a wide spectrum of viewers, Shrek is an example
of narrative and technical innovation. The postmodern features in the film include the
subversion of traditional fairy-tale characters and the parodic treatment of film and
television culture. The 3D computer animation creates the illusion of visual depth
and a paradoxical “realism” in the presentation of these fairy-tale characters. The Shrek
phenomenon has also gone well beyond the film itself through merchandising efforts,
most of which are designed to appeal to the child consumer; the green ogre has been
reproduced in everything from Shrek backpacks to cans of Shrek pasta, and the visibil-
ity of this character shows no sign of fading away.
As a computer-animated movie, Shrek is certainly reflective of recent artistic and
technical developments in computer technology (Hopkins, 2004); however, many
basic elements of the storyline are consistent with the narrative patterns of the past,
including the tales adapted by Disney early on to the medium of film (e.g., Sleeping
Beauty, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). Shrek, for example, embarks on what
may be understood as a hero’s journey—in the manner of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with
a Thousand Faces—in this case with the male protagonist in search of a princess. Along
the way, the hero meets other characters who assist him in his quest; the film also fea-
tures a fire breathing dragon as well as an alter-ego villain, Lord Farquaad. However,
Shrek distinguishes itself as a postmodern variant of the traditional fairy tale in a num-
ber of important ways. To begin with, the hero happens to be a green ogre—ogres are
usually not the stuff of heroism in fairy tales. The fairy godmother—also presented
against type—is a villainous figure, and her equally devious son, Charming, is quite a
departure from the noble prince of the traditional fairy-tale narrative.
The very first scene in Shrek alerts the viewer to many of these narrative reversals
and establishes the film’s subversive approach: the story, it is clear, is representative of
a nontraditional fairy tale that challenges earlier examples of this narrative form. In this
opening scene, a voiceover narrator reads a fairy tale about a princess in search of her
true love; however, the narration is soon disrupted by the image of an ogre’s hand rip-
ping out a page of the book that is being read. Viewers then hear the sound of a flush-
ing toilet, which they realize is located in Shrek’s outhouse. Significantly, these scenes
reflect a filmic shift away from an anonymous, nondiegetic narrator who is not a char-
acter in the story, to a diegetic narrator, who most definitely is a character—Shrek him-
self reading the story in his outhouse. Shrek’s incongruous appearance in the film’s title
sequence, then—he takes a mud shower and consumes a bowl full of eyeballs—acts to
undercut audience expectations of a “charming” prince.
One of the ways in which Shrek represented a breakthrough for animated films was
its success in appealing to diverse demographic groups: children, adults, and even film
studies scholars. Unlike audiences of the past, which may have dismissed animated
films as suitable only for children, contemporary audiences have come to appreciate
the fact that animated films may include adult content as well as technical features that
computer-savvy audiences can appreciate. Shrek is significant in the history of ani-
mated film not only because of the number of famous actors who lent their voices to

442
 Shrek Series, The

the production (Mike Myers as Shrek, Eddie Murphy as Donkey, Cameron Diaz as
Princess Fiona, and Antonio Banderas as Puss n’ Boots), but also because of its clever
use of pastiche, intertextuality, and innovative cinematography. Shrek, for instance,
contains countless references to contemporary popular culture; it also uses the visual
techniques of live-action film, including long shots, close-ups, high- and low-angle
shots, parallel editing and montage—elements that may help to explain why adult
audiences appreciate the film.
While Shrek has been marketed primarily to children, adult themes are plainly
woven through the visual narrative. For example, the Big Bad Wolf is costumed in a
pink dress and nightcap, seemingly reinscribing the image of the wolf in grandma’s
clothing that is a foundational element in the traditional fairy tale “Little Red Riding
Hood”; however, because the wolf in Shrek is presented outside the context of this
formative fairy tale—and within the context of a non-traditional, and on an extremely
important level, very adult fairy tale—his transvestism is readily apparent, as are the
peculiar proclivities of a cross-dressing bartender who appears in Shrek II. Some adult
viewers have been critical of the level of sexual suggestiveness that is apparent in these
pictures, demonstrating, it seems, the fine line that filmmakers must walk in order to
create movies that appeal to inter-generational audiences.
Like Disney’s Pixar films, in relationship to which crossover toys were mass-
marketed, the Shrek movies became even more popular because of the complementary
merchandise and bonus features that were marketed to the films’ many fans. In addi-
tion to DVD versions of the film, which include games and technical bloopers to
appeal to the child spectator, Shrek characters have found their way into toy stores
and even onto grocery store shelves. Indeed, fans have even had the opportunity to
consume Shrek pasta and Shrek Halloween treats.
Film sequels are often less successful than the original films; however, Shrek 2
(2004) was even more appealing than Shrek. Every bit as clever as the original—and
perhaps even more subversive in its intertextual references to popular culture—it
became the highest-grossing film of 2004. The familiar characters of the original were
all back: Shrek and Fiona return from their honeymoon to find an invitation from Fio-
na’s parents to visit them in the land of Far, Far Away. Here, Shrek is transformed into
human form, complementing Fiona’s earlier hybrid status as woman/female ogre in
the original story. Shrek 2 also caters to adult tastes, with Puss ’n Boots (again voiced
by Antonio Banderas) being arrested for holding catnip. The scene functions as a com-
bination of homage and parody, as it is clearly reminiscent of the drug busts featured
on the reality television show Cops.
Shrek The Third (2007) takes the ongoing Shrek narrative in yet another direction
by focusing on the search for a new successor for the kingdom of Far, Far Away. After
Fiona’s father, King Harold, passes away, Shrek rejects the idea of taking on the role.
Instead, he leaves the kingdom, along with Donkey and Puss n’ Boots, to search for
King Harold’s nephew, Arthur Pendragon (Justin Timberlake). The plot of this third
installment is more convoluted and less focused than the other two films, involving a
host of villainous fairy-tale characters who side with (Prince) Charming against the
Shrek contingent in order to apprehend innocent fairy-tale characters. Princess Fiona

443
Silence of the Lambs, The

is relegated to a peripheral role, as she is pregnant and stays far, far away in Far, Far
Away while Shrek ventures forth. The introduction of legendary characters such as
Arthur and Merlin may have also created a certain sense of confusion in the minds of
some viewers that the earlier Shrek films avoided by focusing on the adventures of
characters within a circumscribed fairy-tale world rather than introducing characters
from distant legends and other fairy tales.
See also: Animation

References
Franceschetti, Donald R. Growing Up with Science. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 2006.
Hiltzik, Michael A., and Alex Pham. “Synthetic Actors Guild.” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2001.
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/may/08/news/mn-60707.
Hopkins, John. Shrek: From the Swamp to the Screen. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004.
Parry, Becky. “Reading and Rereading Shrek. English in Education 43(2), 2009: 148–61.
—Karin Beeler

SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, THE. In The Silence of the Lambs (1991), FBI trainee
Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) investigates “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine), a serial killer
who kidnaps, kills, and skins women. Directed by her superior Jack Crawford (Scott
Glenn), Starling questions psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a long-
imprisoned serial killer who cannibalized his victims. Starling asks Lecter to profile
Buffalo Bill, and he proposes a quid pro quo arrangement. He will share his insights
if Starling recounts traumatic childhood memories, such as her father’s death and wit-
nessing the slaughter of lambs. Meanwhile, Bill kidnaps another woman, setting a
timer on the FBI’s manhunt. From Lecter, Starling learns that Bill seeks to transform
himself, which is why he leaves moth cocoons with his victims—the pupa symbolizes
transformation. Later, Starling deduces that Bill intends to fashion a “woman suit”
from his victims’ skin. By film’s end, Lecter escapes confinement, and Starling locates
Bill in time to save the kidnapped woman.
Gender issues are central to Silence, not only in Bill’s gender-bending transforma-
tion and the misogyny of his crimes, but in the obstacles Starling faces as a female
agent. Several shots and scenes emphasize Starling’s small stature next to larger,
stronger men. Starling repeatedly attracts the male gaze, which Lecter underscores by
asking, “Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice?” Crawford manipulates
a local policeman’s sexist desire to shield Starling from gruesome evidence to get him
to cooperate. Starling objects but is not above exploiting her femininity or flirting to
advance her investigation. Indeed, Crawford strategically chooses a woman for the
assignment, as eros partly motivates Lecter’s cooperation. After several interviews,
Lecter jokes, “People will say we’re in love.” Many have identified feminist themes in
Silence, a reading perhaps inflected by Foster’s other roles and public persona.
Silence also posits Crawford and Lecter as father figures to Starling, whose biological
father, also a policeman, was killed when she was a child. Starling clearly respects

444
 Silence of the Lambs, The

Scene from the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs, starring Anthony Hopkins. Directed by Jonathan
Demme. (Photofest)

Crawford and reacts proudly to his fatherly praise. The film juxtaposes her first meet-
ing with Lecter with a flashback of her father; the inclusion of similar tracking-shot
sequences in both scenes cements the comparison. Both Lecter and Crawford serve as
Starling’s teachers and advisors. Both also manipulate her for their own ends. Later,
when Starling graduates from training, Crawford tells her that her father would be
proud, and a close-up of their handshake recalls a poignant shot of Lecter handing
Starling a file, their first and only physical contact. In this resonant moment, the film
unites all three fathers.
Director Jonathan Demme shot much of Silence with craftsmanlike simplicity, but
several sequences and techniques are noteworthy. Throughout much of the film, Bill
is shot from behind, in long shots, or in close-ups revealing only parts of his body. Like
Starling, we must create our own “profile” of Bill from limited information. When we
finally see Bill in full shot, the effect is disturbing. He stands naked with his genitals
tucked between his legs to resemble a woman; wears makeup and other feminine acces-
sories, including the scalp and hair of his unfinished woman suit; and strikes a pose
reminiscent of Lecter’s arrangement of a victim’s corpse.
Silence utilizes horror film tropes, such as close shots of the female protagonist
exploring claustrophobic rooms. These shots create anxiety by preventing us from per-
ceiving offscreen threats. As the FBI closes in on Bill, Demme also tricks us with some
horror-film legerdemain. He cuts between interior shots of Bill in his house and
exterior shots of Crawford’s agents approaching what we assume to be the same house.
However, Crawford’s men raid a vacant home, and we are surprised to learn that it is
Starling, not the FBI team, ringing Bill’s doorbell.

445
Singin’ in the Rain

The film repeatedly alludes to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). In fact, both Buf-
falo Bill and Norman Bates were based, in part, on real-world serial killer Ed Gein.
Near the remains of Bill’s first victim is a stuffed hawk, an allusion to Bates’s stuffed
birds. Demme also emulates Hitchcock’s technique of cutting between point-of-view
tracking shots and reaction tracking shots when Starling walks to her first interview
with Lecter and in flashbacks of her father.
Silence received critical acclaim and is one of only three films to win the five most
prestigious Academy Awards (Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, and Actress). Con-
troversy emerged over the possibly homophobic choice to represent Bill as gay or trans-
sexual, a fact that may have informed Demme’s decision to direct Philadelphia (1993),
which portrays homosexuals positively.
See also: Feminist Film Criticism; Foster, Jodie; Male Gaze, The; Women in Film

References
McQuain, Christopher. “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby? Life Outside the Celluloid Closet
Poses New Conundrums for Queers Looking for Silver-Screen Mirrors.” The Film Journal
3, http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue3/longwaybaby.html 2002.
Mizejewski, Linda. Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture. New
York: Routledge, 2004.
Niesel, Jeffrey. “The Horror of Everyday Life: Taxidermy, Aesthetics, and Consumption in Hor-
ror Films.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 2(4), 1994: 61–80.

—Eric L. Sarlin

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN. Co-directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, Singin’ in
the Rain has come to epitomize the MGM musical. Though not a notable critical suc-
cess when released in 1952, in 2002 Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade poll of leading crit-
ics ranked it among the top 10 films of all time. A warm and humorous depiction of
the genre’s origins, the film’s reputation grew as critics recognized how it self-
consciously refracts that story through a contemporary lens. While on the surface a
consummate studio musical, Singin’ in the Rain also offers a strikingly complex consid-
eration of the nature of musicals at a time when their era was drawing to a close.
Producer Arthur Freed conceived the production as a “catalogue” musical featuring
songs he wrote with Nacio Herb Brown for films made in the 1920s and 1930s. As a
backdrop, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green formulated a simple plot
driven by the problems facing Don Lockwood (Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen),
a silent film duo whose careers are threatened by the transition to sound. In particular,
Don is hampered by simplistic dialogue and Lina has an extremely unpleasant voice.
These difficulties are winkingly based on anecdotes like the story of John Gilbert’s
career decline after the arrival of sound—indeed, Gilbert appeared in The Hollywood
Revue of 1929, in which the song “Singin’ in the Rain” debuted.

446
 Singin’ in the Rain

After a disastrous preview of

Lockwood-and-Lamont’s first
talkie, Don’s best friend Cosmo
Brown (Donald O’Connor) pro-
poses that they rework the film
into a musical, with Don’s girl-
friend Kathy Selden (Debbie
Reynolds) dubbing Lina’s voice.
Lina is enraged when she learns
of this, and also jealous of Kathy’s
relationship with Don; however,
she turns the situation to her ad-
vantage by blackmailing studio
head R. F. Simpson (Millard
Mitchell) into continuing the
arrangement without giving
Kathy credit. The premiere, with
Kathy’s voice instead of Lina’s on
the soundtrack, is a hit, but when
the audience insists that Lina
reprise “Singin’ in the Rain,”
Don, Cosmo, and R. F. raise the
curtain to reveal Kathy singing
the part. Don introduces Kathy
Dancer and actor Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in Singin’
as the “real star,” and the film
in the Rain, directed by Stanley Donen and Kelly, 1952.
closes on a billboard advertise- (Warner Bros./Getty Images)
ment for “Singin’ in the Rain
with Don Lockwood and Kathy
Selden.”
As the decision to start with the songs rather than the story reflects, the essence of
the film lies in its musical numbers. They serve as an index to major styles from the his-
tory of the musical, but all are couched in the form of the “integrated” musical, an
approach endorsed by Kelly/Donen. As developed and popularized by Agnes de Mille’s
Broadway choreography for Oklahoma! (1943), this technique integrates performance
into the plot rather than bracketing it off. Instead of “pausing” the plot for the sake
of singing and dancing, in an integrated musical the plot continues throughout. Thus,
Kelly’s number “Singin’ in the Rain” is both symbolic of Don’s joy at being in love
and, quite literally, an impromptu performance taking place in the real world of the
film, visible as such to confused passersby. This logic extends throughout: all of the
characters who perform are professionals within the narrative, and the characters who
are not performers, such as R. F., or are untalented, such as Lina, have no numbers.
The integration of the numbers, despite their unrealistic aspects such as the frequent
use of nondiegetic music, underlines the film’s self-reflexivity. Interestingly, its open-
ness is itself an illusion: despite the claim that using uncredited vocal talent is

447
Singles

reprehensible, for instance, Reynolds’s singing voice was dubbed by an uncredited

Betty Noyes. Similarly, though the film promotes “spontaneous” performance, in fact
Kelly was a perfectionist who rigorously rehearsed the choreography. As Jane Feuer
argues, Singin’ in the Rain employs a putative demystification of the musical only in
order to remystify it. While other films in the 1950s pursued greater realism, Singin’
in the Rain makes use of the trappings of realism as a way of contending that profes-
sional “entertainment” is more desirable. Caught between changing tastes and a differ-
ent economic structure that rendered big-budget musicals less feasible, Singin’ in the
Rain is one of the great achievements of the MGM musical system and, simultane-
ously, an encapsulation of why that system would not persist.
See also: Music in Film; Musical, The

References
Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Fordin, Hugh. M-G-M’s Greatest Musicals. New York: Da Capo, 1996.
Wollen, Peter. Singin’ in the Rain. London: British Film Institute, 2008.
—Matthew Sewell

SINGLES. Writer and director Cameron Crowe’s 1992 film Singles is a snapshot in
time, capturing the trials and tribulations of a group of twenty-somethings looking
for love in Seattle’s fledgling grunge scene. Traffic manager Steve (Campbell Scott)
meets environmentalist Linda (Kyra Sedgwick) at a Seattle night club and is smitten;
Linda, though, is wary about love, having been hurt too many times in the past. Steve’s
neighbor and former flame, Janet (Bridget Fonda), is a true romantic and former archi-
tecture student who works at a coffeehouse. She’s obsessed with Cliff (Matt Dillon), a
wannabe rock star who works any number of odd jobs to stay afloat, and who does not
appreciate Janet at all. Then there is Debbie (Sheila Kelley), an advertising executive
holding onto her 1980s look, who turns to video dating in search of her soul mate,
and Bailey (Jim True-Frost), an artsy Bohemian type.
Steve and Linda embark on a romance, enjoying the first days of falling in love and
being each other’s everything—until they face the ultimate test, an unplanned preg-
nancy. When Linda loses the baby in an auto accident, she buries herself in her work
and the couple breaks up. Steve falls into a deep depression, one that is worsened when
the mayor (Tom Skerritt) declines to back his pet project, a “Supertrain” that would
change the face of Seattle. Janet, meanwhile, decides to have breast augmentation,
thinking it will make Cliff happy. Thanks to her new doctor (Bill Pullman), Janet
decides that she is fine just the way she is, thank you, and begins to ignore Cliff. Of
course, once Janet stops throwing herself at him, Cliff pulls out all the stops in an
attempt to win her over. In the end, the singles are reunited and paired off, with non-
committal Bailey the exception. Linda realizes that Steve is the man for her, and Cliff
proves his worth to Janet. Even Debbie finds love, despite her disastrous attempt at
video dating, a sequence that includes scenes with the forever “thirty-something”—will

448
 Singles

this guy ever shave?—Peter Horton. The wonderful Eric Stoltz puts in a brief appear-
ance as a Bitter Mime; while Jeremy Piven plays a hyper drugstore cashier—a younger
version of Ari Gold from Entourage?; and filmmaker Tim Burton, Hitchcocklike,
appears briefly on-screen. Even Crowe steps out from behind the camera, showing
up on-screen as a journalist interviewing Cliff in a nightclub.
More than just a film about finding love, Singles is a chronicle of Generation X—
young people raised in the 1960s and 1970s, who came of age in the 1980s. Unlike
the baby boomers, many of whom spent their youth in the 1960s indulging in free love
and experimenting with drugs, the members of Gen-X faced AIDS, herpes, and crack
epidemics, as well as an uncertain economy. The affluence and rampant consumerism
of the 1980s gave way to a fiscal crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which in turn
resulted in a poor job market, and underemployment for many Gen-Xers. Cynical and
perceived to be lacking ambition, members of Generation X reveled in being the ster-
eotypical “slackers”—content to get by with just enough rather than killing themselves
in some perverse attempt to keep up with, and outdo, the Joneses. Grunge personified
this stereotype, with a physical look that included torn jeans, flannel shirts, knit caps,
and unkempt hair. The unofficial king of Gen-X was the tragic Kurt Cobain—who
ultimately killed himself—lead singer of the grunge rock group Nirvana, the band
that, for many, defined the Seattle music scene during the 1980s and early 1990s.
The rise of grunge marked a return to the popularity of rock-and-roll music after
years of chart domination by pop and dance music. A former music journalist who
wrote for Rolling Stone magazine and was married to musician Nancy Wilson of the
rock group Heart, Crowe was no stranger to the music scene. In fact, he claimed that
the screenplay for Singles was ultimately influenced by another tragic death, the acci-
dental overdose of his friend Andy Wood, the lead singer of Mother Love Bone. As
in Crowe’s previous films, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Say Anything, the sound-
track for Singles provided an aural framework for the picture’s narrative sequences.
Indeed, the film includes performances by grunge bands that were popular in Seattle
at the time: Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam—whose real-life members
portrayed the filmic members of Cliff ’s band, Citizen Dick. The soundtrack also
includes material from the Lovemongers, Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone, and Scream-
ing Trees; and Paul Westerberg offerings bookend the narrative sequences, with his
“Waiting for Somebody” opening the picture and his “Dyslexic Heart” playing as the
credits roll.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The; Music in Film; Romantic Comedy, The

References
Crowe, Cameron. “Making the Scene: A Filmmaker’s Diary.” Rolling Stone 640, October 1,
1992. http://www.cameroncrowe.com/eyes_ears/articles/crowe_jrl_make_scene.html.
Gordinier, Jeff. X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything
from Sucking. New York: Viking, 2008.
Kallen, Stuart. The 1990s: A Cultural History of the United States through the Decades. San Diego:
Lucent Books, 1999.

449
Sixteen Candles

McDonough, Gary, Robert Gregg, and Cindy Wong. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American
Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
Rose, Cynthia, ed. American Decades: Primary Sources. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2004.
—Michele Camardella

SIXTEEN CANDLES. A teenage girl’s 16th birthday is supposed to include a big

party, the perfect boyfriend, and a shiny new car, all wrapped up with a bright red
bow. But what happens when the members of your family forget your big day because
they are consumed with planning your older sister’s wedding? Ask high school sopho-
more Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald), the birthday girl in John Hughes’s 1984
romantic teen comedy Sixteen Candles. Much to her dismay, Sam awakens on her big
day—the day before her sister’s wedding—looking exactly as she did yesterday, when
she was just 15. Her mother (Carlin Glynn) forgets to make her special carrots for
lunch, and no one in her family remembers it is her birthday, much less her Sweet Six-
teen birthday! As children’s author Judith Viorst might have said, she was having a
“Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day” indeed.
Things go from bad to worse as she struggles with her fear that the object of her
infatuation, super-popular senior Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), has learned that
she is a virgin and is saving herself for him. To add insult to injury, Sam has been rel-
egated to sleeping on the living room sofa so that her visiting grandparents—they are

Scene from the 1984 film Sixteen Candles, starring Molly Ringwald (right). Directed by John
Hughes. (Photofest)

450
 Sixteen Candles

there not for her birthday, but for her sister’s wedding—can stay in her bedroom, and
has been forced to entertain Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe), a nerdy foreign
exchange student, at the school dance. Distraught about her birthday and sure that
Jake does not know that she exists, Sam hides in the school’s auto shop, where the love-
sick Geek (Anthony Michael Hall) eventually finds her. His serenades—and fumbling
romantic advances—fail to cheer her up; his news that Jake is also interested in her,
however, gives Sam hope, so much so that she agrees to loan the Geek her underwear
so that he can win a box of floppy computer disks in a bet.
Unable to bring herself to speak to Jake while retrieving her coat in a subtly drawn
comic sequence at the end of the dance, Sam returns home, all the more depressed
because Long Duk Dong has managed to find an American girlfriend in a mere five
hours. A bedtime heart-to-heart with her father (Paul Dooley) also fails to provide so-
lace. Jake, meanwhile, finds that his longtime girlfriend, the perfect Carolyn (Haviland
Morris), has invited half the school back to his parents’ house for a wild party while
Mom and Dad are out of town. Fed up with her antics and disgusted by what his child-
ish friends have done to his parents’ house, Jake entrusts Geek with the task of driving
an unconscious Carolyn home in his father’s Rolls-Royce. The next day, having found
the Geek and Carolyn looking a bit too cozy in the back seat of the Rolls, Jake sees an
“out” and ends the relationship, showing up at the church where Sam’s sister, an over-
medicated Ginny (Blanche Baker), has just married Rudy (John Kapelos). Jake whisks
bridesmaid Sam away for a romantic birthday party for two, giving her the perfect
Sweet Sixteen, after all.
Written and directed by Hughes, Sixteen Candles captures the awkwardness and fra-
gility of being a teenager, including the monotony of going to class, the respite pro-
vided by hanging out with friends, and the frustration of dealing with seemingly
clueless adults who just don’t get it. Unlike the serious teen cinema of the mid-
1950s, which inevitably dealt with troubled adolescents, the bulk of 1980s teen movies
included physical comedy that lightened the overall tone of the films and promised a
positive outcome. In her breakout role as Samantha, Ringwald perfectly embodied
the angst-ridden teenager—mawkish but not pathetic, sweet, romantic, adorable.
Indeed, Sixteen Candles launched Ringwald’s career—she would also appear in The
Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, The Pickup Artist, and For Keeps? during the 1980s,
effectively playing the same role with impeccable charm. For his part, Hughes spoke
to teenagers on their own level—he would go on to write and/or direct other iconic
teen films: The Breakfast Club (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Ferris Bueller’s Day
Off (1986). So popular would Ringwald become that she and a number of other hot
young actors with whom she co-starred—Emilio Estevez (co-starred in The Breakfast
Club), Michael Anthony Hall (co-starred in Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club),
Andrew McCarthy (co-starred in Pretty in Pink), Judd Nelson (co-starred in The
Breakfast Club), and Ally Sheedy (co-starred in The Breakfast Club)—would be dubbed
members of the “Brat Pack,” a play on Frank Sinatra’s 1960s “Rat Pack,” which
included Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis Jr.
See also: Coming-of-Age Film, The; Music in Film; Romantic Comedy, The

451
Sixth Sense, The

References
Grant, Barry, ed. Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, Volume 4. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007.
Reed, Joseph. American Scenario: The Uses of Film Drama. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press, 1989.
Rollins, Peter, ed. The Columbia Companion to American History on Film. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003.
—Michele Camardella

SIXTH SENSE, THE. The five natural senses are sight, hearing, smell, taste and
touch. A sixth sense has always been characterized as beyond natural, conveying an
ability to perceive the paranormal. In other words, The Sixth Sense, by its title alone,
gives rise to an expectation in viewers that they are going to watch a film about the
supernatural. While it fulfills this expectation admirably, this film is much more than
a simple ghost story.
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, this delicately nuanced film with its
unexpected plot twists shook the world of popular culture, earning six Academy Award
nominations when it was released in 1999, and winning a number of lesser honors,
including the People’s Choice Award. Breaking away from the gory, effects-driven hor-
ror movies that had dominated the genre for at least a decade, and leaning more toward
the nineteenth-century literature of Ambrose Bierce, H. H. Munro, and Henry James,

Scene from the movie The Sixth Sense, which received a Best Picture Academy Award nomination in
2000. Shown are Haley Joel Osment (left) and Bruce Willis. (AFP/Getty Images)

452
 Sixth Sense, The

the reality-shifting plot had people talking about the film at the watercooler, dragging
their friends off to see it, and standing in line to see it again.
The Sixth Sense begins with an expository flashback that introduces award-winning
child psychologist Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) on the night that he is shot by a
disturbed former patient. As the action resumes months later, a strangely diminished
Dr. Crowe is meeting a new client, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a painfully shy
boy who dreams of being liked and included by his classmates, but who is plagued
by the attentions of individuals who have suffered violent deaths—as Cole tells Dr.
Crowe, “I see dead people!” Sometimes, Cole reveals, besides scaring him, the dead
physically hurt him. The plot at this point is concerned with how Dr. Crowe will come
to grips with the presence of the paranormal, and how the boy will ultimately be saved
by the adult. But this is not the traditional story of a helpless child-victim being saved
by the white-knight professional psychologist. Dr. Crowe is in far more need of help
than even he is aware; indeed, it is the boy who will ultimately save the man.
In The Sixth Sense Shyamalan suggests that communication, even between those
who care for each other—especially between those who care for each other—is diffi-
cult, halting, and secretive. Cole keeps the visits from the dead locked away from his
confused but supportive mother (Toni Collette); Dr. Crowe seems unable to talk to
his former, and formerly supportive and loving wife; and Cole is wary of Dr. Crowe,
reluctant to reveal his secret. Eventually, however, Cole feels safe enough to confide
in Dr. Crowe, and the barriers to communication begin to crumble. The boy listens
to the unwitting ghosts who visit him, helping them resolve unfinished business they
have with the world of the living. Cole is empowered, and no longer victimized. He
can finally reveal his inner life to his mother, who loves him. In the end, with Cole’s
help, Dr. Crowe is finally able to talk to his wife, telling her he loves her. Even more
importantly, his wife can hear him, even though it turns out that Crowe has been
one of the violently dead, a ghost since the attack depicted in the first scene. For the
viewer, this epiphany challenges every scene in the movie, as each motivation and
action is transformed by this new awareness.
The plot of The Sixth Sense is brilliant, but it is the sensitive acting that makes the
film believable, heartbreaking, and sweetly triumphant. Bruce Willis is at his best as
Dr. Crowe; but it is the performance of young Haley Joel Osment as Cole that holds
the film together. Osment is fragile, funny, geeky, brave, and tremblingly human.
This film stays with the viewer long after the closing credits, raising questions that
may have no answers: How do we know we are alive? What is real? And perhaps most
importantly, what does love have to do with all of this? Maybe the sixth sense is not the
ability to see ghosts but the even rarer ability fully to communicate love. It has been
said that we are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone—trapped within the cage
of our five senses. In this film, Shyamalan gives us a glimpse of another sense,
connecting us through bonds of trust, hope, and love throughout and even beyond
our mortal lives.
See also: Horror Film, The; Science Fiction Film, The

453
Sleepless in Seattle

References
Bierce, Ambrose. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Man-
kato, MA: Creative Education, 1980.
Dyson, Jeremy. Bright Darkness: The Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film, London and
Washington, DC: Cassell, 1997.
James, Henry. “The Turn of the Screw.” The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels. New
York: Signet Classics, 1995.
Kovacs, Lee. The Haunted Screen: Ghosts in Literature and Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2005.
Munro, Hector Hugh (Saki). “The Open Window.” The Complete Saki, New York: Penguin,
1982.

—Helen M. York

SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE. An unapologetically romantic film, Sleepless in Seattle

became the date movie of 1993, and eventually grossed $125 million. The film opens
with Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) explaining to his son Jonah (Ross Malinger) how
his mother succumbed to cancer. Grief-stricken, Sam moves to Seattle. Eighteen
months later and with Sam still mourning, Jonah calls a radio psychiatrist who convin-
ces Sam to talk about his wife. Listening to the broadcast in Baltimore, Annie Reed
(Meg Ryan) cries over Sam’s story. Annie becomes preoccupied with Sam, despite
being engaged to Walter (Bill Pullman). Annie even writes a letter asking Sam to meet
her on top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day.
Back in Seattle, Sam struggles to rejoin the dating world, sharing a sidesplitting
exchange with Jay (Rob Reiner) about the perils of dating in the 1990s. Sam eventually
starts dating Victoria (Barbara Garrick), leading Jonah to call the radio psychiatrist and
to claim that “my father’s been captured by a ho.” Listening in Baltimore, a distressed
Annie flies to Seattle to find Sam. After unknowingly catching Sam’s eye in the airport,
Annie mistakes Sam’s sister for his girlfriend, believing he is in love with her. Before fly-
ing back to Baltimore and attempting to forget about the whole sad situation, Annie
again catches Sam’s attention by almost being run over.
Unhappy with his father’s choice of girlfriend, Jonah pleads with Sam to meet
Annie, whose letter he liked. Upset with his father’s refusal, Jonah flies to New York
by himself, and a panicked Sam follows on the next flight. Jonah and Sam reunite at
the Empire State Building in an emotional scene. On the other side of town, Annie
breaks off her engagement and rushes to the top of the Empire State Building. There
she finds Jonah’s forgotten Seattle Mariner’s backpack, seemingly knowing to whom
it belongs. When Sam and Jonah return for the backpack, Sam recognizes Annie and
the two leave hand-in-hand.
Sleepless in Seattle was heavily influenced by another romantic film, An Affair to
Remember (1957). Throughout Sleepless, the characters watch and reference the earlier
film, which is where Annie gets the Empire State Building idea. Jay even counsels Sam
to “think Cary Grant” while talking to women. That association adds to the film’s

454
 Sleepless in Seattle

Scene from the 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle, starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Directed by Nora
Ephron. (Photofest)

sentimentality, which accounts for how it moves the audience. A connection can be
made with each character as they are all familiar and likable. Even Walter, who would
have been easy for writer/director Nora Ephron to make unlovable, comes across as
friendly and affable. The strong friendship between Annie and Becky (Rosie O’Don-
nell) and the loving relationship between Sam and Jonah add to the film’s emotionality
and further connect the viewer to the characters. Relatable personalities help overcome
the occasionally contrived plot points, creating an atmosphere where the viewer empa-
thizes with the characters. As Roger Ebert wrote, the film is “as ephemeral as a talk
show, as contrived as the late show, and yet so warm and gentle I smiled the whole
way through.”
Significantly, the film turned out to be important for the careers of both Hanks and
Ryan. The two had already co-starred in an earlier film—the quirky Joe Versus the Vol-
cano (1990). Unfortunately, audiences were baffled by the film, and it ended up being a
box-office flop. But Hanks went on to make the extremely successful A League of Their
Own and Ryan Prelude to a Kiss, both of which were released in 1992, and their indi-
vidual successes helped convince Ephron that reuniting the two popular stars was not
as risky as some thought. The pairing worked so well that Hanks and Ryan would join
to make You’ve Got Mail (1998).

455
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

It may be that what made audiences “smile the whole way through” Sleepless in
Seattle were its suggestions that within the global village anyone can be your soul mate
and that when romance is real, nothing can stand in its way. At least for a brief time in
a darkened theatre, viewers could hope that everyone’s destiny is to be filled full with
love and happiness.
See also: Romantic Comedy, The

References
Ebert, Roger. “Sleepless in Seattle.” Chicago Sun Times, June 25, 1993. Available at
www.rogerebert.suntimes.com.
Pfeiffer, Lee, and Michael Lewis. The Films of Tom Hanks. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing,
1996.
—Sean Graham

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. In 1935, Walt Disney thought
about turning six cartoon shorts into one feature film. But would audiences patiently
watch for 83 minutes? When Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, based on the German
fairy tale “Schneewittchen,” from the Brothers Grimm’s collection, premiered on
December 21, 1937, the audience—studded with celebrities—cheered wildly for the
first full-length animated feature film in movie history. Snow White turned out to be
a blockbuster, taking in more money than any movie before. The reviews praised it
as a masterpiece of animation. In 1939, Disney received an honorary Academy Award
for his pioneer work and significant screen innovation, and in 2008, the American
Film Institute called it the greatest animated film of all time.
With Snow White, Disney sought to speak to both children and adults, and in the
process, completely redefined the nature of movie entertainment. He presented viewers
with a simple story and an attractive protagonist with whom they could easily identify.
Snow White is forced by her evil stepmother, the queen of the court, to work as a lowly
maid. The queen, who continual calls upon her magic mirror to proclaim that she
is the “fairest of them all,” one day is disturbed to hear the mirror unexpectedly declare
that Snow White is more beautiful than she. The queen orders her huntsman to kill the
child, but he is unable to do so. In a bravura sequence that recalls German Expression-
ism, she flees through a dark, terrifying forest in which the trees leer and claw at her.
Exhausted, she falls asleep but is discovered the next morning by forest creatures who
lead her to the house of the seven dwarfs. Realizing that Snow White is still alive, the
queen tricks her into biting a poisoned apple, which causes her to fall into a deep sleep.
The dwarfs chase the queen until she falls to her death, and then put Snow White into
a glass coffin, watching her body as the seasons change. Finally, a handsome prince
spies Snow White, and, captivated by her beauty, kisses her, and she awakens.
Snow White, it seems, functions on multiple levels. For some, it was merely a sweet
coming-of-age story; for others it was a Marxist critique of 1920s fiscal conservatism
and a Freudian expression of sexual development. Thus, some interpreted the struggle

456
 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Snow White is cradled in the Prince’s arms as the dwarfs celebrate, in a still from the animated film
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937. (Disney/Courtesy of Getty In Images)

between the queen and Snow White as representative of the battle engaging an older
generation’s capitalism and fading sexuality and a younger generation’s socialism and
awakening sexuality: during puberty Snow White lives and matures with the dwarfs,
a hardworking, communistic society; ready to become an adult, she is literally sus-
pended until the handsome prince, with his symbolic kiss, makes her into a woman.
Taking a very different perspective, the Christian Century called Disney an educator of
the soul and suggested the picture was really a religious allegory: Snow White and her
friends live in a Garden of Eden; the stepmother causes Snow White’s “fall”; and the sal-
vific Prince makes possible the triumph of love and the inculcation of family values.
However Snow White was understood, the picture’s popularity was undeniable.
This, it seems, had much to do with Disney’s attention to detail and his decision to
present the dwarfs as distinct and lovable personalities who balanced the evil of the
stepmother-queen. The redemptive quality of the film also appealed to audiences
who had been suffering through the Great Depression since 1929. Haunted by unem-
ployment and poverty, the land of opportunity had turned into a nation of despair.
Believing that his New Deal programs had successfully turned the economy around,
however, Roosevelt slowed government spending after he was reelected in 1936, once
again plunging the country into recession. Disney produced a film that responded to

457
Sound of Music, The

the economic desperation of the time, reflecting the value of hard work, the virtue of
community among common people, and the triumph of the underdog. It was his most
thoroughgoing political statement since his 1933 Depression allegory The Three Little Pigs;
and by offering his audiences a filmic release from the seemingly inescapable, he pro-
vided them with a sort of vicarious power over a world that appeared hopelessly out
of control.
See also: Animation; Disney, Walt

References
“American Cultural History, The Twentieth Century: 1930–1939.” Lone Star College, King-
wood. http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade30.html.
Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Biography. London: Aurum Press, 2008.
Solomon, Charles. Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1989.
Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Wells, Paul. Animation and America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
—Daniela Ribitsch

SOUND OF MUSIC, THE. Released in 1965, Twentieth Century-Fox’s The Sound

of Music was nominated for 10 Oscars and won five, including Best Picture and Best
Director (Robert Wise). Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer play the lead roles—
a young novitiate named Maria and a widowed Austrian naval officer, Captain von
Trapp. Their lives intersect in the late 1930s when Maria is sent to work as a nanny to
the captain’s seven children. The Sound of Music is at once a coming-of-age story, a nod
toward the Heimatfilm genre (literally the “home-land” film), and a tribute to the
masterful musical collaboration of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Within
a year of its release, The Sound of Music became the most financially successful film of
all time, held that title for five years, and still plays to enthusiastic audiences around
the world, epitomizing the international appeal of the American musical.
The Sound of Music is based loosely on the life of Vienna native Maria Augusta
Kutschera (1905–1987), who grew up an orphan and studied at Vienna’s State Teachers’
College before seeking admission as a candidate at the Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg.
Soon after, Kutschera was sent to tutor the daughter of recently widowed Austrian naval
officer Baron Georg Ritter von Trapp. According to her memoir, Kutschera fell in love
with the family’s seven children and married the baron in 1927. During the Depression,
the family began singing publicly, and their success at the 1936 Salzburg Music Festival
led to international appearances. The staunchly anti-Nazi family immigrated to the
United States in 1938, undertaking several national and international tours before
settling in Vermont.
By 1958, the von Trapp family’s experience in Nazi-occupied Austria had become
the basis for two German-language films (Die Trapp-Familie and Die Trapp-Familie

458
 Sound of Music, The

in Amerika), a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and a stage musical by
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Rodgers and Hammerstein sold the movie
rights to Twentieth Century-Fox in 1960. Ernest Lehman’s screenplay, like the stage
musical, takes considerable liberties with the original narrative. For example, the film
overlooks Maria’s early socialist upbringing in Vienna, turns Captain von Trapp’s eld-
est child into a daughter—Liesl (Charmian Carr)—and overdramatizes the family’s
flight from Nazi-occupied Austria.
As Maria, Julie Andrews plays a bright, idealistic, if somewhat unfocused young
novitiate who arrives at the von Trapp estate with an irrepressible optimism and her
guitar. She wins over the Captain’s seven children, relaxing the Captain’s strict discipli-
nary code, and introducing them to tunes including “Do, Re Mi,” “My Favorite
Things,” and “The Lonely Goatherd.” Frightened by her blossoming romance with
the much older Captain Von Trapp, Maria flees back to the abbey; after consulting
with the Mother Abbess (Peggy Wood), however, she eventually returns to the family
she loves. In a dramatic final scene, shot on location outside Salzburg and accompanied
by a choral version of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” the family hikes over the Alps to
escape the Nazi dictatorship.
After warm receptions at previews in Tulsa and Minneapolis, The Sound of Music
opened in Los Angeles in 1965. Critics described the film as sentimentalized fantasy,
but acknowledged the musical prowess of Rodgers and Hammerstein. They also noted
that the film avoided the stilted choreography plaguing most Broadway-based films,
and lauded Wise’s ability to integrate music, plot and a complex array of scenes shot
both on location and in Hollywood. In addition to Best Film and Best Director, The
Sound of Music won Academy Awards for Best Sound (James Corcoran and Fred
Hynes), Best Score (Irwin Kostal), and Best Editing (William Reynolds).
The cinematic version of The Sound of Music is closely tied to its stage counterpart,
largely because Rodgers and Hammerstein contributed to both productions; not sur-
prisingly, given the involvement of the composers, both stage play and film are best
known for their infectious melodies. Unlike in many Hollywood musicals, the songs
in The Sound of Music are an integral part of the picture’s narrative flow, contributing
to the development of both characters and plot. “Do, Re, Mi,” for example, is not sim-
ply a gratuitous production number; Maria uses the song to teach her young charges
the notes of the scale—in the process freeing both their voices and their hearts.
See also: Music in Film; Musical, The

References
Hirsch, Julia. The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1993.
Maslon, Lawrence. The Sound of Music Companion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.
Von Trapp, Maria August. The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1948.
—Kimberly A. Redding

459
Splendor in the Grass

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS. Looking at the films and plays that challenged con-
ventional moral standards of the 1950s and early 1960s, three names often appear:
Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and William Inge. As a journalist in 1944, Inge was
assigned by his newspaper to do a feature article on Williams. In the course of this
assignment, he realized that being a playwright was his biggest ambition. Before writ-
ing the original screenplay for Splendor in the Grass, Inge was previously known for
his plays Come Back Little Sheba (1950), The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) and
Picnic (1953). Elia Kazan, who had previously directed two of Williams’s most notable
works, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), directed
Splendor.
Splendor tells the story of Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty) and Deanie Loomis (Natalie
Wood), who are high school sweethearts in rural Kansas of 1928, but they and their
more closely resemble teenagers of the early 1960s. Bud comes from a wealthy family,
whose strong-willed father Ace has made his money from his oil wells, while Deanie
comes from a much less affluent home. However, it is not class differences but sex,
or rather the lack thereof, that provides the central tension of this story. Deanie’s
mother repeatedly warns her that to give into sex would taint her reputation and make
her someone boys would not want as a wife. The mother presents sex as something
unpleasant that has to be endured, not enjoyed. But when Deanie and Bud accom-
pany Bud’s sexually promiscuous older sister and her boyfriend on a date, she observes
sex as adventurous and fun. From the increasing pressure Deanie feels from Bud, she
is torn between becoming the promiscuous self-destructive easy lay or remaining the
staid proper virginal good girl. Bud, going through each scene with ever-increasing
sexual frustration, asks first his father and then his doctor for advice. The doctor
understands Bud’s dilemma but declines to advise him. Ace is too busy planning Bud’s
future to understand his crisis, and suggests finding a “different kind of girl” to satisfy
his sexual appetite. Bud initially rejects his advice, saying that he only loves Deanie,
but after a pivotal scene in which Bud, his pent-up sexual frustrations at their peak,
pushes Deanie to her knees with all the visual cues that he wants her to give him oral
sex (but using language that allowed the scene to be approved by the Production Code
Administration), Deanie collapses in despair at what he seems to be asking of her. Bud
focuses his attentions on a more sexually available girl, and Deanie, sensing his
betrayal tries to become this “other type of girl,” dressing in red, and trying to seduce
a different boy. This act completes her mental unraveling and she attempts suicide.
Although rescued, her mental state causes her to be institutionalized. The final seg-
ment of the film follows Bud and Deanie’s separate paths.
Splendor was released in 1961, on the cusp of the 1960s sexual revolution. Its chief
theme of sexual repression and how it affects its two main characters was an important
cultural step in removing the taboo of sex, something not talked about to parents or
professionals. As the decade continued, several other films continued pushing against
the sexual mores of the time, most notably Lolita (1962), Walk on the Wild Side
(1962), Marnie (1964), The Graduate (1967), and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969).
Hollywood was influenced by the field of psychiatry but altered it to fit its own
moral agenda. Nina Leibman compares Splendor to another Kazan film, A Streetcar

460
 Stagecoach

Named Desire, arguing that Hollywood misused Freud’s concept of sexual repression to
control female sexuality. Unlike Freud’s view that the repression of desire was the cause
of psychological ailments, Hollywood made it appear that the expression of such feel-
ings was the core of these maladies. Despite this criticism, however, Splendor made a
strong statement against ignoring one’s sexual urges or attempting to act as if this driv-
ing force behind romantic relationships should not be discussed.
Beatty’s role as Bud would launch his career. For Wood, it would be one of her high-
est achievements. Inge too, reached the highest point of his career by winning an Acad-
emy Award for his screenplay. Splendor epitomizes Inge’s major focus—that of lonely
lives, unrealized longings, and the hypocrisy of traditional morality.
See also: Beatty, Warren; Kazan, Elia

References
Grant, Barry K., ed. American Cinema of the 1960s. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2008.
Leibman, Nina C. “Sexual Misdemeanor/Psychoanalytic Felony.” Cinema Journal 26(2), 1987:
27–38.

—Rick Lilla

STAGECOACH. In 1937, director John Ford bought the rights to the Ernest Hay-
cox story “Stage to Lordsburg.” Two years later, Ford would use the ideas from the
story as the foundation for his iconic 1939 western Stagecoach. By the time he made
Stagecoach, Ford had established himself as one of Hollywood’s preeminent and most
prolific directors. Interestingly, he had made many B-westerns early in his career, but
had turned away from the genre for more than a decade before he made Stagecoach
in 1939. The year proved to be not only an important one for Ford as a director—
Stagecoach was accompanied by the release of his Drums Along the Mohawk and Young
Mr. Lincoln—but a pivotal year for the screen western, as in addition to Stagecoach and
Drums Along the Mohawk, films such as Dodge City, Destry Rides Again, Jesse James,
Union Pacific, The Oklahoma Kid, Frontier Marshal, Stand Up and Fight, and Man of
Conquest also appeared.
Stagecoach was the first of nine films that Ford would shoot in Arizona’s ethereal
Monument Valley, a vast, southwestern landscape marked by steep-edged mesas and
soaring buttes. Shooting there was more than difficult in 1938. As Ford’s grandson
has pointed out, to get to Monument Valley, which was located 200 miles from Flag-
staff, Arizona, the cast and crew were forced to drive over rutted dirt roads that were
crossed by numerous streambeds, none of which had bridges. Once there, they were
without phones or a telegraph, and at 5,000 feet, the area was brutally cold in the win-
ter and almost unbearably hot in the summer. Still, Ford loved to shoot there; partly
because it afforded him protection from studio heads back in Hollywood, but more
importantly, because it gave his westerns the otherworldly look and feel that he desired.

461
Stagecoach

Actors (from left) George Bancroft, John Wayne, and Louise Platt on the set of the movie Stagecoach
in 1939. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Ignoring the use of either a dateline or a scrolling historical explanation, Ford opens
the picture with a series of sweeping establishing shots of Monument Valley, in which
he crosscuts among cavalry troops, Indian warriors, and a stagecoach crossing the bar-
ren landscape. He then cuts to two lone, distant riders galloping straight at us. Using a
series of dissolves, Ford takes us into a cavalry camp with its telegraph office, where a
group of men wait anxiously for a message. Just before the line goes dead, a single-
word missive comes over the wire: “Geronimo.” With this brilliantly simple plot
device, Ford sets his story in the 1880s, when the Apache chieftain Geronimo fought
the last of the battles that constituted the Indian Wars, which had raged since the
United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the
Mexican-American War in 1848. He also defines the vast spaces of Monument Valley
as uncivilized territory, filled with anonymous savages who must be keep from civilized
folk by way of military force.
Cutting from the telegraph office to the bustling main street of a western town,
Ford quickly relocates us within the boundaries of civilization. A stagecoach noisily
makes its way down the street, stopping across from the Tonto Hotel. It is here, in
Tonto, that Ford introduces us to the characters who will populate the stage: Dallas
(Claire Trevor), a prostitute, and Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell), an alcoholic physi-
cian, who are being driven from town by the members of the Ladies Law and Order
League; Hatfield (John Carradine), a former Confederate soldier and Southern

462
 Stagecoach

sophisticate, who has been reduced to supporting himself by becoming a drifting gam-
bler; Mrs. Lucy Malloy (Louise Platt), the gentile wife of a Union officer who is desper-
ately trying to locate her husband; Ellsworth H. Gatewood (Berton Churchill), a
stuffy, dismissive banker and prominent citizen of Tonto, who, while decrying
progressive ideals as the ruination of the market economy, is sneaking out of town with
embezzled funds; Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek), a docile, nervous whiskey
drummer; Buck Rickabaugh (Andy Devine), the comical stagecoach driver; Marshal
Curley Wilcox (George Bancroft), a tough, no-nonsense lawman; and, of course, the
Ringo Kid (John Wayne), an escaped convict seeking to avenge the murders of his
father and brother.
Given that Stagecoach has long been considered a landmark cinematic work because
it succeeded in reimagining the formulaic structure of what was then the standard film
western, it is surprising to note how conventional the film actually is—Ford even gives
us the requisite cavalry-to-the-rescue scene near the end of the picture. Indeed, charac-
ters such as those who appear in Stagecoach had been seen—in myriad forms—in doz-
ens of B-westerns by the time the picture was released in 1939, and in Ford’s film they
initially seem to be nothing more than conventional narrative elements functioning
within the framework of a traditional western. Early on, however, we begin to realize
that Ford will develop these apparently typical western characters against type—or at
least as what may be understood as hybrid types. In the beginning, for instance, the
civilized, gentlemanly Hatfield and gentile Lucy Malloy prove to be hard-hearted social
snobs, while Dallas and Doc Boone, ostensibly savage violators of the social order, turn
out to be salvific figures—Doc delivers Lucy’s baby and Dallas watches over the new
mother during and after the difficult delivery—who teach the rest of the passengers
what being civilized really means. Such fictional character types were not new, of
course—in fact, they were common stereotypes. Yet Ford provides us with much more:
He slowly reveals to us that Hatfield’s vocal defense of the elitist South may actually be
connected to Hatfield’s own disturbing sense of being rejected by his father; Ford also
refuses to release Dallas and Doc from their existential struggles with prostitution and
alcoholism.
Nowhere is this troping of conventional character types more powerfully articulated
than in relation to the figure of the Ringo Kid. Not initially among the passengers who
leave Tonto, Ringo halts the stage as it makes its way out of town into the vast reaches
of Monument Valley by firing a shot from his carbine into the air. Ford, it seems,
positions Ringo here, on the frontier borderline between civilization and savagery,
intentionally. Such rogue characters—suitably violent, populist protectors of the
people—were also not new; they traced their roots back to the nineteenth-century
myths created around real-life figures such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and
fictional characters such as Natty Bumppo from the novels of James Fennimore
Cooper. In Ford’s hands, however, Ringo, although violent enough to help fight off
an Indian attack and to avenge the murders of his father and brother, is in many ways
an overgrown child, innocent in the ways of the world—he never seems to understand,
for instance, that Dallas, with whom he falls in love, is a tainted woman, one, as we
said, who will continue to be haunted by her past even as she rides off with Ringo to

463
Star Trek Series, The

begin her life anew. Ford even breaks from the code of the western by having Ringo
and Dallas ride off into the sunrise—after an unsettling noirish night in Lordsburg—
instead of into the sunset. They are headed for Mexico, transgressing, it seems, yet
another border. Apparently, there is no place for them in America; as Doc says to Curley
as they watch the couple go: “Well, they’re saved from the blessings of civilization.”
See also: Ford, John; Wayne, John; Western, The

References
Grant, Barry Keith, ed. John Ford’s Stagecoach. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Simmon, Scott. The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-
Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
—Philip C. DiMare

STAR TREK SERIES, THE. Created by Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek began as a
television series that ran on NBC from 1966 to 1969. It became an American phe-
nomenon that continues to influence cultures and inspire fans around the world. Star
Trek tells a story of adventure, exploration, and utopian communities in space, in a gal-
axy filled with strange alien beings, some wonderful, others terrifying. It is an adven-
ture that everyone can enjoy; in its imagined future, all can live fulfilling lives, all are
included in the community, and none are marginalized or oppressed. Unlike the Super-
man series, which tells of “the never ending battle for truth, justice, and the American
way,” in Star Trek, that battle has been won. Now, a united humanity enjoys peace in
the galaxy, justice in society, and truth in the pursuit of happiness. According to Star
Trek’s voiceover, space is the final frontier, and the adventure is to “explore strange
new worlds, to seek out new life, new civilizations . . . to boldly go where no one has
gone before.” This is the backdrop and the dream behind 11 full-length movies, hun-
dreds of television episodes, an animated series, numerous comic book series, and
countless novels, video games, fan clubs, and conventions.
Significantly, Star Trek’s ideal future of truth, justice, and unlimited adventure is
defined within the context of the real present using language and imagery that are
necessarily products of the past. Star Trek, then, is a construction defined by its
forward-looking creators; yet this has not diminished its popularity, or its influence.
Continuing to fuel imaginations, Star Trek has attracted a millions-strong cult follow-
ing and led to academic studies that explore its different manifestations in regard to
myth, religion, sociology, history, law, race, gender, and class.
At the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Captain Kirk orders navigator Sulu to
set the Enterprise in motion: “Ahead Warp 1.” Attempting to determine their destina-
tion, Sulu asks: “Heading, sir?” Kirk’s simple response is instructive: “Out there. That-
away.” Another adventure has wound down and the Enterprise crew is ready for more.
The appeal of this imagery is perennial, and it did not begin with Star Trek. Space as

464
 Star Trek Series, The

Actors George Takei, James Doohan, Grace Lee Whitney, Nichelle Nichols, Stephen Collins,
DeForest Kelley, Majel Barrett, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Persis Khambatta, and Walter
Koenig pose for a portrait during the filming of the movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1979.
(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

the final frontier derives from notions of futurism and American progress. In the nine-
teenth century, American progress was imagined in terms of westward expansion. It
was a dream of unlimited possibilities and endless progress made possible through sci-
ence, courage, and the spirit of adventure needed to trek across the vast American con-
tinent. Though tempered by time and the reality of limited frontier territories, this
ideal helped fuel the space race and remains important in shaping America’s identity
and civic philosophy. Its mythological imagery was first conceived in the literary
western, where stories were told about heroic men and women facing and overcoming
adversity in order to build civilization from the ground up. It found new life in science
fiction, in the hope and expectation of space travel in the future and the reality of
unlimited space beyond earth. The image of space as the ultimate frontier was first seen
in science fiction novels and comic books, later in 1930s and ’40s movie serials like
Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and still later in the Star Trek television series and in
films like Star Wars and Star Trek.
As a cultural descendant of the western, Star Trek emphasizes male camaraderie and
values like honor, loyalty, and sacrifice. Although it shares features with heroic narra-
tives like Superman and I its vision is grounded in science. It makes forays into fantasy,
but it is primarily science fiction; its human characters do not have superpowers,
although its alien characters are often endowed with super-strength compared with

465
Star Trek Series, The

humans. There tend to be no individual heroes whose sidekicks trail after them; rather,
Star Trek presents us with groups of characters, each member playing an important role
in preserving the stability of the greater community.
In their journeys into outer space, these characters explore the nature of humanity.
As Joseph Campbell explained in his work on myth, the journey to outer space is also
an inner journey. Curiosity is an important human trait, but it leads to discoveries
about the self as much as it does to discoveries of what lies outside the self. This pro-
cess of introspective exploration takes many turns as the different incarnations of Star
Trek unfold. It is there from the beginning, however. in the original series through the
character trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, whose interactions were a source of humor
and tension rarely duplicated elsewhere. They were the boys away from home, bound
by loyalty and honor. As career military men, they were friends who brought out the
best in each other, a unique, male-oriented family learning and growing together.
On a more philosophical level, they represented symbolically three essential elements
of human nature: head (Spock), heart (McCoy), and soul (Kirk). More accurately,
Spock represents rationality, McCoy emotion, and Kirk a balance between the two.
That balance is what makes Kirk a good captain, a role requiring courage, strength,
and self-control.
The familial tension in the early series, and then later in the Star Trek films, arose
mostly out of the clash between Spock and McCoy, out of the struggle between
Spock’s nearly uncompromising logic and McCoy’s explosive emotionality. McCoy is
not the only crew member who clashes with Spock, however. Indeed, because his logic
makes him so very frustratingly un-human, he becomes a sort of alien touchstone in
relation to which humanity is defined. This use of the alien that serves as representa-
tional Other to the human self is an important element of science fiction in general
and of Star Trek in particular. When we look at each of the spin-off crews in Star Trek,
we find one or two crew members whose “alienness” is defined, at least in part, by a
lack of essential human traits, and whose contrast with humanity helps to define us.
These characters include Data (The Next Generation), Odo (Deep Space Nine), the
Doctor and Seven of Nine (Voyager), and T’Pol (Enterprise). Each of these characters
lacks or suppresses that most essential of human traits, emotion, and eventually finds
or embraces it. As they do so, each journeys closer to his or her own humanity—
including Spock.
Delving further into inner space, Star Trek explores spirituality. Star Trek’s creator
excluded religion from the starship and the United Federation of Planets. Only a sec-
ular government could support Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (the Vulcan
multiracial, multiethnic philosophy at the heart of Star Trek). And, any single religion
on the starship would inevitably come into conflict with others. Nevertheless, both
original and Next Generation crews are confronted with alien religions, which they typ-
ically debunk. In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), for example, Spock’s half
brother, Sybok, leads the Enterprise across the “great barrier” of space in search of
God, who turns out to be an evil alien.
After The Next Generation, Star Trek is more open to religion. Voyager’s Captain
Janeway discovers, in “Sacred Ground,” that the spirits worshiped on an alien world

466
 Star Trek Series, The

are real, and in “Concerning Flight,” finds science and spirituality compatible. In Deep
Space Nine, the most religious of the Star Trek series, Captain Sisko discovers that the
Bajoran gods, “the Prophets,” are real, although he calls them wormhole aliens. He
serves as an emissary between them and the Bajorans, later discovers he was chosen
for that role before his birth and is descended from the Prophets through his mother,
and in the end, becomes one of them.
Significantly, Star Trek was created in the 1960s, a time of turmoil and social revo-
lution. The civil rights movement, women’s liberation, free love, and antiwar protests,
all made their way into Star Trek. The original series’ attempt to depict a future of
social justice for all met with mixed success, however. Dramatic requirements con-
flicted with the series’ antiwar ideal, and the need for ratings and advertising dollars
pitted the ideal of justice for minorities and women against racism and the attraction
of miniskirts. Still, Star Trek displayed inclusion in every episode. The cast of charac-
ters in the original series was more multicultural than any other group on any other
television show or film of the time.
In hindsight, of course, it is easy to see the limitations of the original Star Trek—
women confined to traditional roles as sex objects, nurturers, and passive listeners;
minority males limited to the lower ranks; and leading Caucasian characters shooting
barbs at the single alien Commander. Some of the blame for this went to the network
and its advertisers. They rejected the first pilot, featuring a female second in command,
but accepted the second pilot, which put women “in their place,” on the periphery in
miniskirts. But blame must also be accepted by the Star Trek writers, themselves, as
they produced stories such as “Turnabout Intruder,” which proclaimed that it was Star-
fleet policy to exclude women from command.
Series spin-offs made progress. Instead of one woman on the regular crew in the origi-
nal series (Uhura), there were two in The Next Generation (three in its first season). In an
imaginary world strongly focused on male friendships, this at least gave women someone
in whom they could confide. Women were also more prominent in the films, both as char-
acters and in backdrops, beginning with Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). Finally,
in the third spin-off, Star Trek: Voyager, several women made it to the top. The Star Trek
series had begun giving women token leadership in The Next Generation; Captain Picard’s
boss, Admiral Nechayev, was a woman who appeared only on rare occasions. In Voyager,
three main characters were women, two in the top ranks of captain and chief engineer.
Race was dealt with in both storylines and cast. In “Let That Be Your Last Battle-
field” (Star Trek, season three), for example, racism was the cause of an alien civil
war. But the differences between sides were insignificant; one group had white on
the right side of the face and black on the left and claimed to be superior to the other
group, which had black on the right side of the face and white on the left. Thus, when
they destroyed each other, it was for no other reason than blind hatred. Alien crew
members were also a resource for exploring racism. McCoy regularly railed against
Spock’s pointy ears, green blood, and Vulcan logic. And, in “The Galileo Seven” (Star
Trek, season one), crew members doubted Spock’s loyalty as the leader of an away mis-
sion. This theme was repeated in later series with Data (android), “The Doctor”

467
Star Wars Series, The

(hologram), and Seven of Nine (ex-Borg), all of whom lacked emotion, and, for that
reason, were thought by other crew members incapable of loyalty.
The crew of the original Star Trek was very diverse. It included two nonethnic
white males; alien, Japanese, Russian, and Irish crew members; and a black female.
Backdrops, such as Federation Council meetings and alien bars, were scenes of even
greater diversity, where humans mingled with strange and exotic species. In a form
of tokenism that continued throughout the original series and films, black men were
cast as admirals and other higher-ranking officers in occasional scenes depicting con-
versations between the captain and his superiors. Finally, in The Next Generation, a
black male was cast as a human crew member, and in Deep Space Nine, as the series’
leading character.
Star Trek uses aliens and alien societies, symbolically and allegorically, to deal with
controversial issues like racism, sexism, homosexuality, and war. This use of the alien
is an important part of what makes Star Trek what it is, a story combining the futurism
of science fiction with a dream of American progress that, unlike its nineteenth-century
ancestor, stands against injustice and oppression.
See also: Science Fiction Film, The

References
Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. Novato:
New World Library, 2002.
Chaires, Robert H., and Bradley Chilton, eds. Star Trek Visions of Law and Justice. Dallas: Adios
Press, 2003.
Geraghty, Lincoln, ed. The Influence of Star Trek on Television, Film and Culture. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2007.
Malmgren, Carl D. “Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters.” Science Fiction Studies 20(1),
March 1993: 15–33.
Mogen, David. Wilderness Visions: The Western Theme in Science Fiction Literature, 2nd ed. San
Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1982.
Wagner, John, and Jan Lundeen. Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
—Susan de Gaia

STAR WARS SERIES, THE. Star Wars is the collective term for a franchise of media
texts and products based on a core of six motion pictures. The original trilogy of Star
Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983) was fol-
lowed by a prequel trilogy of The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones
(2002), and Revenge of the Sith (2005). A seventh all-CGI film, The Clone Wars
(2008), was inserted into the narrative of the prequels. While many people worked
on the production of Star Wars, the franchise is typically described as the vision of its
creator, George Lucas. Star Wars changed the nature of film in America by advancing
the idea of the summer special-effects blockbuster and by becoming the gold standard

468
 Star Wars Series, The

Scene from the 1980 film Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, starring David Prowse (as
Darth Vader; voice: James Earl Jones) and Mark Hamill (as Luke Skywalker). Directed by Irvin
Kershner. (Photofest)

model in merchandising licensed products. Star Wars enjoyed enormous success.

According to the Internet Movie Database, three of the films in the franchise (Star
Wars, Phantom Menace, and Revenge of the Sith) placed in the top 10 of all-time top
U.S. box-office takes.
The original trilogy revolves around the attempt by the heroic, outnumbered Rebel
Alliance to overthrow the repressive Empire. The film centers on the character of Luke
Skywalker (Mark Hamill), a young man pursuing his destiny to become a Jedi. Men-
toring Luke are Obi-Wan “Ben” Kenobi (Alec Guinness) and the alien Yoda (voiced
by Frank Oz). Luke is aided by droids R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) and C-3PO (Anthony
Daniels), the independent and resourceful Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), and the
roguish Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his Wookie first-mate Chewbacca (Peter
Mayhew). In the second and third movies, the heroes are also joined by Lando Calris-
sian (Billy Dee Williams). Opposing these heroes is the intimidating villain Darth
Vader (David Prowse, voiced by James Earl Jones), who leads the storm troopers on
behalf of the Emperor (Ian McDiarmid).
When Star Wars debuted, the film took a different direction than science fiction
movies of the past. Unlike the monster and alien invasion films of the 1950s that
expressed American Cold War anxieties or the more cerebral fare of movies like
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars struck out in the direction of epic space opera
adventure. As with the films that followed in the series, the original movie used space as
a backdrop for grand adventure, spiced with visual spectacle. Planets were the exotic

469
Star Wars Series, The

backdrops to these quests. Viewers were taken from the twin-sunned desert planet
Tatooine to the menacing, moon-sized Death Star, a technological atrocity that
destroys other worlds.
Audiences responded enthusiastically to Star Wars. The simple morality of the first
film no doubt appealed to a nation that had gone through Watergate and was dealing
with the cultural malaise during the Carter administration. This melodramatic strain
runs through the original trilogy. Good has to work hard, but it generally triumphs
against overwhelming odds to defeat evil in the end. Although fairly direct, the narra-
tives of the films did spin out some surprises, most notably the shocking revelation, at
the end of Empire, that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. In Return of the Jedi, Luke is
able to redeem his father when Vader dramatically sacrifices his own life to save Luke
from being killed by the Emperor. Despite their surface differences, Han and Leia find
true love. In the Star Wars universe, trust in friends is always rewarded.
The films’ eye-popping special effects were also a tremendous draw. Audiences were
treated to cutting edge special-effects sequences in all the movies. Although modern in
effect, Jedi lightsaber duels invoked the swashbuckling swordfights of old Hollywood
adventures. Space battles between Rebel X-Wings and Imperial TIE fighters drew on
memories of fighter plane battles.
Viewers began to rewatch the spectacle, often bragging of the number of times
they’d seen the films. The trilogy demonstrated that well-crafted special-effects block-
busters could earn enormous profits beyond their high production cost. Star Wars led
directly to the resurrection of the Star Trek franchise with Star Trek: The Motion Pic-
ture (1979) and probably contributed to the success of movies like Superman (1978).
Such success also bred many imitators. While borrowing heavily from Star Wars’ space
opera feel, films such as Starcrash (1978) or Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) failed to
muster dazzling special effects. Later films such as The Last Starfighter (1984) would
lift whole plot elements, such as a young man destined to defeat an evil ship with a
fatal design flaw.
Many years passed before the next Star Wars movie came to the screen. The idea of
the prequel stories was hinted at by the opening narrative crawl for The Empire Strikes
Back, which labeled the film “Episode V.” In anticipation of the prequels and in cel-
ebration of the 20th anniversary of Star Wars, in 1997 the films of the original trilogy
were returned to the theaters as special editions. The first film began being known
under the new episode title, A New Hope. The special editions were not merely rere-
leased. Lucas changed the films, largely by inserting new special-effects sequences into
older scenes. While the narratives went relatively untouched, a controversial change
was made to the character of Han Solo in A New Hope, when a scene in which Han
shot the bounty hunter Greedo was altered to make it appear that Han shot only after
being fired upon by Greedo.
The prequel trilogy takes a more tragic direction as the films center on the character
of Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd, Hayden Christensen), destined to become the evil
Darth Vader. Anakin is mentored in the first film by Jedi Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson)
and then later by young Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor). Anakin is aided in his adven-
tures, and later has a doomed love affair with Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman).

470
 Star Wars Series, The

While the prequels introduce new characters like the Gungan Jar Jar Binks, audiences
see earlier versions of favorite characters such as Yoda, R2-D2, C-3PO, Obi-Wan, and
Chewbacca.
The narratives of the prequel trilogies establish a more complicated storyline. Sena-
tor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is secretly the evil Sith Lord Sidious, the sworn foe of
the Jedi. He comes to power by manipulating a war between the Jedi and the clone
army of the Republic and battle droid-reliant Trade Guilds (later subsumed into the
Separatists) To sow this chaos, Palpatine uses a number of evil agents: Darth Maul
(Ray Park) in Menace, Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) in Clones and Sith, and Gen-
eral Grievous (voiced by Matthew Wood). Exploiting the political situation and fears
of the power of the Jedi, Palpatine grabs power in the guise of offering order, thus
becoming Emperor at the end of the trilogy.
The prequel trilogies have a darker tone as Palpatine also manipulates Anakin with
tragic results. Qui-Gon believes that Anakin is the Chosen One, prophesied to bring
balance to the Force. Ambitious, Anakin chafes under what he sees as the restrictive
training system overseen by Jedi Counselors such as Yoda and Mace Windu (Samuel
L. Jackson). Secretly wed to Amidala in Clones, Anakin has nightmare visions of his
wife’s death in Sith. Palpatine uses these fears to bring Anakin under his control. Ana-
kin betrays the Jedi, leading a massacre at the Jedi Temple (a controversy among fans as
the Temple had youthful trainees). Sith concludes on a very down note as Obi-Wan
defeats Anakin in battle and a heartbroken Amidala dies giving birth to the twins Luke
and Leia. The twins are taken into hiding, establishing the pretext of the original
trilogy. The gruesomely injured Anakin is transformed, in a scene reminiscent of
Frankenstein (1931), into the cyborg Darth Vader.
In 2008, The Clone Wars presented an all–CGI adventure set between Clones and
Sith. An accomplished Jedi at this time in the stories, Anakin is given an apprentice
of his own to train, the spirited Ahsoka (voiced by Ashley Eckstein).
The Force is an important spiritual concept that runs throughout all of the films. In
Star Wars, Ben explains that the Force is an energy field that binds all living things.
Certain individuals are more connected with the Force than others, allowing them to
manipulate the Force. This manipulation grants a number of spectacular powers such
as telekinetic and telepathic abilities. Although not antitechnology, the Force is pre-
sented as something more useful, and thus more ideal, than technology. The most
famous example is Luke switching off his targeting computer and relying on the Force
to destroy the Death Star.
The prequels added a more pseudoscientific, and for fans, a more controversial
explanation for the Force by introducing the idea of midi-chlorians, microbes that
allow the manipulation of the Force. Although not confirmed in the narrative, scenes
in The Phantom Menace suggest that Anakin may have been a virgin birth, created by
the midi-chlorians.
Although Anakin is presented as a messianic figure and the Jedi function in ways
similar to the Crusaders in the prequels, the Force is not an orthodox religion along
the lines of Western Christianity. In many ways the Force is more like Eastern religions
in that it requires contemplative study to master. The Force operates on a simple

471
Star Wars Series, The

dichotomy of good and evil. Students must constantly beware the seduction of the
Dark Side of the Force, a fate that some, such as the Sith and Darth Vader, were unable
to resist. To avoid this temptation, the practitioner must constantly master his or her
emotions.
Interestingly, while the Force and the Jedi are important to the Star Wars universe,
within the narrative most characters react with skepticism to the Force. Since Luke
and Leia are born at the end of Sith, the time difference between the end of the pre-
quels and the beginning of the original trilogy is only their age. Yet in that short time,
many characters, notably Han Solo, are skeptical of the Force. In the prequels, Palpa-
tine is able to use fear of the Jedi’s power in order to scapegoat the group in his own
bid for dominance.
Star Wars presents other political and moral arguments outside the Force, although
the views are sometimes less coherent. In the original trilogy, the Empire is clearly evil
and repressive, with the Rebel Alliance taking the role of heroic underdog. Leia’s title
of Princess also suggests a monarchy akin to those found in fairy tales. In the prequels
both the Republic with its clone warriors and the Trade Guild/Separatists with their
droid armies are manipulated by Palpatine. While the Republic eventually becomes the
Empire, through most of the prequels the clone warriors are on the side of good due
to their association with the Jedi. The political universe of the prequels is more demon-
strably democratic, although the films are at pains to explain how Amidala is somehow
elected queen. The Republic’s demise models the shift from the Roman Republic to
the Roman Empire. The vulnerability of this democracy to Palpatine’s ambitions is a
contemporary warning on the fragile balance between freedom and security.
Personal morality is ultimately important in the Star Wars universe, where redemp-
tion is a powerful theme. Collectively the films may be read as Anakin Skywalker’s
tragic fall and salvation through self-sacrifice. Other redemptions can be seen in the
films, such as Han Solo’s renouncement of materialism when he returns to save Luke
in Star Wars or Lando Calrissian’s seeing beyond self-preservation when he joins the
Rebels after betraying them in Empire Strikes Back.
Technology is another vital element in Star Wars, and there is no way this entry
could begin to note all the examples. Although the Jedi teach that the Force is some-
thing more meaningful and useful in the universe, technology does all the hard work
waging the wars in these stars. The Jedi aren’t Luddites; they are best identified by their
signature weapons, the lightsaber. Sword surrogates, lightsabers feature in many
prominent duels throughout all of the films. Travel in the Star Wars universe, be it local
or intergalactic, is accomplished easily by a dizzying array of vehicles and warships.
Technology even provides important characters in the form of droids.
Special effects are a hallmark of the films. Lucas’s companies have been on the cut-
ting edge of developing this movie magic for decades. The original films pioneered the
use of models and stop-motion animation. In the rereleases Lucas used computer tech-
nology to add more effects to complete his vision. The prequels embraced CGI wiz-
ardry, creating whole environments and characters electronically. Two notable
examples of this transition are the characters of Yoda and Jabba the Hutt. Puppets

472
 Star Wars Series, The

and animatronics in the original films, the characters appeared in the prequels as CGI
animation.
While human characters abound in the Star Wars universe, one signature element of
the franchise is the inclusion of nonhuman characters. In fact, in some crucial ways the
narratives of all the films are structured around the adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO.
The duo has a knack for being in just the right place at the right time. Star Wars’
Cantina Band scene presented an array of aliens hanging out in a bar on Tattoine,
and the trend continued from there. From trusty Wookiee co-pilot Chewbacca to Jedi
master Yoda, alien beings abound. Although there is some evidence of droid prejudice
in the original trilogy, the Star Wars universe is truly diverse. Nonhumans hold
important positions and roles. A few problems do exist, most notably in Jar Jar Binks,
a character that skews painfully close to minstrel show stereotypes.
Music and sound are two more signature aspects of Star Wars. Just as the films pro-
moted visual effects, they have also advanced sound effects. Composer and conductor
John Williams created the music for all six of the live-action films. Many of the musical
leitmotifs have become well known in American culture, particularly the Star Wars
theme itself and the Imperial March that often accompanies Darth Vader’s appearan-
ces. In addition to its official releases, Star Wars music has been recorded by a number
of orchestras in a bid to raise revenues.
Although this entry has by design focused on the films themselves, Star Wars is
much more than a cinematic experience. From the beginning, Lucas has licensed this
franchise into a wide variety of products such as T-shirts, posters, costumes, and light-
sabers. Most notable of these are the Star Wars action figures. These figures changed the
nature of children’s toys by promoting a collectible line of characters, vehicles, and play
sets that children could use to reenact scenes from the movies or to create their own
adventures. Although the toy company Kenner was unable to produce action figures
in time for the 1977 holiday season (instead selling IOUs for the figures), these toys
have been sold at every holiday season since, with the line expanding to include new
elements from all the films.
Star Wars is also an important force in publishing. Alan Dean Foster’s 1978 novel
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was the first original adventure set in the Star Wars universe.
Countless other books have followed, fleshing out the events between the movies and
recounting the further adventures of characters after the films. Marvel Comics pro-
duced Star Wars comic book adventures during the original trilogy, but the rights have
moved on to other companies. There are also many reference books for the series.
Star Wars was also a source for a number of television programs. The Star Wars Hol-
iday Special (1978) centered on Chewbacca’s family, but although it featured most of
the main characters it is not accepted as canon. Never rereleased, the special is a kitschy
prize of collectors everywhere. Saturday morning cartoon Droids (1985) chronicled the
R2-D2 and C-3PO’s adventures before the original trilogy, while Ewoks (1985) fol-
lowed the lives of the fuzzy aliens from Return of the Jedi. The Clone Wars carried
directly into an all-CGI show on Cartoon Network in 2008. Star Wars is referenced
in many other media products. Two prominent cinematic parodies were Hardware
Wars (1977) and Spaceballs (1987). Some programs, such as Robot Chicken and Family

473
Streetcar Named Desire, A

Guy, have produced entire parodies of Star Wars with the permission of, and occasional
participation by, Lucas.
Not surprisingly, Lucasfilm’s video-game divisions have also produced a number of
games in the Star Wars universe. There is a massive multiplayer online Star Wars game.
Various platforms have allowed players to reenact battles from the movies (Star Wars
Battlefront) or pursue narrative adventures within the spaces of the films (The Force
Unleashed).
Finally, Star Wars was referenced politically when President Ronald Reagan unveiled
the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. SDI planned to use satellite and Earth-based
weaponry to destroy incoming ballistic missile attacks. There are no scenes in the Star
Wars films that display such moments, so the label was merely an attempt to popularize
the idea with the American public.
Few movies have won a place in the hearts and imaginations of viewers the way the
Star Wars films have. While generations of fans can and do bicker over the movies’ nar-
rative inconsistencies, the ubiquity of Star Wars in American popular culture and the
continued success of their associated products are a testament to the loyalty of those fans.
See also: Lucas, George; Science Fiction Film, The

References
Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. 3rd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2009.
Lawrence, John Shelton, and Robert Jewett. The Myth of the American Superhero. Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002.
Seabrook, John. “Letter from the Skywalker Ranch: Why Is the Force Still with Us?” New
Yorker, January 6, 1997: 40–53.

—Michael G. Robinson

STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, A. Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

is a film adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play of the same name. The play, also
directed by Kazan, won the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award,
and a Tony Award. Following on the success of the play, the film received 12 Oscar
nominations and helped to make Marlon Brando a Hollywood superstar. Except for
Vivien Leigh, all of the actors from the original Broadway production played their
stage roles on-screen. Working closely on both the theatre and film productions of
Streetcar, Williams and Kazan pioneered the concept of subjective realism and opened
up discussions of the portrayal of male and female sexuality on stage and screen.
The film centers on Blanche DuBois’s gradual descent into madness. After losing
the family plantation, Belle Reve, as well as her position as a schoolteacher, Blanche
moves to New Orleans to share a two-room apartment in the French Quarter with
her sister, Stella Kowalski (Kim Hunter), and her brutish, cynical brother-in-law, Stan-
ley Kowalski (Brando). Tennessee Williams described A Streetcar Named Desire as a
“tragedy of misunderstandings,” and the misunderstandings become apparent from

474
 Streetcar Named Desire, A

Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter in a dramatic scene from A Streetcar Named Desire written by
Tennessee Williams and directed by Elia Kazan. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

the very beginning of the picture (Murphy, 1992). Blanche makes it seem as though
she took a leave of absence from the school, when in fact, she was terminated after
becoming sexually involved with a student. She then accuses Stella of only desiring
Stanley sexually, instead of truly loving him; an accusation that rings true on one level,
as Stella’s relationship with Stanley appears at least partially based on her need for his
protection to survive the harsh life of the French Quarter.
Significantly, Blanche gives vague answers to questions or avoids them completely,
although she claims to tell the truth in regard to really important matters. While on
a date with her ultrasensitive and emotionally unaware suitor Mitch (Karl Malden),
she reveals that she feels responsible for the death of her husband, Allan Gray, who
publically shot himself at a party after revealing his homosexuality to Blanche. When
Mitch confronts her about her past indiscretions, Blanche confesses to “many meetings
with strangers,” but declares that she “never lied in [her] heart.” Mitch chooses to
believe Stanley’s version of the truth, and so he leaves Blanche to endure life alone.
What initially seems like conceit eventually reveals itself to be a defensive strategy
employed by Blanche in an attempt to survive an unforgiving, post–World War II
American society.

475
Sullivan’s Travels

For the film adaptation, director Kazan strove to transfer the stage version to the
screen, to include its themes, and insisted on using the Broadway cast in order to keep
the integrity of the play intact. Warner Bros., though, wanted Kazan to cast someone
with more box-office draw than Jessica Tandy in the role of Blanche, thus the choice
of Leigh (Freeman, 1995). Although Kazan reluctantly agreed to the requests of the
studio, the film still became a victim of the Hollywood Censorship Office. For fear
of receiving a “C,” or “condemned” rating from the League of Decency, whose moral-
ity code inspired the Hollywood production code, Warner Brothers demanded the
deletion of lines and scenes, in addition to a changed ending (Freeman 1995). In the
stage version, Stella commits Blanche to an insane asylum and remains with Stanley
as a means of survival. In the film version, however, we see a more morally and socially
acceptable ending where Stella whispers to her new baby that they are never going back
to Stanley again (Thomson, 2003). She then takes the newborn baby in her arms and
runs upstairs to the neighbor’s apartment. Kazan and Williams both felt that the mov-
ie’s changed ending ruined the story’s effectiveness in that Stella’s actions seem absurd
in the context of the rest of the film (Freeman, 1995, 28–29). As a whole, A Streetcar
Named Desire remained controversial, regardless of the producer’s cuts. In 1993, Fox
released the director’s cut of the film that includes three minutes of excised footage that
underscored the sexual tension between Stanley and Blanche, as well as Stella’s passion
for her husband. The film remains a landmark in American film for the social issues it
raised during a time of moral consciousness in American culture.
See also: Brando, Marlon; Kazan, Elia; Melodrama, The

References
Freeman, Koina. Derailment of A Streetcar Named Desire: Compromise of a Theatrical Document
through Translation to the Screen. Unpublished master’s thesis: California State University,
Long Beach, 1995.
Murphy, Brenda. Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1992
Thomson, David. Marlon Brando. New York: DK Publishing, 2003.

—Jennifer K. Morrison

SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. Writer and director Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels

(1941) explores the complex operations of socially engaged cinema during the Great
Depression, offering a satirical vision of Hollywood. The film focuses on the story of
young filmmaker John Lloyd Sullivan, who resists his role as a creator of lighthearted
comedies. Sullivan wants instead to produce a hard-hitting socially relevant film titled,
“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
Studio executives reject Sullivan’s idea, questioning his ability to produce a worth-
while film. Noting that his model in the genre of socially conscious films is director
Frank Capra, they ask Sullivan, “What do you know about hard luck?” They argue that

476
 Sullivan’s Travels

Sullivan has not experienced the life of the common man and therefore cannot pro-
duce a meaningful film about his experience.
In response, Sullivan dons the garb of a hobo and embarks on a disastrous adven-
ture in hopes of understanding the plight of the everyday individual. His butler objects
to his plan, arguing that the poor value their privacy. He cautions Sullivan, “Poverty is
not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera,
with filth, criminality, vice, and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed
away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.”
Nonetheless, Sullivan departs, pairing up with a failed actress (Veronica Lake)
who poses as a young man during their journey. The two travel to Kansas City,
where they tour a skid-row district, observing a mission, a flophouse, and a soup
kitchen. Sullivan decides to end his project. But first, he wants to distribute cash to
the poor, out of gratitude for the lessons he has learned. As he distributes five-
dollar bills, one homeless man, who had earlier stolen Sullivan’s boots, now knocks
him out and steals his money. Sturges refuses Capra’s frequently romanticized depic-
tion of the nation’s poor, instead, portraying some indigent people as both desperate
and violent.
The escaping thief is struck and killed by a passing train. Wearing the stolen boots
tagged with Sullivan’s identification, he is identified as the director. Meanwhile, during
an altercation, Sullivan, now an amnesiac, strikes a railroad yard worker with a rock.
He is tried and sentenced to six years in prison. As a prisoner, he encounters a life of
hard labor on a chain gang, abuse, and misery. He is taken with other prisoners to an
African American church to see a Walt Disney cartoon. Through that experience, he
comes to understand and appreciate the value of comedy to those who are suffering.
Although his life is one filled with pain, he can still find pleasure in the products of
Hollywood. He realizes that his destiny is to return to the studio and produce similarly
comedic films.
A darker film than those directed in this era by Capra, Sullivan’s Travels offered a
complex vision of the relationship between art, culture, and society during the Great
Depression. Sturges seemed to be saying that everyday Americans were not necessarily
either heroes or villains, and should not be painted with a broad brush. Cultural prod-
ucts, such as films, Sturges seemed to contend, need not position themselves heavy-
handedly as uplifting and educational projects. Instead, they could offer audiences a
temporary escape from reality.
Sullivan’s Travels demonstrated Sturges’s interest in experimenting with narrative
structure. Sullivan’s four journeys away from Hollywood are each presented in the style
of a distinct genre, including physical comedy, melodrama, silent film, and prison film.
The film offers audiences a nuanced exploration of the role of cultural production in
the lives of everyday Americans. Sullivan’s Travels received critical acclaim but no Acad-
emy Award nominations.
See also: Sturges, Preston

477
Sunset Blvd.

References
Moran, Kathleen, and Michael Rogin. “ ‘What’s the Matter with Capra?’ Sullivan’s Travels and
the Popular Front.” Representations 71, Summer 2000: 106–34.
Peeler, David P. Hope Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
Pells, Richard H. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the
Depression Years. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

—Ella Howard

SUNSET BLVD. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950) is one of the great Hollywood
movies about movies, rivaled, perhaps, only by Singin’ in the Rain. While the latter film
is pure joy, Sunset Blvd. provides us with dark humor and is ultimately a caustic indict-
ment of the business of Hollywood moviemaking.
The story involves a down-on-his-luck screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William
Holden), who turns into the driveway of an old mansion on Sunset Blvd. in Los
Angeles, while being chased by two men who are trying to repossess his car. The man-
sion turns out to belong to Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), an aging actress who
has never been able to acknowledge her star power has long passed. Indeed, when Joe
recognizes her, she denies that she has lost any of her movie star brilliance: “You’re
Norma Desmond,” says Joe. “You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.”
“I am big,” responds Norma crossly. “It’s the pictures that got small.”
When Norma realizes that Joe is a screenwriter, she hires him to help edit a script
she is writing that will provide her a vehicle for her comeback (although when Joe calls
it a “comeback,” she memorably snaps, “I hate that word. It’s a return!”). The two form
an uneasy interdependent relationship—she needs Joe’s skills as a writer, he needs her
money. Joe moves into the house, and the relationship evolves to the point where Joe
begins to provide not just his writing acumen, but what can best be described as
companionship.
The movie is essentially about how people in Hollywood use each other and how
ruthless they are toward one another once they no longer need each other. Early in
the story, Joe asks his agent for help in getting a job, or at least to loan him $200 until
he can finish the script that he knows will put him over the top. The agent refuses, tell-
ing Joe that the best writing in the world was done on an empty stomach. Although he
recognizes that his relationship with Norma is emotionally unhealthy, Joe nevertheless
wants Norma’s financial support to continue. In order to deal with his peculiar situa-
tion, he begins sneaking out at night to work on his own script with another, female,
screenwriter. When Norma discovers this, she threatens suicide; when Joe finally
decides to leave for good, she ends up killing him.
A darkly incisive character study, the film has an unsettling noirish sensibility.
Wilder had already directed one of the great film noirs six years earlier when he made
Double Indemnity. Like that earlier film, Sunset Blvd. is told in flashbacks with voice-
over narration—viewers know the outcome of the story from the very beginning, as

478
 Sunset Blvd.

Silent screen star Gloria Swanson stars with William Holden in the biting Hollywood satire Sunset
Blvd., directed by Billy Wilder, 1950. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

the picture opens with a shot of Joe lying face down in a swimming pool: “The poor
dope—he always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool.” Marked by
the shadowy, uncanny—even creepy—interiors of Norma’s mansion, the picture
presses in on the viewer, literally and figuratively, as Joe’s ill-advised decisions send
him spiraling toward his predetermined death.
Interestingly, Gloria Swanson was herself a well-known silent film star who found it
difficult to make the switch to sound films; and Erich von Stroheim, who played her
butler Max, although one of the truly great directors of the silent era, was never really
able to recover from his disastrous production of Greed. Wilder even had the legendary
silent film star Buster Keaton sit in as one of Norma’s guests with whom she plays
cards—guests whom Joe calls Norma’s “waxworks.”
See also: Film Noir; Wilder, Billy

References
Henry, Nora. Ethics and Social Criticism in the Hollywood Films of Erich von Stroheim, Ernst
Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Staggs, Sam. Close-up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Holly-
wood Dream. New York: St. Martin’s, 2002.
—Govind Shanadi

479
Superman: The Movie

SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE. The 1978 film version of Superman was a milestone
on many levels: It created a resurgence of a comic book character that had been an icon
for 40 years; it established the careers of its stars Christopher Reeve and Margot Kid-
der; and perhaps most importantly, it ushered in the age of the modern cinematic
superhero. The character of Superman had been introduced in Action Comics #1 in
1938 by creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. In the four decades that followed, the
world’s first “superhero” went on to star in a long-running radio show, animated car-
toon shorts, live-action movie serials, and a 1951 big-screen adventure starring George
Reeves, Superman and the Mole Men. This latter film would spawn the popular 1950s
television show.
The 1978 incarnation was produced by Alexander and Ilya Salkind, with a script by
Godfather author Mario Puzo, co-written with David and Leslie Newman and Robert
Benton. Directed by Richard Donner, the film featured a score by John Williams, hot
off of his award-winning score for Star Wars. Wanting relative unknowns to fill the
starring roles, the Salkinds chose Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder as the Man
of Steel and his love interest, Lois Lane. Gene Hackman brilliantly portrayed Super-
man’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor. The role of Superman’s father, Jor-El, went to screen
legend Marlon Brando, who received top billing even though he made only a cameo
appearance in the film.
Born as baby Kal-El on the doomed planet of Krypton, the future Superman is shot
into space by his parents in an attempt to save him from their fate. Landing in a field
outside of Smallville, Kansas, he is found by an elderly couple, Jonathan and Martha
Kent, who take the boy in and raise him as their son. As baby “Clark” grows into
adulthood, his “second” father dies, leaving him to make his way in a world that is
not his own. He emerges a decade later on the streets of Metropolis, seeking a job as
a reporter at the local newspaper, the Daily Planet. It is there that he meets Lois Lane,
as well as other Superman mainstays: editor Perry White and cub reporter Jimmy
Olsen. Once he begins fighting crime as Superman, the hero catches the attention of
criminal mastermind Lex Luthor, who has researched Superman’s origins and discov-
ered his one weakness: irradiated remnants of his long-dead planet: Kryptonite. Super-
man soon discovers Luthor’s plan to buy up thousands of acres of worthless desert
properties in the American west, and, using stolen nuclear weapons, to blow up the
San Andreas fault line, sending California into the ocean and making his “desert”
properties prime coastal real estate. Though successful in stopping Luthor, and saving
the lives of those who had been threatened, Superman discovers he is too late to save Lois
Lane, who has died in the earthquakes. Disobeying the one rule set down by his real
father, Superman uses his powers to reverse the rotation of the planet and turn back time,
which, although it allows him to save Lois, also has the ominous effect of “changing
human history.”
The success of Superman was due in large part to the timing of its release. By the end
of the 1970s, American morale had descended to one of its lowest points. Having
endured the Watergate scandal; the inglorious loss of the Vietnam War; a stagnant
economy, exacerbated by a massive energy crisis; and what was increasingly perceived
as the failure of the Carter administration, the United States, for one of the few times

480
 Superman: The Movie

Scene from the 1978 film Superman, starring Christopher Reeve. Directed by Richard Donner.
(Photofest)

in its history, seemed to be bowing its head in shame. The American people needed a
hero . . . and Superman provided them with one.
Interestingly, the film was released during the lead-up to the era of flag-waving
patriotism that defined the Reagan years. Though Superman would ultimately lose
much of his appeal as the 1980s increasingly made way for antiheroes like Batman,
Wolverine, and the Watchmen, he would never completely disappear from the land-
scape of the American psyche. Throughout the 1990s, he would be featured in no
fewer than five top-10 pop songs. He would emerge again in the wake of the events
of September 11, 2001, when, just one week after that tragic day, the WB television
network premiered what would become its most popular series, Smallville, a show
chronicling the adventures of a young Clark Kent, fulfilling his heroic destiny.
See also: Action Adventure Film, The; Science Fiction Film, The; Superhero, The

References
Burns, Kevin, Dir. Look, Up in the Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman. Warner Bros. DVD,
2006.
Daniels, Les. Superman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 1998.
—Richard A. Hall

481
This page intentionally left blank
 v
T
TAXI DRIVER. Taxi Driver (1976) is an Academy Award–winning film directed by
Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro as a mentally unstable Vietnam War vet-
eran named Travis Bickle. Bickle drives a cab at night and comes to despise the con-
temptible people who roam the city streets after dark. The film depicts the tragic
consequences of loneliness and alienation as he attempts to “clean up” the streets. Taxi
Driver is remembered not only for its gritty performances but also as the film that
inspired the 1981 attempted assassination of U.S. president Ronald Reagan by John
Hinckley, who was obsessed with Jodie Foster, the actress who plays teen prostitute Iris
in the film.
Taxi Driver can be defined as a film about failure: personal, cultural, and that of a
country engulfed in an unpopular war. While hospitalized, author Paul Schrader was
motivated to write the screenplay for Taxi Driver while reading newspaper accounts
of would-be assassin Arthur Bremer, who shot and paralyzed Alabama governor
George Wallace in 1972. After a failed relationship, Bremer began drinking heavily
and did not talk to anyone for weeks. Bremer believed that his only means to gain
the recognition he coveted was to assassinate someone of distinction, and after failing
to penetrate President Richard Nixon’s security zone, he targeted Wallace.
In Taxi Driver, Bremer is loosely represented by Bickle, an ex-Marine whose insom-
nia leads him to a job driving a New York City taxicab at night. His diary expresses his
harsh view of what he sees as the squalor and sleaze on the streets. Alienated, awkward
in his attempts at relationships, and unable to sleep, he visits the Times Square X-rated
movie theaters and watches the screen with a dispassionate gaze. The only people he
has a minimal relationship with are a group of fellow taxi drivers, whom he occasion-
ally meets for evening coffee. He consults one of them, Wizard (Peter Boyle), and
attempts to explain the dark, evil thoughts he is having.
Several defining moments in the narrative act as a catalyst in setting the motivation
for Travis. He meets and pursues beautiful blonde Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who works
in the Manhattan office of presidential candidate and U.S. senator Charles Palantine
(Leonard Harris). She is a vision of purity, dressed in a flowing white dress. After
observing her from the insulation of his taxi, he meets Betsy in the office and convinces

483
Taxi Driver

Robert De Niro points a pistol at a firing range in a still from the film Taxi Driver, directed by
Martin Scorsese. (Columbia Pictures/Fotos International/Getty Images).

her to have coffee with him. Unable to separate Betsy from his routine, alienated life-
style, he takes her to an X-rated movie on their first date and she rushes out.
His other meeting with a female is by chance, when Iris, a teenage prostitute, sud-
denly gets into his taxi and tells him to drive away quickly. Before he can react, she is
pulled out of the cab by her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel), who drops a $20 bill on
his seat and tells him to forget about what just happened. In his wanderings, Travis
again meets Iris and this time befriends her, attempting to convince her to abandon
her lifestyle and return home.
One evening Travis picks up Palantine and his aides on their way to an event.
During the ride he tells the senator how he feels about the city being a cesspool and
how it must be cleaned up. Palantine humors Travis, realizing that he is deranged. In
another self-defining incident, Travis, who has purchased an array of assault weapons,
confronts an armed robber in a convenience store and shoots him, leaving the unli-
censed gun with the store owner before fleeing. Deciding to organize his life and get
his body into shape, Travis begins a regimen of lifting weights and doing push-ups
and pull-ups. Visiting a Palantine rally, he approaches a Secret Service agent, who
becomes suspicious when Travis asks questions about becoming an agent. Travis blends
into the crowd before another agent can photograph him.
Back home, in one of the most famous scenes in film, Travis, wearing a green mili-
tary fatigue jacket, poses in front of a mirror, posturing as a tough guy and repeating
the phrase “You talkin’ to me?” while drawing his gun from a forearm spring-loaded

484
 Terminator Series, The

holster. Travis begins to set his life in order, writing a final letter to his parents, articu-
lating his fantasy of living with Betsy and working at a sensitive job with the
government. He stuffs $500 into an envelope intended for Iris, thinking that he will
be dead by the time she receives it. Wearing a Mohawk-style haircut, Travis stalks
Palantine at a rally with the intent to assassinate him, but flees after being seen by a
Secret Service agent.
In a bloodthirsty scene of retribution and symbolic cleansing, Travis confronts Sport
outside Iris’s apartment and shoots him. He enters the building, shooting the manager,
and is wounded in the neck by Sport, whom he kills. Then he is shot in the arm by
Iris’s customer, whom he shoots in the face and chest. He wrestles with the manager
and, after subduing him in front of Iris, he tries to shoot himself under the chin but
is out of bullets. As the police enter he puts his bloody trigger finger to his head and
mimics the sound of a shot.
The media pay tribute to him as a hero who rescued the young Iris from her invol-
untary servitude. He is lauded as a purveyor of vigilante justice, cleaning the city of its
filth. In the last scene he is the next taxi in line at the St. Regis Hotel as Betsy enters
the cab. They say little, and when they reach her apartment, Travis refuses to accept
Betsy’s offer to pay the fare and he drives away, taking a last glance of her in the rearview
mirror.
Taxi Driver received high critical acclaim and was nominated for four Oscars at the
1977 Academy Awards presentation, including Best Actor (De Niro), Best Supporting
Actress (Foster), Best Original Score, and Best Picture.
See also: De Niro, Robert; Scorsese, Martin

References
Schrader, Paul. Taxi Driver. London: Faber & Faber, 2000.
Taubin, Amy. Taxi Driver. London: British Film Institute, 2008.

—James Roman

TERMINATOR SERIES, THE. The Terminator (1984), James Cameron’s low-

budget science fiction film featuring a relentless cyborg killer from the future, captured
the zeitgeist of early 1980s America by reflecting the culture’s ambivalence toward
technology at the dawn of the digital revolution. The surprise success of the film set
the stage for numerous sequels, and launched a franchise that continues to generate
spin-off products in a wide variety of media formats.
The terminator character has become synonymous with Arnold Schwarzenegger,
who played the T-800 cyborg assassin in the first film. Born in the small town of Thal,
Austria, Schwarzenegger achieved international fame as a bodybuilder, winning the
Mr. Universe title five times and Mr. Olympia title seven times between 1966 and
1980. He began his acting career with Hercules in New York (1970) and appeared in
numerous other films before becoming a serious box-office draw in Conan the

485
Terminator Series, The

Barbarian (1982). For The Termi-

nator, Schwarzenegger was ini-
tially offered the role of the hero,
but chose the role of the flesh-
covered robot villain instead, using
his muscle-bound physique and
thick Austrian accent to define the
character of the unstoppable kill-
ing machine. Schwarzenegger’s
portrayal of the terminator made
him one of the world’s most popu-
lar action movie stars of the next
two decades.
The film was also a career
launcher for James Cameron,
who, prior to The Terminator,
had only directed one feature
film, Piranha II: The Spawning
(1981). After The Terminator,
Cameron went on to direct many
popular Hollywood movies,
including the enormously suc-
cessful Titanic (1997), which
won 11 Academy Awards and is
one of the top-grossing motion
pictures of all time. He also
directed The Terminator’s sequel,
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Scene from the 1984 film The Terminator, starring Arnold (1991). For The Terminator,
Schwarzenegger. Directed by James Cameron. (Photofest) Cameron shares screenwriting
credits with Gale Anne Hurd,
who also produced the film and married Cameron a year after its release. The story
was largely based on two 1964 episodes of the television show The Outer Limits written
by Harlan Ellison, entitled “Soldier,” and “Demon with a Glass Hand.” Cameron’s in-
fluence is most obvious in The Terminator’s special effects which, despite a modest
budget of only $6.4 million, achieved a convincing vision of a dystopic future that
rivaled films with larger budgets, such as Ridley Scott’s classic Blade Runner (1981).
The Terminator begins in Los Angeles in 2029. A sophisticated computer system
called Skynet has started World War III as a way of eliminating all human life. Some
humans have survived to wage war against the machines. Skynet has created an army
of cyborgs to infiltrate and kill off these human resistors, but it realizes that in order
to win against the humans it must eliminate their leader, John Connor, before he is
born. Skynet sends the T-800 back in time to kill John’s mother, Sarah Connor (Linda
Hamilton), before she conceives. To protect his mother from the T-800, John sends

486
 Terminator Series, The

Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) back in time. Kyle finds Sarah just before the T-800, say-
ing, “Come with me if you want to live.” Kyle and Sarah then flee from the T-800 and
hide out in a hotel room where Kyle confesses that he has always loved Sarah. They
consummate their relationship (conceiving John in the process), and ultimately con-
front the T-800 in a final showdown in which Kyle is killed, but Sarah manages to
crush the T-800 in a compactor.
Like many dystopic science fiction films, The Terminator bristles with strong under-
currents of technophobia. Throughout the film there are scenes where machines break
down or fail to help human beings. Telephones, a police radio, an answering machine,
a walkman, all play a role in either assisting the T-800 in its quest to find Sarah, or pre-
venting victims from recognizing the danger the T-800 presents. In addition, the
T-800 consistently uses automobiles and a panoply of weapons against human beings.
The most enduring image of the relentless incursion of technology into everyday
American life is the T-800 itself, particularly when its flesh is burned off and it contin-
ues to pursue Sarah as a robotic skeleton.
Despite its dark, technophobic undertones, The Terminator is not without humor,
and the credit for this must be given to Schwarzenegger, whose deadpan delivery and
heavy Austrian accent turned throwaway lines of dialogue into memorable snippets
of popular vernacular. Before crashing a car into the police station where Sarah is being
held in protective custody, the T-800 politely asks a clerk if he may see Sarah Connor.
When he is told he will have to wait, the T-800 looks around the room, and in a flat
mechanical voice says, “I’ll be back.” The phrase would become not only the signature
line of the movie, but also a forecaster of numerous Terminator sequels, and an indica-
tor of the cultural longevity of Arnold Schwarzenegger. For legal and technical reasons
it took seven years, but eventually the terminator did come back.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of the few sequels that is generally regarded as
being superior to the original. Written by Cameron and William Wisher, T2 was the
most expensive movie of its time with a budget exceeding $100 million, but it made
more than five times its cost in worldwide box-office sales. Its special effects helped
to pioneer a new era of computer-generated imagery that would be seen in later films
such as Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). Along with its popular success,
T2 won Academy Awards for soundtrack, visual special effects, sound effects, and
make-up. The key to its success, however, is that it does not merely repeat the themes
of the first film. Instead, it takes the technophobic theme and reverses it, showing that
technology can also be used to benefit human beings.
T2 takes place 13 years after the original Terminator. This time two cyborgs are sent
back to present day Los Angeles. One is a T-800 (Schwarzenegger) that the John
Connor of the future has captured, reprogrammed, and sent back to protect the
13-year old John Connor (Edward Furlong) from the T-1000, Skynet’s newest termi-
nator. The T-1000 (Robert Patrick) is even more dangerous than the T-800. Com-
posed of “liquid metal,” the T-1000 can resume its original shape after being shot,
burned, or crushed, and can even shape-shift to take the form of other humans of sim-
ilar size. Robert Patrick’s clean-cut looks and policeman’s uniform make the T-1000
less menacing than the bulky, foreign accented Schwarzenegger was in the first film.

487
Terminator Series, The

At the same time, its impressive ability to shape-shift undermines the technophobic
subtext of the first Terminator with its seductive visual spectacle.
In addition to the T-1000’s stunning liquid metal effects, the T-800’s role reversal
from assassin to protector contributes to an overall positive view of technology
in T2. Schwarzenegger plays the T-800 like a father figure to the young John Connor,
and even sacrifices himself at the end, descending into a cauldron of molten steel so
that Cyberdyne, the company that eventually develops Skynet, will not be able to use
his technology. This opposite characterization of the T-800 reflected Schwarzenegger’s
new image as one of the most popular action heroes in the world. He had even proved
himself a competent comedian in Twins (1988), and Kindergarten Cop (1990), and his
role in T2 shows this change as well, with many comic lines coming from his imitation
of John Connor’s teenage slang. In one scene, before shooting the T-1000, he sardoni-
cally utters another phrase that would enter the cultural lexicon, “Hasta la vista, Baby.”
Another character who changed radically from the original Terminator was Sarah
Connor, again played by Linda Hamilton. At the beginning of T2, Sarah is being held
in a maximum-security insane asylum because she is obsessed with trying to prevent
World War III. Apart from her mental change, Sarah is also physically transformed.
When we first see her, she is doing pull-ups in a sleeveless tank top. She has progressed
from a docile, stereotypically feminine woman who needs to be protected by Kyle Reese
in the first film, into a lean, muscular killer who, in many ways, takes on the traits of
a cyborg terminator. She also has a single-minded ambition to kill Miles Dyson (Joe
Morton), the man responsible for the development of Skynet, and sets out to do so with
a laser-sighted rifle reminiscent of the laser-sight the T-800 trained on her in the first
film. Just before “terminating” Dyson in front of his family, Sarah regains her humanity,
and together with John and the T-800, recruits Dyson to help destroy the Cyberdyne
offices.
The strong characterization of Sarah Connor in T2 takes up the latent feminism of
the first movie and expands it. Where Sarah requires Kyle’s training in the first film
before she can kill the T-800, by the second film Sarah has become an action heroine
in her own right. Since she is also the narrator of the second film, Sarah has voice-
over authority in the depiction of the story events as well. The third Terminator movie
would go even further in depicting a powerful female character, but it would not be
Sarah Connor. Instead, the strong female character is a new cyborg killer.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) was the first Terminator film not written
and directed by James Cameron. Jonathan Mostow, fresh from helming U-571
(2000), agreed to direct after Cameron turned it down. The story does not differ sub-
stantially from T2, but John Connor (Nick Stahl) is older; Sarah Connor has died;
and, along with the T-800 (Schwarzenegger), who is sent to protect Connor again, a
newer T-X, “terminatrix” (Kristanna Loken), is sent to kill Connor and anyone who
might assist him in the future. The T-X has the same shape-shifting abilities that the
T-1000 had, but can also remotely control other machines. Connor and his future
wife, Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), try to prevent Skynet’s nuclear war, but in the
end, are only able to hide out in an underground base station and wait it out.

488
 Thelma and Louise

Despite Schwarzenegger’s star power, and an enormous budget of $200 million,

T3 was not able to turn a profit during its theatrical run in the United States. For
many, the third Terminator film had lapsed into parody. A typical example occurs in
the beginning. In each film, the naked T-800 confronts the first people it meets in
order to acquire clothing. In the original film, the T-800 violently dispatches a trio
of street punks. In T2, the T-800 enters a biker bar, where the thugs are considerably
tougher, but again, defeats them. By the third film, the T-800 repeats this same perfor-
mance in a club for male strippers, where his nudity is applauded as part of the act, and
he is told to “talk to the hand,” when he asks for one of the stripper’s clothes.
Despite the shortcomings of T3, it showed that after two decades, there was still
plenty of interest in the franchise. Terminator 4: Salvation was released in 2009. It
starred Christian Bale as John Connor, with Roland Kickinger, another Austrian body-
builder, playing the part of the T-800. Beyond the four films, the Terminator franchise
has produced novels, video games, and a Fox television series entitled Terminator: The
Sarah Connor Chronicles, which stars Lena Headey as Sarah Connor and Thomas
Dekker as a teenage John Connor. With all of these spin-offs, the influence of the
time-traveling terminator will likely continue long into the future.
See also: Action Adventure Film, The; Science Fiction Film, The

References
Friedman, Norman L. “The Terminator: Changes in Critical Evaluations of Cultural Produc-
tions.” Journal of Popular Culture 28(1), 1994: 73–80.
Mann, Karen. “Narrative Entanglements: ‘The Terminator.’ ” Film Quarterly 43(2): 17–27.
Rushing, Janice Hocker, and Thomas S. Frentz. Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in
American Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
—Joseph Christopher Schaub

THELMA AND LOUISE. Directed by Ridley Scott—best known at the time for
such slick sci-fi thrillers as Alien and Blade Runner—Thelma and Louise burst on the
scene in 1991, garnering immediate, though not universal, critical and popular
acclaim. The film tells the story of Thelma (Geena Davis), a housewife whose spirit
seems to be largely stifled by her domineering husband Darryl (Christopher McDon-
ald), and Louise (Susan Sarandon), an unmarried waitress whose obvious strength
masks a trauma hidden deep within her past; it follows them through a series of serio-
comic adventures that begin when they go off on what they think will be a relaxing
two-day road trip. Callie Khouri wrote the original screenplay, and wanted to direct
the film herself, but was unable to find a studio willing to produce it until Scott agreed
to direct it for MGM—an arrangement Khouri approved on the condition that Scott
promise not to change her ending. The film features performances by Brad Pitt, in
his first role in a major Hollywood production, Harvey Keitel, and Michael Madsen.
Thelma and Louise’s little trip takes an unexpected turn when Thelma is nearly
raped by a man with whom she’s flirted in a bar (Timothy Carhart) and Louise

489
Thelma and Louise

Scene from the 1991 film Thelma and Louise, starring Susan Sarandon (left) and Geena Davis.
Directed by Ridley Scott. (Photofest)

intervenes, shooting and killing the attacker. Convinced that their story of self-defense
would never be believed by the authorities, Thelma and Louise decide to flee to
Mexico. On the way, they meet a charming thief, J. D. (Pitt), who ends up seducing
Thelma, teaching her how he commits robberies, and stealing all of the women’s
money. As their flight gets more desperate, Thelma and Louise embrace the life of care-
free outlaws, and for a time manage to evade capture by both the FBI and a sympa-
thetic local detective (Keitel). Ultimately, however, their attempts to escape the
authorities prove futile, and they choose the only option that they feel is left to them—
they literally fly off a cliff in their car. Although Scott, in a shot reminiscent of George
Roy Hill’s final shot in another outlaw-buddy-movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid, freezes the frame with Thelma, Louise, and their car in midflight over a deep ravine,
we can only assume that our protagonists have been set free from their tragically
oppressive lives by dying.
For the most part, Thelma and Louise was received by both critics and the filmgoing
public with wild enthusiasm. In particular, it was praised for its appropriation and sub-
version of numerous well-established cinematic genres, including the buddy film, the
road film, the outlaw-couple-on-the-run film, and the female friendship film. It was
hailed as a feminist manifesto, a celebration of Thelma and Louise’s refusal to be deter-
mined by the demands of a patriarchal society, as embodied in the conventions of both
personal relationships and a legal system that all too often fails to protect female vic-
tims of male violence. However, it also generated a great deal of controversy, with

490
 Third Man, The

numerous critics taking it to task for its violence and its derogatory—even, ironically,
essentialist—depictions of men.
The question of whether or not Thelma and Louise is really a feminist film continues
to be debated, particularly in academic circles where scholars have been writing about
and discussing the film since it was released two decades ago. Building on the feminist
film theory of Laura Mulvey, much of the scholarly criticism related to Thelma and
Louise focuses on the extent to which the film is or is not successful in contributing to
the construction of a female gaze that subverts the male gaze that, for Mulvey and others,
structures cinematic viewing pleasure. Khouri herself has argued that Thelma and Louise
are not feminists but outlaws, yet she also acknowledges that she wrote the film because
she was tired of the predominance of passive roles for women in American cinema—an
acknowledgment that suggests the implicit, if not explicit, feminist agenda of the film.
Thelma and Louise received numerous awards, and even more award nominations.
Screenwriter Khouri won an Academy Award and a Writers Guild Award for Best
Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, and a Golden Globe Award for
Best Screenplay, Motion Picture. Davis and Sarandon were both nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and for the Golden Globe Award
for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture. The film also received Acad-
emy Award nominations for Best Director, Best Cinematographer (Adrian Biddle),
and Best Film Editing (Thom Noble), as well as a Golden Globe nomination for Best
Motion Picture, Drama.
The 2003 DVD release of Thelma and Louise includes a 2001 documentary in three
parts, Thelma and Louise: The Last Journey, featuring timely interviews with Scott,
Khouri, and several key cast members; 30 minutes of footage deleted from the theatri-
cal release; and an alternate ending with commentary from Scott. The DVD continues
to generate sales well into the second decade of the film’s life, suggesting that Thelma
and Louise still resonates with the American moviegoing public.
See also: Male Gaze, The; Mulvey, Laura; Scott, Ridley

References
Cook, Bernie, ed. Thelma and Louise Live! The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007.
Fournier, Gina. Thelma and Louise and Women in Hollywood. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.
Hollinger, Karen. In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Sturken, Marita. Thelma and Louise. London: British Film Institute, 2000.
—Judith Poxon

THIRD MAN, THE. Adapted from Graham Greene’s novel of the same name,
Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) is a noir thriller set in the divided city of Vienna
after World War II. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), a writer of pulp-fiction westerns,
is invited to Vienna by an old school friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles). Accepting

491
Third Man, The

the invitation, Holly arrives in Vienna only to find that Harry has died under mysteri-
ous circumstances, apparently related to smuggled penicillin. Unnerved by stories he
begins to hear about Harry and the black market trade of penicillin, Holly sets about
clearing his friend’s name.
Filmed in 1948, shortly after the end of World War II, The Third Man was released
at the point where the Cold War relationship between the Soviet Union and the
United States was becoming increasingly tense. As early as 1946, the prescient Winston
Churchill had warned that an “Iron Curtain” was descending across Eastern Europe;
and in 1947, George Kennan sent his infamous “Long Telegram” to President Truman,
detailing what he called the policy of “containment.” By 1949, Mao and the commu-
nists had come to power, and Truman was being accused of “losing China.”
The film explores what was a real black market in stolen and adulterated drugs in an
occupied city. In Vienna, large amounts of these drugs were moved by criminals
through the city’s massive underground sewer system—the mazelike system was also
used by criminals to slip from one sector of the city to another. The Austrian author-
ities actually put together a special unit of sewer police, which was depicted in the film’s
climactic chase scenes. Interestingly, because the film’s producer, David O. Selznick,
felt that the original script was marked by anti-American sensibilities, he insisted that
a plotline that had Americans involved in Lime’s gang be eliminated and that Lime’s
nationality not be revealed—leaving Holly Martins as the lone well-intentioned
American who would set things right.
Viewers identified with the openness and optimism of Martins, who embodied the
notion that American energy and dedication could rescue something worthwhile from
tired old Vienna—much as the American military had rescued Europe from its worst
wartime nightmare. Martins even characterizes himself as being like the hero of one
of his novels, The Lone Rider of Santa Fe. Things were not as simple as they seemed,
however, as the Vienna of The Third Man ended up being considerably darker and
wilder than the pulp-fiction westerns penned by the naive Martins.
Interestingly, although the film is marked by an explicit sense of technical and
psychological darkness, it is nevertheless redemptive at its core. In the end, The Third
Man is very much about saving individuals—Anna from life in a communist state,
children from the effects of impure drugs, and Martins from being murdered. Indeed,
even Martins’s misguided attempt to save his friend’s reputation, his merciful ending of
that friend’s suffering, and Anna’s steadfast loyalty to her criminal boyfriend and
refusal to take up with Martins affirm the value of human relationships.
See also: Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The; Welles, Orson

References
Carpenter, Lynette. “ ‘I Never Knew the Old Vienna’: Cold War Politics and The Third Man.”
In Phillips, William H., ed. Analyzing Films: A Practical Guide. New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, 1983: 40–47.
Falk, Quentin. Travels in Greenland: The Cinema of Graham Greene. New York: Quartet Books,
1984.

492
 Three Kings

Man, Glenn K. S. “The Third Man: Pulp Fiction and Art Film.” Literature/Film Quarterly 21(3),
Summer 1993: 171–77.

—W. M. Hagen

THREE KINGS. The U.S.-led international military coalition’s goal during the
Gulf War, Americans were told, was to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation and to
prevent further aggression by Iraq’s despotic leader, Saddam Hussein. U.S. military
action, dominated by Operation Desert Storm, began in mid-January 1991. Six short
weeks later, President George H. W. Bush declared victory. Reports of a high civilian
death toll, environmental damage caused by oil spills and oil fires, and Hussein’s con-
tinuing attacks on Kurds and Shiite Muslims dampened the celebration for some on
the home front. However, largely because fewer than 300 American troops died, the
war did not generate the same level of controversy in the United States as did Vietnam
or even Ronald Reagan’s interventions in Central America in the 1980s. Desert Storm
Commander Norman Schwarzkopf returned home a war hero, and on March 1
President Bush exclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and
for all.” While this triumphalist view permeated American media and popular culture
during the decade between the Gulf War and September 11, 2001, David O. Russell’s
bracing Three Kings (1999) represents an important exception.
A unique blend of acerbic black humor and earnest moral inquiry, Three Kings is set
in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm. Immediately questioning the idea that the
Gulf War represented a clean break from Vietnam, the film’s second scene shows
soldiers marking their victory by dancing to Rare Earth’s 1971 hit “I Just Want to
Celebrate.” During the party, a journalist tells Special Forces officer Major Archie
Gates (George Clooney) a rumor that Iraqis are keeping gold stolen from Kuwait in
nearby bunkers; the following day, troops find a map to the bunkers on the body of
an Iraqi prisoner. Gates, who earlier tells another officer, “I don’t know what we did
here,” decides that if he is not going to find meaning in the war, he can at least try to
find enrichment, and he leads three soldiers on a mission to resteal the gold. What
begins like a hijinks-filled heist picture shifts dramatically after the foursome witnesses
an Iraqi soldier execute the wife of an anti-Saddam leader. Suddenly, the need to pro-
tect refugees begins to compete with the search for gold. “Bush told the people to rise
up against Saddam,” Gates explains. “They thought they’d have our support—they
don’t. Now they’re getting slaughtered.” Will these soldiers do the right thing?
If the most famous Vietnam films retreated from the simple patriotism of World
War II movies by portraying troubled soldiers succumbing to the complexity and ter-
ror of war, Three Kings depicts the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War both as a sur-
real, media-managed situation and one in which the moral choices are so clear that
even four American men looking for action like frat boys on a Saturday night can man-
age them. Unlike World War II movie heroes or the tortured souls of many Vietnam
films, Three Kings’ protagonists remain average GI Joes throughout, only half-
believing they will find the riches that will enable them to quit their low-status jobs
back home. Like the Vietnam War, the Gulf War was fought by the working class,

493
Titanic

yet this film’s signifiers of class are humorous and ironic. The soldiers are not Michael
Cimino’s primal deer hunters or stand-ins for America in the manner of the broken
fighting men of Born on the Fourth of July. Instead, Vig (Spike Jonze) is shown back
home practicing his marksmanship by shooting stuffed animals with a sawed-off shot-
gun, and Elgin’s (Ice Cube) service to his country represents, as a freeze-frame caption
reads, “a four-month paid vacation from Detroit.”
The comedy in Three Kings is complimented by sympathetic portrayals of Iraqi ref-
ugees that won accolades from Middle Eastern Americans, and by Russell’s anatomical
depictions of violence. In one of the film’s signature scenes, Gates responds to the
troops’ desire for action by asking if they know what happens when one suffers a bullet
wound. As the camera moves inside the body of one of the soldiers, we see a bullet rip
through tissue and generate bright green bile, producing the kind of footage seen regu-
larly over the past decade on television shows such as CSI and House, MD. Although it
can be jolting watching Three Kings’ unusual blend of realism and surrealism, of satire
and sincerity, the film provides strong evidence that post-Cold War warfare demands
postmodern filmmaking.
See also: War Film, The

References
Edelstein, David. “One Film, Two Wars, ‘Three Kings.’ ” New York Times, April 6, 2003.
McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since
1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
—Kenneth F. Maffitt

TITANIC. Titanic was initially perceived as a disaster waiting to happen—again.

During production, rumors circulated about problems on the set, an obsessed director,
and production budget overruns. The unprecedented commercial success of the film
changed all that. Released in December 1997, Titanic was the first movie to gross more
than $1 billion worldwide. Reviewers subsequently recast the record-breaking cost of
production ($200 million) as a sign of the film’s quality. Director James Cameron
was heralded as an auteur and a stickler for historical authenticity. The film went on
to win 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Critics and scholars offer various explanations for the film’s extraordinary popularity
with audiences: the mix of genre elements; the lavish visual style; the narrative frame
linking past and present; the teen heartthrob status of Leonardo DiCaprio; the savvy
marketing of the soundtrack, including the hit song by Celine Dion; and nostalgia
for the big-budget epic romances of the past. Although there may be no single explan-
ation for the Titanic phenomenon, the film’s appeal to both female and male viewers
is significant. Titanic is representative of a contemporary production trend in
Hollywood: female-centered action-adventure films designed to woo female viewers
without alienating male viewers, the genre’s core audience.

494
 Titanic

Scene from the 1997 film Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Directed by James
Cameron. (Photofest)

In the film, Rose’s (Kate Winslet) oppression as an upper-class woman is opposed to

Jack’s (DiCaprio) freedom as a working-class man. One scene in particular captures the
sense of freedom that Jack has and Rose wants. Jack, along with Fabrizio (Danny
Nucci), a friend from steerage, climbs up on the bow of the ship in order to experience
the exhilaration of speed and movement as the Titanic sets out for America, full steam
ahead. As pistons engage, dolphins leap, and heavily synthesized music swells, Fabrizio,
the hopeful immigrant, shouts excitedly that he can “see the Statue of Liberty already,”
while Jack throws his arms open wide and declares himself “the king of the world.”
This is a sensation scene, designed less for advancing the narrative than to evoke the
feelings associated with being alive—with being a male body in the world, specifically.
The extent to which that body might be oppressed by virtue of its class status is elided
in the film. Instead, oppression is located with Rose and the constraints of her experi-
ence as a woman on the “upper deck.”
Rose’s attempts to fight back against gender oppression are linked with the women’s
suffrage movement in America. In one scene, Rose and her family members dine with
Ismay (Jonathan Hyde), managing director of White Star Lines, and Andrews (Victor
Garber), Titanic’s designer. Ismay boasts that Titanic is “the largest moving object ever
made by the hand of man in all of history,” while Andrews, of a more modest
demeanor, displaces the credit due to him for having designed the ship by referring to
the grandiosity of Ismay’s idea: “He envisioned a steamer so grand in scale and so

495
Titanic

luxurious in its appointments that its supremacy would never be challenged.” Rose
reacts to the idea of “supremacy that can never be challenged” by doing just that. She
lights a cigarette—the sign of a suffragist in 1912 America—as a subtle challenge to
the patriarchal supremacy implicit in Ismay’s idea. Ruth (Frances Fisher), Rose’s
mother, immediately chastises her for lighting up, while Cal (Billy Zane), her fiancé,
snatches the cigarette out of her mouth and extinguishes it. Ruth and Cal are melodra-
matic villains, upholding oppressive gender ideologies that the film will work to
overcome.
In addition to adopting the attitude of the suffragette, Rose gradually begins to
manifest the physical freedom associated with the working-class man. She is trans-
formed into an action heroine—literally becoming like Jack in a type-scene repeat in
which she is allowed to become “king of the world” on the soaring bow of the ship.
In another scene, Jack is not only trapped within the sinking ship, he is melodramati-
cally trapped within the trap, handcuffed to a pipe on a lower deck that is quickly fill-
ing with water. It is up to Rose to save him, which she does, in the nick of time. In
another scene, with Rose in the lead, she and Jack attempt to outrun a deluge but are
swept underwater and deposited against a locked gate. Miraculously, a steward appears
and, with trembling hands, tries to unlock the gate, once again invoking the narrative
question central to suspense: will he release them in the nick of time or will he be too
late? When the steward drops the keys and flees in a panic, Jack dives underwater and
recovers them, escalating the suspense. “What one is it, Rose?” he cries, abiding by the
gender politics of the film, which resist letting the male character take over at the
expense of the female hero. Rose cleverly identifies the correct key in the nick of time.
In the final scenes of the film, Cameron prepares us for the possibility of Rose’s
death but also invites us to “let go” via the sensory and emotional experience of film
entertainment. “The former world has passed away,” announces a priest as passengers
kneel and pray while struggling to hold onto him. The next shot depicts the body of
a young woman in a diaphanous white gown floating weightlessly in her underwater
grave. This image is followed by shots of the ship tipping upright, stern over bow.
One after another, passengers let go, screaming, and slide down the deck of the ship,
in a manner reminiscent of an amusement park ride. This effect continues as the ship
snaps in two. The stern plunges and then is upended once again, giving passengers
(and members of the audience) the roller coaster ride of their lives.
The connection between death and film entertainment as conduits for “letting go”
is confirmed as Jack climbs over the railings of the ship and positions himself “over-
board,” as it were, inviting Rose to join him. “Give me your hand. I’ve got you. I won’t
let go,” he exclaims. The ship bobs momentarily, as if waiting for Jack and Rose to
secure themselves in their seats, and then begins its final, spectacular plunge. “This is
it!” Jack declares. This is the moment toward which the film has been building: the
moment of death, facilitated by the film’s most thrilling special effects. The ship
plunges vertically into the water and disappears from the horizon for the last time.
Pulled along in the ship’s wake, Jack and Rose struggle to hold onto each other, but
are forced to let go. Making their way to the surface, Jack guides Rose to a piece of
floating debris and helps her onto it while remaining nearby, submerged in the icy

496
 To Kill a Mockingbird

water. He then enlists her in promising that she’ll “survive,” that she’ll “never give up,
no matter what happens, no matter how hopeless,” that she’ll “never let go.” Clutching
Jack’s trembling hand, Rose agrees to “never let go.” The irony, of course, is that in
order to keep her promise to survive, she must eventually “let go” of Jack in death.
She releases him into the icy depths, and viewers into the experience of pathos and
heightened emotion.
Rose is eventually rescued and delivered to the safety of America’s harbor. From her
position on Carpathia’s steerage deck, gazing on the Statue of Liberty, she declares her
new name, rejecting the values of her repressive past. As Rose Dawson, she will lead an
emancipated life, doing all the things she had once asked Jack to teach her—”to ride
like a man, chew tobacco like a man, spit like a man”—all of which depend on the free-
dom of the non-corseted body. That she does indeed lead a nontraditional life for a
woman, a life of adventure, is evidenced by a collection of framed photographs gath-
ered next to her deathbed: Rose deep-sea fishing, Rose piloting an airplane, Rose riding
a horse, and so on. The photos are offered as proof that she has experienced the exhila-
rating sensations associated with being “king of the world.”
See also: Melodrama, The; Women in Film

Reference
Sandler, Kevin S., and Gaylyn Studlar, eds. Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster. Piscataway, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1999.

—Carol Donelan

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) explores the role of racism in the South
during the Great Depression. Although the novel and the film were set in a fictional
town based on Lee’s childhood home in 1930s Monroeville, Alabama, the picture
debuted at the height of the 1960s civil rights movement and provided audiences a
glimpse of southern society struggling with the haunting legacy of perverse tradition,
fear, and racial hierarchy. Directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Gregory Peck,
To Kill a Mockingbird represented an attempt to break free from the destructive stereo-
types that had characterized earlier films set in the South. Whereas, for example, pic-
tures such as Gone with the Wind had focused on antebellum plantation life, and
others, such as A Streetcar Named Desire, had portrayed the South as a decadent,
repressed region of America, the critically acclaimed Mockingbird emphasized the cou-
rageous role of Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), a southern white attorney who acted as a
filmic representative of both the civil rights movement and the possibility of the
South’s eventual integration into national life.
To Kill a Mockingbird revolves around the experiences of Scout, the young daughter
of Atticus Finch, who functions as the cinematic bridge figure through whom the film’s
two parallel narratives are connected. The first of these narratives focuses on the efforts

497
To Kill a Mockingbird

Actor Gregory Peck, as Atticus Finch, stands in a courtroom in a scene from director Robert
Mulligan’s film To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962. (Universal Studios/Courtesy of Getty Images)

of Scout (Mary Badham), her older brother Jem (Phillip Alford), and a neighborhood
friend to uncover the mystery of Arthur “Boo” Radley (Robert Duvall), a young man
rarely seen outside his nearby house and assumed to be strange and dangerous. The
second narrative focuses on Finch, who, while the children struggle with their fear of
the unknown, finds himself defending Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), an innocent
black man accused of sexually assaulting a young white woman named Mayella Ewell
(Collin Wilcox). Although Finch protects Robinson from a local lynch mob and ably
defends him during the dramatic trial, Robinson is convicted for violating the region’s
racial mores and is eventually killed trying to escape before Finch can appeal the ques-
tionable verdict. The children join the town in following the trial and observe the hos-
tility of the larger white community, especially Robert E. Lee “Bob” Ewell, the father of
the woman who falsely accused Robinson of rape in order to hide her own romantic
and scandalous interest in the defendant. The two narratives intersect to create a piv-
otal moment in the lives of Scout and Jem when a vengeful Buell attacks the children
only to be killed by Boo Radley, the misunderstood recluse.
To Kill a Mockingbird provided 1960s America with a poignant morality tale, one
that sought to demonstrate that racial redemption could be achieved through the
expression of understanding, tolerance, and compassion. Interestingly, however, even
though it raised important questions about race in America, it is clear today that the

498
 Top Gun

film still did not go far enough in breaking down the destructive racial stereotypes that
had dominated earlier pictures. Tom Robinson, for instance, remains largely a mute
and marginalized figure, almost wholly defined by his paternalistic relationship to
Atticus Finch; and while the film’s description of the explicit injustice of southern soci-
ety at least hinted at white America’s deepest fears of the mythos of black male sexual
perversity, the plot almost completely neglects the pervasive structural racism and rigid
class hierarchy that often dominated southern life.
Thus, although the film seemed powerful during the early 1960s, as the civil rights
movement allowed Americans to embrace the ideal of interracial cooperation, as the
movement collapsed and the seemingly intractable challenges of race and class
remained unresolved, the film’s depiction of the promise of an enlightened white
America appear less and less realistic.
See also: African Americans in Film; Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Filmmaking

References
Arnold, Edwin T. “What the Movies Told Us.” Southern Quarterly 34(3), 1996: 57–65.
Crespino, Joseph. “The Strange Career of Atticus Finch.” Southern Cultures 6(2), 2000: 9–29.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Harper & Row, 1960.
—Richard L. Hughes

TOP GUN. The top ticket seller of 1986, Top Gun, won an Oscar for Best Original
Song for “Take My Breath Away,” and received Oscar nominations for Best Sound
Effects Editing, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound. Though a box-office success, most
critics dismissed it as a blatant representation of Reaganite values—it was anticom-
munist, individualist, militarist, morally unambiguous, nationalistic, and triumphalist.
To be sure, critics also derided it as superficial filmmaking. The movie’s success, they
believed, was based solely in its pop musical and especially in its visual appeal.
Top Gun reflected President Ronald Reagan’s and his right-leaning constituency’s
desire for a reassertion of American triumphalism. This was a stark contrast from the
1970s political and cultural “crisis of confidence.” From a foreign policy perspective,
burying the Vietnam War—by attributing the loss to both bureaucrats and an overre-
liance on technology, not a superior enemy—and reasserting American power were
crucial to the reconstruction of American triumphalism. Like Reagan, a devout anti-
communist who revived the Cold War, Reaganite cinema reasserted American power
by reengaging and even defeating the communists. Top Gun epitomized this effort.
And like Reagan, who viewed the United States as righteous and the Soviet Union as
an “evil empire,” Top Gun reflected his morally unambiguous view of the Cold War.
In the aerial combat scenes, the light-colored (good) American F-14 Tomcats are con-
trasted against the dark-colored (evil) Soviet MIGs. The MIG pilots’ faces are covered
by dark visors; they are faceless, whereas we see the faces of the American pilots, and
their names are written on the top of their helmets. These factors, in addition to filming

499
Top Gun

Scene from the 1986 film Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise. Directed by Tony Scott. (Photofest)

the MIGs only at a distance, serve to depersonalize and, therefore, dehumanize the
enemy—the American pilots are fighting evil, not people (Palmer, 2003).
Yet Top Gun is not simply a military contest, but a boast of the supremacy of the
American system—that is, the superiority of individualism and democracy over Soviet
collectivism and totalitarianism (Palmer, 2003). This is made manifest in the figure of
“Maverick” (Tom Cruise). He is his call sign’s namesake, a trait that is perceived as dan-
gerous by his flight instructors—he is viewed as a “wild card” and “completely unpre-
dictable.” Yet his unbridled individualism, from which his creative and courageous
flying is derived, makes him an excellent pilot (Sprinker, 1987). He resists becoming
the overly mechanical fighter that the Navy demands. Maverick’s later decision to tem-
per his individualism with technical acumen—triggered by the tragic death of his best
friend and co-pilot, “Goose” (Anthony Edwards)—unites the American Frontier with
American technical proficiency. In the climactic aerial combat scene, Maverick saves
the excessively mechanical pilot “Iceman” (Val Kilmer), and shoots down three MIGs.
Maverick and the United States—that is, individualism and democracy complemented
by technical proficiency (who could ignore the technological sophistication of the F-14
Tomcats and that of the pilots who flew them?)—are victorious over Soviet collectiv-
ism and totalitarianism, which bred machines rather than humans (Palmer, 2003).
In addition to reflecting and projecting cultural and political triumphalism, Top
Gun reflected and projected militarism. It was a corollary that if the United States
was superior to the Soviet Union, its military, then—protecting the American virtues

500
 Touch of Evil

of individualism, democracy, and capitalism—was virtuous (not evil or fascist, as was

suggested by New Left elements; such militarism was also a reaction against New Left
pacifism and anti-anticommunism). Tony Shaw (2007) notes a link during the Cold
War between the Pentagon and the film industry. The former provided technical and
material aid in return for a positive portrayal of the military, which promoted milita-
rism. Top Gun flight instructor “Viper” (Tom Skerritt) warns his student-pilots:
“although we’re not at war, we must always act as though we are at war.” Top Gun
was filmed with the Navy’s cooperation, romanticized combat, and was used as a
recruitment tool (Sprinker, 1987). If the film is dismissed by the Left as a reflection
of grotesque triumphalism and militarism, the Right takes a less critical stance as it
indeed views the Cold War as a necessary confrontation with a murderous and totali-
tarian state with diametrically opposed values.
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The; War Film, The

References
Palmer, William J. The Films of the Eighties: A Social History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1993.
Shaw, Tony. Hollywood’s Cold War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.
Sprinker, Michael. “Top Gun.” In Magill, Frank N. Magill’s Cinema Annual, 1987: A Survey of
the Films of 1986. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1987.
—Mark D. Popowski

TOUCH OF EVIL. Directed by Orson Welles, Touch of Evil was released in 1958.
Starring Charlton Heston as Mexican law enforcement official Ramon Miguel “Mike”
Vargas and Janet Leigh as his wife, Susan “Susie” Vargas, the film is perhaps best
remembered for Welles’s performance as corrupt American police chief Hank Quinlan.
Heavily made up, Welles transformed himself into a bloated, rumpled, sinister screen
presence, creating what most agree was his finest characterization since he portrayed
Charles Foster Kane in his classic 1941 film Citizen Kane.
Touch of Evil begins with one of the most famous opening sequences in film history.
In one long—nearly four-minute—take, the camera pans, cranes, and tracks as it
simultaneously follows a bomb that is armed and placed in a car alongside of which
Mike and Susie casually stroll. Suddenly, the couple’s festive idyll is shattered when
the car explodes. The sequence has long been celebrated for its technical bravura, but
it has deeper implications: with his fluid camera, Welles, it seems, transgresses borders;
or perhaps more correctly, he elides borders.
This theme of bordering proves to be the foundational narrative element in Touch of
Evil. Protagonists Vargas and Quinlan, for instance, constantly cross borders, both geo-
graphical and cultural, as they struggle to establish their respective investigative juris-
dictions. As it turns out, the case is complicated: a bomb that was placed in a car in
Mexico, allegedly by a Mexican national, goes off in Texas, killing two Americans.

501
Touch of Evil

Who, then, should head the investigation? The situation is further complicated by the
fact that Vargas is married to an American, while Quinlan has been involved with
Tanya (Marlene Dietrich), a Mexican prostitute.
Pushing hard against each other, Vargas and Quinlan develop their own theories about
the crime. Vargas attempts to solve the case by exploring the clues with which he has been
presented, although he is immediately suspicious of the Grandis, a crime family whose
members move back and forth between the United States and Mexico with impunity.
For his part, Quinlan, based on what he takes to be his finely honed powers of deduction,
decides that a young Mexican man, Manelo Sanchez (Victor Millan), is guilty. Excusing
his actions by way of his own perverse ethic—Quinlan has adopted an ends-justify-the-
means attitude, beating confessions out of his prisoners when they are not appropriately
forthcoming—he fabricates a scenario that fits his preconceived notions about the crime
and orders that the suspect be broken, by whatever means necessary.
As is the case in many of Welles’s films, the ending of Touch of Evil is marked by
irony. Quinlan’s efforts to frame Sanchez (and eventually Vargas), ultimately leading
to his own downfall, prove to have been unnecessary, as Sanchez finally confesses; or
so it seems, as the question regarding whether the young man was really guilty or just
cracked under interrogative pressure is left open—was the confession beaten out of
him? We naturally conclude that Vargas’s law-and-order sensibilities are more redeem-
ing than Quinlan’s obsessive, results-at-all-costs methods, and that this is the point of
the film. But there is additional irony—after all, Vargas ends up illegally wiretapping
Quinlan in order to expose him. Vargas, then, disturbed by his wife’s victimization,
resorts to using precisely the same unethical investigative methods that he claims to
abhor, and that Quinlan began to use after his own wife was murdered.
The dark, complex exploration of transnational issues that provides the narrative
framework for Touch of Evil is still resonant today, as Americans and Mexicans con-
tinue the bitter debates over immigration, the controversial fence being built between
the two countries, and the frightening specter of Mexican drug gangs buying guns in
Texas and bringing them back across the border. Filmically, Welles provided us with
a playful yet unsettling trope of thematic boundaries: mixing low comedy with violent
action, blurring the lines between hero and antagonist, and giving the camera a haunt-
ing life of its own. Not surprisingly, conservative studio heads at Universal “simplified”
the film—a process that Welles was forced to endure on numerous occasions through-
out his career. Even so, the influence of Touch of Evil can still be seen in the work of
contemporary filmmakers such as Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel and the Coen
brothers’ No Country for Old Men.
See also: Film Noir; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The; Welles, Orson
References
Comito, Terry, ed. Touch of Evil: Orson Welles, Director. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1985.
Conrad, Peter. Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life. London: Faber & Faber, 2003.
Thomson, David. Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
—Dimitri Keramitas

502
 Toy Story

TOY STORY. In July 1991,

Disney Studios agreed to a three-
feature-film deal with a small
computer animation company
owned by Steve Jobs, the founder
of Apple Computers. Pixar, for-
mally the computer division of
George Lucas’s Lucasfilms, had,
until then, focused on developing
computer animated short films
and commercials. The deal
allowed Pixar to develop its first
feature-length film that was com-
pletely computer generated. The
collaboration with Pixar marked
a departure for Disney, long the
dominant force in “cell anima-
tion,” which had been richly
praised for its realism. Pixar, real-
izing its inability to reach that
level of animated realism, sought
instead to provide a fantasy world
that was a caricature of reality.
The company’s first film, Toy
Story, was written by John Lasse-
ter, who also directed; Pete
Docter; Andrew Stanton; and
Joe Ranft. Inspired by an earlier
Pixar short, Tin Toy, the film tells Scene from the 1986 film Toy Story. Shown are Sheriff Woody
the story of a toy cowboy named (voice: Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (voice: Tim Allen).
Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) Directed by John Lasseter. (Photofest)
who fears being replaced as a little
boy’s favorite plaything by a
highly coveted toy astronaut named Buzz Lightyear (named after real-life astronaut
Buzz Aldrin and voiced by Tim Allen). The film unfolds as a buddy picture, as the
two toys learn to look past their differences and to work together to overcome adversity
in order to make their owner, Andy, happy.
Production of Toy Story occupied a staff of 110 people, including 28 full-time ani-
mators, for four years. Using technology developed by Edwin Catmull, three-
dimensional wire-frame models were initially scanned into a computer. From there,
each model was equipped with articulated variables, “avars” for short, by which anima-
tors could show movement. Woody and Buzz contained more than 700 avars each; and
to produce Woody’s Tom Hanks-like facial expressions, 58 avars were placed on the
model’s face alone. Animators then added color, texture, transparency, and other

503
Toy Story

specific characteristics to enhance the look of their creations. Interestingly, the decision
to wrap the narrative of Toy Story around the toys themselves had much to do with the
limitations of the technology in 1995; because toys are not expected to possess fluid,
lifelike movements, reasoned the film’s creators, audiences would be forgiving if anima-
tors were not able to achieve such realistic, humanlike effects. In the end, the final cin-
ematic product required the use of 300 Sun microprocessors and 800,000 hours of
computing time to complete.
Released on November 22, 1995, Toy Story became an instant blockbuster, earning
$64.7 million in its first 12 days. Indeed, it became the highest-grossing film of 1995,
taking in $192 million domestically and an additional $357 million globally.
Although Pixar had never been a particularly successful company before it joined
Disney, shortly after the film’s release Steve Jobs made the decision to take Pixar pub-
lic. As he had in the past, Jobs proved to be a business genius, as Pixar became the
most profitable IPO of the year; Jobs’s share of the company was ultimately valued
at over $1.1 billion.
For his work on Toy Story, John Lasseter was awarded the Oscar for Special Achieve-
ment at the 1996 Academy Awards. The film was also nominated for awards for Best
Original Music (Randy Newman), Best Original Song (“You’ve Got a Friend in Me”
by Randy Newman), and Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Film.
The success of Toy Story cemented the relationship between Disney and Pixar, and
Disney now set out to conquer computer-generated films. Michael Eisner, the vision-
ary CEO of Disney, negotiated a new contract that extended Pixar’s commitment to
Disney for five more films and that made the two business entities equal partners in
future ventures. Jobs, concerned about establishing Pixar’s name in the film industry,
insisted that all pictures produced by the new company carry both the Pixar and
Disney labels. Disney, however, wisely retained control of all sequels and rights to con-
sumer products. The trend that began with Toy Story continued over the years, produc-
ing one blockbuster after another, including A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999),
Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006),
Ratatouille (2007), Wall-E (2008), and Up (2009).
See also: Animation

References
Kanfer, Stefan. Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop
to Toy Story. New York: Scribners, 1997.
Paik, Karen. To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios. San Francisco: Disney
Enterprises/Pixar Animation Studios, 2007
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
Stewart, James B. DisneyWar. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005.
Telotte, J. P. The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology. Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2008.
—Robert W. Malick

504
 Traffic

TRAFFIC. Based loosely on Traffik, a 1990 British television drama about the
opium trade between Pakistan and Great Britain, director Steven Soderbergh’s multi-
stranded film focuses ambitiously on cocaine trafficking at the U.S.-Mexican border
and on consumption of the drug in the United States. Released at the end of a decade
that saw increased anxiety in the U.S.-Mexican relationship—surrounding both illegal
immigration and drugs—Traffic (2000) generally avoids the former topic and instead
seeks to expose the futility of U.S. policymakers’ “war on drugs.” In the 1970s and
1980s, cartels in Bolivia, Colombia, and elsewhere expanded to meet escalating
demand for illegal narcotics in the United States. President Ronald Reagan responded
in 1982 by appointing the first “drug czar,” which in 1988 became the cabinet-level
Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Following a crackdown on
Caribbean trade routes, in the late 1980s South American cartels began to rely increas-
ingly on shipping cocaine through Mexico, enriching Mexican cartels and initiating a
wave of corruption in government and law enforcement south of the border.
Unlike those who have perceived little but political grandstanding in the war on
drugs, Traffic portrays policymakers and agency staffers as sincere combatants in a los-
ing battle. This may explain why several government officials, including Sen. Harry
Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), were willing to appear in cameos
as themselves in the film. In one of Traffic’s three interwoven storylines, the real
bureaucrats interact with the character of Ohio judge and newly appointed national
drug czar Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), an earnest public servant who
expresses shock when he learns that the cartels have a bigger budget than he does. In
a second storyline, San Diego drug enforcement agents Monte (Don Cheadle) and
Ray (Luı́s Guzmán) find it difficult to take their jobs seriously, especially when, during
a stakeout at the plush La Jolla home of the Tijuana cartel’s main U.S. connection, the
drug dealer’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) knocks on the door of their undercover van
and brings them lemonade.
In its third narrative thread, Traffic attributes much of the futility of drug enforce-
ment to corruption in Mexico. Although the grainy, sepia-toned Mexican sequences
have rankled some critics who say they present the country as stereotypically lawless
and chaotic, others have praised the film for capturing living conditions in Tijuana
without resorting to border-town clichés. For his portrayal of Tijuana police officer
Javier Rodrı́guez, who struggles to advance without selling out to any of the competing
drug cartels, Benicio Del Toro won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Rodrı́guez offers to share information with U.S. drug agents, but only if they will pro-
vide funds to help Tijuana build a new Little League baseball field. Is Soderbergh argu-
ing that Mexico needs traditional American values?
Whatever idyllic era of the American past the baseball field might symbolize is hard to
imagine in Traffic, which is keen to explore the role of insatiable U.S. demand in fueling
the drug trade. The film argues that the principal battleground in the drug war is located
not at the border, but in the heart of the American family. Traffic’s cocaine addicts are
not the crack-consuming, Reagan-era underclass, but Wakefield’s 16-year-old daughter,
Caroline, and her friends in Cincinnati’s posh Indian Hill suburb. These high school stu-
dents drink, snort cocaine, and trade sarcastic barbs while sprawled on leather couches in

505
12 Angry Men

family rooms lined with stained glass and shelves full of their highly educated parents’
books. The behavior is learned: Wakefield’s wife (Amy Irving) withholds information
about Caroline’s drug problem and accuses her husband of abusing alcohol; Robert tells
her he drinks to cope with his “boredom” with the marriage. If the Wakefields serve as
the individual problem family in Traffic, the basic cleavage in the American Family writ
large is one of race and class, signified by the stark difference between tony Indian Hill
and the seedy, less convincingly rendered urban neighborhood where the teenagers buy
the drugs from an African American dealer. “If there is a war on drugs,” Wakefield
tells the White House press corps in a concluding scene, “then many of our family mem-
bers are the enemy. I don’t know how you wage war on your own family.”
See also: Politics and Film

References
Payan, Tony. The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration, and Homeland Security.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006.
Shaw, Deborah. “ ‘You Are Alright, But . . . ’: Individual and Collective Representations of
Mexicans, Latinos, Anglo-Americans and African-Americans in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic.”
Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22(2005): 211–23.
—Kenneth F. Maffitt

12 ANGRY MEN. Set in a sweltering jury room on the hottest day of the year,
Sidney Lumet’s film 12 Angry Men (1957) has a Zenlike simplicity. A young man is
on trial for murder, accused of stabbing his father to death in their inner-city tenement.
The judge instructs the jury that they must reach a unanimous verdict, and that a find-
ing of guilty will result in the defendant’s execution. Eleven of the 12 jurors see the case
as open-and-shut, and the evidence as overwhelming. The twelfth is less certain. “Let’s
talk about it,” he says, and for the remainder of the movie the 12 do just that. They muse,
reason, speculate, snarl, badger, cajole, disparage, and threaten. Jackets are removed, ties
loosened, and sleeves rolled up; unexamined assumptions are exposed, prejudices are laid
bare, and deeply buried resentments dragged to the surface. When the talking is over, the
vote has swung from 11-1 in favor of conviction to 12-0 in favor of acquittal.
In the film, as in the Reginald Rose television play from which it was adapted, the
jurors represent 12 different varieties of American everyman, and the jury as a whole
represents a cross-section of American society in the mid-1950s. Underscoring their
everyman status is the fact that, in the film as in the play, they have no names, and
are identified only by the numbers of the seats they occupy at the jury table. On paper
the jurors are broadly drawn “types” defined by a trait or two: Number 2 is meek;
Number 4 coldly rational; Number 10 bigoted; and so forth. Impeccable casting—
Martin Balsam as Number 1, the consensus-seeking foreman; Jack Warden as boorish
Number 7, who cares more about his baseball tickets than the trial; Jack Klugman as
Number 5, who grew up on the same mean streets as the defendant—turns them into
well-developed characters.

506
 12 Angry Men

Actor Lee J. Cobb (right), as Juror # 3, wields a switchblade as he threatens Henry Fonda, as Juror # 8,
in a scene from the 1957 film 12 Angry Men, directed by Sidney Lumet. (Getty Images)

The nominal hero of the film is Number 8, who casts the lone dissenting vote and
encourages the others to consider whether reasonable doubt exists in the case. Played
by Henry Fonda—the lone star in a cast of character actors—he personifies 1950s
liberal ideals. He is intelligent without being an intellectual, compassionate without
being soft or naive, and persuasive without being slick or insincere. Number 8 is a pas-
sionate advocate for social justice, but he is no radical. Polite, soft-spoken, and con-
servatively dressed, he conforms to social norms rather than challenging them. He
believes that the System works if everyone involved participates and does so in good
faith. He is fierce toward those who neglect that duty (callous Number 3, indifferent
Number 7, and bigoted Number 10) and solicitous toward those who feel they have
no role to play (meek Number 2, elderly Number 9, and foreign-born Number 11).
His deepest, most passionate commitment is not to a particular ideology, but to the
integrity of the System. The issue for him is not whether the accused is guilty or inno-
cent, but whether the rules—especially proof of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”—
have been fairly applied to him.
Number 8’s idealistic view of the jury system is also that of Rose the playwright,
Lumet the director, and the film itself. The triumph at the end of the film is not the
fact that Number 8 wins the jury-room argument or that the accused walks free, but
that the jury reaches the 12-0 verdict that the System (personified by the judge)
requires. 12 Angry Men, though structured as a legal thriller and directed as a

507
2001: A Space Odyssey

character-driven drama, is ultimately a political film: a ringing endorsement of the idea

that the System can deliver the “justice for all” promised in the Pledge of Allegiance.
The political views expressed in 12 Angry Men make it a popular supplement for
civics classes, but they also make the film something of a period piece. Its faith in the
System (expressed, in more complex ways, in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder
released two years later) is more in tune with the idealism of Mister Smith Goes to
Washington (1938) and The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) than it is with the
cynicism of subsequent courtroom dramas. Those later films—from Paths of Glory
(1958) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) through And Justice for All (1979), The
Verdict (1983), Scent of a Woman (1997), and The Runaway Jury (2003)—portray
the System as noble but irretrievably broken, controlled not by the People (for whom
Lumet’s jurors stand in) but by a wealthy and powerful few.
See also: Lumet, Sidney; Melodrama, The

References
Ebert, Roger. “12 Angry Men.” In The Great Movies II. New York: Broadway Books, 2005.
Ellsworth, Phoebe C. “One Inspiring Jury,” Michigan Law Review 101(6), 2003: 1387–1407.
Munyan, Russ, ed. Readings on Twelve Angry Men. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press,
2000.

—A. Bowdoin Van Riper

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. A landmark science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) showcases groundbreaking special effects and explores unusual philosophical
and religious themes. Emphasizing scientific accuracy, the film presents a slow and
sometimes disturbingly silent image of spaceflight. Based partly on “The Sentinel,” a
short story by Arthur C. Clarke (co-screenwriter with director Stanley Kubrick),
2001 is a film of startling complexity and scope, especially in the challenging image
of the Monolith (mysterious black rectangles of unknown origin). While 2001 resists
singular explanations, two themes, evolution and technology, are central to the film’s
structure.
The Monolith, the most famous image of 2001, is closely associated with the pro-
cess of evolution. While Clarke originally imagined the mysterious object as a robotic
“intelligence detector” left on the Moon and designed to alert its builders when Earth
evolved creatures capable of spaceflight (Clarke, 1999), the film’s Monolith is far more
potent and abstract. 2001 begins four million years ago at “The Dawn of Man,” where
a band of hominids encounter a Monolith and experience a sudden evolutionary
breakthrough: tool use. The silent Monolith is juxtaposed against the Sun and Moon,
both revealing its extraterrestrial origin and also suggesting humanity’s future trajec-
tory. Cutting suddenly, 2001 leaps into the space age.
In the second act, the hominids’ descendants, technology-wielding humans, exca-
vate a Monolith buried on the Moon. In the finale, astronaut Dave Bowman discovers

508
 2001: A Space Odyssey

a giant Monolith orbiting Jupiter.

Transported through a colorfully
surreal passageway to an unknown
destination, and accompanied by
yet another Monolith, Bowman
rapidly ages (or mutates) and is
reborn as the Star Child, a “post-
human” and presumably superhu-
man entity (Abrams, 2007).
Though the Monoliths’ origin
and the reason for their interest
in humankind are not revealed,
they do appear to be shaping
humanity’s destiny. An ersatz-
God of a secular teleology, the
alien Monolith is the superpower-
ful (but not supernatural) midwife
of human evolution. The process
of evolution is also a form of birth.
“The Dawn of Man,” Bowman’s
journey through the stellar pas-
sageway, and the fetus-like Star
Child all suggest birth and the cre-
ation of new life (Moore, 2001);
two characters even mark birth-
days. However, Homo sapiens is a Actor Gary Lockwood as Dr. Frank Poole in the classic 1968
stage in, not the culmination of, science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley
this gestation process. Kubrick. (Archive Photos/Getty Images)
This vision of evolution
reflects the Übermensch (Superman or Overman) concept expounded by Friedrich
Nietzsche in his philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1954). Nietz-
sche imagines humanity as a “rope” stretched between an animal past and a superhu-
man future (Nietzsche, 1954), a sequence, from “Beast” to “Man,” and then from
“Man” to “Superman”—precisely the evolutionary process we see unfold in 2001.
The Nietzschean theme is further reinforced by the use of Richard Strauss’s
Nietzsche-inspired music Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Signaling profound transitions,
Strauss’s slow, rising music appears both at the point where tools are invented and at
the point of Bowman’s final transformation.
The second key theme in 2001 is the relationship between humans and technology,
which the film frames with an ironic tension (Fry, 2003). The film’s first act climaxes
with toolmaking, specifically, the mental leap necessary to turn a bone into a club for
hunting. Ominously, the first tool is also a weapon, which is ultimately deployed
against a rival hominid band; the essence of humanity, the “killer-ape,” is technology
and perhaps violence. The bone-weapon, exuberantly tossed in the air, is transformed

509
2001: A Space Odyssey

via the dramatic cut mentioned above into an orbiting spacecraft, linking primitive
and advanced technology (Fry, 2003). Accompanied by Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube,
the scene revels in futuristic, albeit often sterile-looking, hardware. Encased in various
technologies, astronauts are apparently scientific supermen who have transcended their
biological limitations. The future (from the standpoint of 1968) is complete with com-
mercial passenger spacecraft, a gracefully rotating space station, and a network of lunar
bases. Nature itself is domesticated as air, gravity, and food are reworked to serve
human needs. Even human metabolism is controllable, as three members of the
Jupiter-bound Discovery travel in a state of suspended animation.
2001’s image of technology remains ambiguous, for while Discovery is a life-
sustaining cocoon for its crew, it is also the scene of a deadly confrontation between
humanity and the product of its genius, the Hal-9000 computer. Hal, who proudly
notes the error-free history of 9000-series computers, is eerily emotional in contrast
to his stoic human crewmates. He is also capable of humanlike violence, and his rebel-
lion (which is tempting to associate with that of Frankenstein’s creature) is a reminder
that artifice can threaten the artisan. Technological superman Bowman (the only sur-
viving crewman) must confront the super pseudo-man of technology, Hal. Trapped
outside Discovery by Hal, Bowman significantly reenters the ship without his space hel-
met (i.e., partially denuded of technology). Hal’s rebellion and ultimate defeat by Bow-
man suggests that artificial intelligence is a false path to the Superman. The true
destiny of Homo sapiens, biological evolution guided by the alien Monolith, finally
unfolds in Bowman’s metamorphosis into the Star Child. Technology, like the primi-
tive hominids and Homo sapiens itself, is ultimately a means to a larger end.
Raising provocative questions and offering some of the most enduring images in
cinema, 2001: A Space Odyssey establishes biological and technological evolution as a
teleological journey. In this narrative Homo sapiens is one stage in a larger process,
the conclusion and meaning of which remains veiled.
See also: Kubrick, Stanley; Science Fiction Film, The

References
Abrams, J. J. “Nietzsche’s Overman as Posthuman Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey.” In
Abrams, Jerald J. ed. Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2007.
Clarke, A. C. “Son of Strangelove.” In Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934–
1998. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999.
Fry, C. L. “From Technology to Transcendence: Humanity’s Evolutionary Journey in 2001:
A Space Odyssey.” Extrapolation. 44.3 (Fall, 2003), 331–343.
Moore, G. “The Process of Life in 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Images. Issue 9 (February, 2004).
Available at: www.imagesjournal.com.
Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In Kaufmann, Walter, ed./trans. The Portable
Nietzsche. New York: Penguin Press, 1954.
—Karl Leib

510
 v
U
UNFORGIVEN. Unforgiven (1992) was the 10th western with which the film’s
director, Clint Eastwood, had been associated. After starring in the “spaghetti west-
erns” A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the
Bad, and the Ugly (1965), all with Italian director Sergio Leone, and then in other
westerns such as Hang ’Em High (1968), Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), and Joe Kidd
(1972) with other directors, Eastwood starred in and stepped behind the camera to
direct High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and Pale Rider
(1985). In a sense, then, Eastwood had been moving toward making Unforgiven since
early in his career.
According to critic Stephen Hunter, Unforgiven “tells the story of how the West was
lost . . . lost . . . to pointless, ugly violence, men with guns who couldn’t imagine the
pain their bullets would cause and had no capacity to conceptualize the vacuum of loss
they created when they killed” (Hunter, 1995). William Munny (Eastwood) is a for-
mer gunslinger and now a widower with two young children. Since being cured by
his wife, as he says, “of drink and wickedness,” he has nothing to show for his miserable
existence but a squalid pig farm. But when he is approached by the “Schofield Kid”
(Jaimz Woolvett) and offered an opportunity to split a $1,000 reward for the capture
of two men who have maimed a prostitute, he reluctantly straps on his gun for the first
time in more than a decade. Along the way to the town of Big Whiskey, he joins up
with his former partner-in-crime, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman). Preceding them is
another bounty hunter, railroad gunman “English Bob” (Richard Harris), who is trav-
eling with his biographer (Saul Rubinek). Opposing them is Sheriff “Little Bill”
Daggett (Gene Hackman), himself a brutal “former” badman. What transpires is a
series of confrontations among the men that erupt in cold and calculated bloodletting.
Unforgiven is a film—like its director, one might say—of few words. More to the
point, it’s a collection of sounds—the wind rasping across the high plains, a sudden
thunderbolt piercing lowering clouds, the reedy screech of a bow scraping across a vio-
lin, and the blunt cry of men dying from gunshots at point-blank range. Significantly,
among its few words is the cryptic inscription that appears at the beginning of the film:
“Dedicated to Sergio and Don.” “They were my teachers,” Eastwood explains. “In a

511
Unforgiven

way the film is a tribute to Sergio

Leone and Don Siegel. If you ana-
lyze something like Sergio’s The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, you
see there wasn’t a whole lot of talk
in them, just strong visuals and
music and lots of shooting and
crazy one-upmanship. They were
more or less like operas. And
Don was always so prepared and
shot fast and brought his films in
under schedule. You can learn a
lot from that” (Tibbetts, 1993).
It is likely that Unforgiven may
have been Eastwood’s last western.
“Whether it’s my last western or
not, remains to be seen,” he said in
an interview in 1992. “The western
can be a genre that permits you to
work in different approaches and
moralities and subjects. You can
take it in different directions. If
you don’t, it gets into a rut and
there’ll be somebody to pronounce
‘the western is dead.’ That happens
every few years. Hollywood is so
silly, sometimes, and it’ll follow
the fad—until somebody comes
Poster for the 1992 film Unforgiven. Shown from top:
Richard Harris, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and Clint
up with another successful one. I
Eastwood. Directed by Clint Eastwood. (Photofest) can say that if I was going to do just
one last western, I think Unforgiven
might be the one.”
Unforgiven won four Oscars, for director, supporting actor (Gene Hackman), and
editing (Joel Cox). In its blunt brutality, Unforgiven surpasses anything Eastwood
had done before. Eastwood has been subject to attacks from the critics for allegedly
indulging in gratuitously sensationalized violence. Especially devastating was the criti-
cism leveled at him by the iconic film critic Pauline Kael in regard to his Dirty Harry
movies. Regarding Magnum Force, for example, Kael wrote, “With a Clint Eastwood,
the action film can—indeed, must—drop the pretense that human life has any value
. . . killing is dissociated from pain; it’s even dissociated from life.” She dismissed
another Dirty Harry entry, The Enforcer, as “garbage,” depicting “a collection of villains
so disgustingly cruel and inhuman that Eastwood can spend the rest of the movie kill-
ing them with a perfect conscience” (Kael, 1994). Eastwood is careful not to push the
idea too far that Unforgiven is a “reply” to his critics; yet the film, for all its coruscating

512
 Unforgiven

and grimly choreographed scenes of slaughter and mayhem, can hardly be character-
ized as indulging in false heroics or sensationalizing violence. To the contrary.

People have always tried to see the West as something heroic and glamorous, and one
could say that in my pictures I have followed the tradition of glamorizing violence.
But in something like Unforgiven there’s nothing very heroic at all. Now, I’m cer-
tainly not doing any penance for any of the mayhem I’ve presented on the screen
over the years. But at the same token, I think it’s a time in my life and a time in his-
tory where violence should not be such a humorous thing. That there are consequen-
ces to both the perpetrator as well as the victim. This is important to address, and if
you can do it in a western atmosphere that would be fine. In a nutshell, it’s not fun
and it’s not glamorous. I grew up with White Heat and Public Enemy and all those
Jimmy Cagney films shooting people in the trunks of cars and all kinds of craziness.
But it never made us into criminals and we didn’t go out and start blowing people
away because we saw it on the screen. You always realized it was just a movie. The
movie industry has always been an easy target for attack because it always runs
scared. (Tibbetts, 1993)

Eastwood’s William Munny has tried to put his past as a gunfighter aside to become
a farmer. Yet, after protesting constantly that he’s “not that kind of killer” anymore, he
finds in the moment of confrontation with “Little Bill” Daggett that he has not
escaped his demons. “He’s back in his mode of mayhem,” Eastwood says.

And he doesn’t care. He’s his old self again, at least for the moment. Before, he’s been
very rusty, having trouble getting on his horse, he wasn’t shooting very well. He
wasn’t nailing people with the very first shot (like I would do in my earlier films!).
Now, when he goes on this suicidal mission, he’s all machine. He’s not going to do
any of this ‘you draw first’ stuff. He marches in to the saloon and just says, ‘Who
owns this place?’ And then, Boom! He not only coldly murders Daggett at point-
blank range but shoots some bystanders with no more compunction than someone
swatting a fly. Munny has been protesting all the time that he’s changed, but maybe
he’s been protesting too much. (Tibbetts, 1993)

Unforgiven is suffused with a fatalistic resignation about life and death. “We all have
it comin’, kid,” Munny warns a frightened young gunslinger. The gunslinging hijinks
of Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, for all their carnage, had evaded this implacable
truth. In Unforgiven, whatever Munny’s justifications for killing—he is avenging the
cruel torture/murder of his best friend—his deeds are executed with ruthless, cold-
blooded precision. It is an image as beautiful in its graceful precision as it is deadly
in its horrible finality. “You’ll notice,” affirms Eastwood, “that Munny is no longer
the clumsy has-been you’ve seen throughout the film—falling from his horse, missing
things at target practice, getting beaten up. For the first time, he’s back now in full
charge of his abilities” (Tibbetts, 1993).
By contrast to this apocalypse, the film’s epilogue brings us back to where we began,
to a view of a distant horizon line where Munny’s farm is starkly outlined against the
darkling twilight. On the soundtrack a plaintive tune is heard, picked out on a guitar.

513
Unforgiven

Dwarfed by the sky, Munny’s tiny figure is seen for a moment; then it disappears.
“I tried to end with the same image that we had at the beginning,” observes Eastwood.
“The first time he was burying his wife. Now, he’s—well; he’s leaving. All we know is
that he left the place with his two children. Maybe he went to San Francisco. Maybe
not.” Eastwood shrugs.

Maybe he’s at last put his past behind him, or maybe he’s just bought some time
against the destruction that will surely catch up with him. When William Munny
says, “I’m not the man I used to be,” I’m sure there’ll be folks out there who think
that’s me, Clint Eastwood, talking. Whatever they read in that line is fine with me.
There may be some validity in that. When Munny says, “I ain’t like that no more,”
it’s true enough. Hopefully, all of us mature in some way and learn something from
our lives. We hope that characters like Will Munny at last have changed for the
good. But sometimes you wonder if all of us aren’t really just going in circles, chasing
our tails. Maybe, in the end, we haven’t really learned anything. (Tibbetts, 1993)

See also: Eastwood, Clint; Western, The

References
Hunter, Stephen. Violent Screen. Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 1995.
Kael, Pauline. For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies. New York: Dutton, 1994.
Tibbetts, John. “Clint Eastwood and the Machinery of Violence [An Interview],” Literature/
Film Quarterly 21(1), 1993.
—John C. Tibbetts

514
 v
V
VERTIGO. Received upon its initial release in 1958 with muted admiration, Alfred
Hitchcock’s Vertigo has come to be regarded as one of the cinema’s most important and
popular works. Its spiraling psychological intensity has left a mark on filmmakers as
diverse as the experimental French New Wave director Chris Marker (La jetée) and
the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct). But perhaps Vertigo’s most signifi-
cant cultural impact has been on the generations of viewers who return to it repeatedly
to connect with its obsessive and claustrophobic power. Seldom has a mainstream
American movie created such an uncomfortably addictive emotional connection with
its viewers.
Set in a hypnotically beautiful San Francisco, with many of its most famous sequen-
ces shot in almost surrealistically evocative locations, Vertigo, like other deluxe 1950s
Paramount pictures, is a glossy and transfixing wide-screen VistaVision spectacle. But
Vertigo employs the commercial cinematic apparatus of its day to produce the equiva-
lent of an inner spectacle, a journey into the troubled, endless vortex of unattainable
projection and desire. Oddly, for a film that depends so thoroughly on an American
locale (San Francisco with its labyrinthine hills and vast expanses of water-spanning
steel seems the only place where this drama of the unconscious could unfold), and
whose main character fits a classic American movie profile (he’s a psychologically
wounded former police detective), Vertigo transcends any particular American influ-
ence and jumps headlong into a world that evokes the power of archetypal dreams.
Each of the film’s major acts intensifies its ineluctable spiral into personal tragedy.
Act one is prelude: Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) is a victim of acrophobia; his fear
of heights leads to the accidental death of a fellow police officer. Act two is a mystery
story: After forced retirement, Scottie is privately employed by an old friend to follow,
surreptitiously, his blonde, socialite wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who has grown
morbidly obsessed with a dead woman’s past, even taking on the dead woman’s person-
ality and suicidal impulses. Before this act is over, Scottie follows Madeleine to muse-
ums and flower shops, rescues her from a suicidal plunge into San Francisco Bay, takes
her home (and undresses her), and falls in love. In trying to break Madeleine’s obses-
sion, Scottie brings her to an old mission that haunts her dreams; but Madeleine,

515
Vertigo

overcome with her need to

reenact the dead woman’s suicide,
bolts from his arms and hurls her-
self off the mission’s tower.
Scottie’s acrophobia, of course,
prevents him from stopping her
as she falls to her death.
Act three makes it clear that the
film’s real theme is about the
impossibility of Scottie reclaiming
his lost anima figure; now the plot
follows a traumatized Scottie, who
imagines he sees the dead Mad-
eleine in passing women. Lonely
and grieving, walking in a disem-
bodied state, Scottie one day
passes Judy Barton, a cheap-
looking, brunette, working-class
girl whose face nonetheless is a
dead ringer for his lost love. Scot-
tie sets out to mold Judy into what
he desires: he gets her to dye her
hair blonde and to cut it like
Madeleine’s; he buys her the same
color and style of clothing.
Indeed, only when the fetishistic
transformation has been achieved
can he complete an intoxicating,
Poster advertising Vertigo, Alfred Hitchock’s classic 1961 film vertiginous consummation of
starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak. (Library of their relationship. In this iconic
Congress) filmic moment—the camera enve-
lopes the characters in a stunning
360-degree pan—Hitchcock lays
bare an obsessive preoccupation with a type, one embodied by actresses such as Mad-
eleine Carroll, Grace Kelly, and later by Eva Marie Saint, Janet Leigh, and Tippi Hedren.
In love with a dead woman whom he has in effect reincarnated through Judy,
Scottie discovers the inevitable twist of act four—after it has already been revealed to
the audience: Judy was Madeleine, or, rather, she played her in order to involve Scottie
in the murder of the real Madeleine, whom Scottie never actually met. In the end, Judy
falls for Scottie as she works to seduce him into murdering Madeleine; but for whom
does Scottie fall? The Madeleine who never was—the archetypal Madeleine? A phan-
tom of projected passion? Enraged when the plot is revealed, Scottie drags Judy back
to the scene of the crime, and Hitchcock’s tragedy ends in a final desperate apotheosis
of the repetition compulsion at the center of lost love: like Scottie, we are left peering

516
 Vertigo

into the mystery of eternal unquenchable desire, into a love we always wanted but that
never was—and that can never be.
See also: Hitchcock, Alfred

References
Barr, Charles. Vertigo. London: British Film Institute, 2008.
O’Brien, Geoffrey. “Magnificent Obsession,” New York Review of Books, December 19, 1996.
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock by Truffaut. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.
—Robert Cowgill

517
This page intentionally left blank
 v
W
WAITING FOR GUFFMAN. Christopher Guest has become so identified with the
satiric “mockumentary” that a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of
Modern Art in 2005. After appearing in, and co-writing, Rob Reiner’s ground-
breaking This Is Spinal Tap (1986), Guest launched out on his own with Waiting for
Guffman (1996). Like his subsequent efforts, notably Best in Show (2000) and
A Mighty Wind (2003), Guffman utilizes the forms and practices of documentary in
order to undermine any claims to truth.
Anyone who has ever participated in a local theater project or a hometown festival
will find something gruesomely familiar in Waiting for Guffman. Behind its perversely
entertaining send-up of homespun theatrics, its gingham-cloth humor, and its cotton-
candy satire is a wicked set of jaws with big teeth.
The town of Blaine, Missouri, is celebrating its “sesquicentennial” (that’s a century
and a half, whispers the town mayor), and it wants to put on a show called “Red,
White, and Blaine.” The local theater director, Corky St. Clair (Guest), takes on the
assignment, rounds up the usual suspects, suffers through the rehearsals, and prepares
for opening night. Tension is added by the news that a big-time Broadway scout will
attend. His name is “Mort Guffman.”
The movie’s first 10 minutes sets the stage, as it were, reviewing the history of the
town of Blaine: In frontier days a pioneer named Blaine Fabin, bound to a wagon train
traveling from Philadelphia to California, stopped at the first scent of salt water.
Proclaiming the region to be part of California, he established a town in his own name.
No matter the region turned out to be in Missouri, Blaine’s noble history had begun.
Years later came a visit from President McKinley, whose delight at being presented with
a locally manufactured footstool assured the town of becoming “The Stool Capitol of
the World.” Then in 1946, a UFO landed and abducted one of the local townspeople,
leaving him, decades later, remembering the numberless hours he spent enduring the
“probing” of aliens.
Corky takes up the challenge of mounting a musical pageant celebrating this glori-
ous heritage. He brings to the task impressive theatrical credentials, like his local pro-
duction of a stage version of Backdraft (“You can feel the heat!”), which almost

519
Waiting for Guffman

burned down the theater house. Now, with Red, White, and Blaine set to go, Corky
awaits Mr. Guffman with more than the usual anticipation. Maybe, just maybe, the show
can go to Broadway, and Corky will have a chance to return to the Great White Way.
Waiting for Guffman’s cast members have their characters securely within their
sights—and they take dead aim. Guest’s Corky pouts and lisps his way through a gay
stereotype that would be outrageous if it were not also occasionally starkly poignant.
With his “Judy Tenuta” T-shirts and vest-bolero pants ensembles, he’s an exotic fish
in a humdrum aquarium. Eugene Levy is Allan Pearl, the dentist, who claims theater
legacy from his grandfather’s Yiddish theater days; Catherine O’Hara and Fred Willard
are Sara and Ron Albertson, theater wannabes and local travel agents who have never
ventured beyond Blaine (except for Ron, who once had penis-reduction surgery in
Jefferson City); Parker Posey is Libby the Dairy Queen girl, who’s willing to quit ice
cream confections like Blizzards and Derbys for the footlights; Bob Balaban is Lloyd,
the music teacher, terminally timid but a dynamo at the podium; and Lewis Arquette
is Clifford, the grizzled town father who is lured out of his trailer and out of
retirement.
On opening night the chair reserved for Guffman remains empty until the produc-
tion is 10 minutes gone. Then a dapper man arrives and sits down. At the postplay
backstage festivities, however, after he is introduced to the ecstatic cast, he admits his
name is not Guffman but “Roy Loomis,” in town on a brief visit. In the manner of
Samuel Beckett, it seems, the entire town will have to go on waiting for Guffman.
Red, White, and Blaine both illuminates and alters the lives of Blaine’s residents. The
dentist and the travel planners leave their jobs and head for the showbiz spotlights, the for-
mer to entertain at a Miami nursing home, the latter two to work as extras in Hollywood.
The Dairy Queen girl leaves town, as well, but only because her father is now out of prison
(“on good behavior,” since he didn’t kill anybody), and they are on the road together while
she dreams of new ways to make fat-free Blizzards. And Corky, well, he returns to New
York where he opens up a theater memorabilia shop, featuring such red hot items as
“Remains of the Day” lunch boxes and “My Dinner with Andre” action figures.
The film is shot in pseudo cinéma vérité style, with Guest’s camera wobbling
around the characters, who speak directly into it, shamelessly proclaiming who and
what they are. Because the cast and credits are reserved for the end of the film, you
almost feel as if you are viewing a real documentary about small-town life. And as
for the big musical production itself, never fear—you see it in its entirety, footstools
and flying saucers and everything. But hints of pathos, even tragedy, peek through
the warp and woof of events. Revelations of Corky’s dismal private life (references to
a nonexistent “wife” apparently have provided him with the necessary cover to live in
Blaine) and theatrical background (he was, he says, “stomped down for years” playing
in off-off-off-off Broadway theater productions in New York City) are dispensed inter-
mittently throughout the film. Most moving of all, perhaps, is the town councilman’s
glittering eyes as he gazes with rapt—and barely concealed sexual—attention at Corky
as he performs. In his hungry stare is the real drama, the play-behind-the-play; the hol-
low dark that lurks behind the brightly painted flats. That is the real meaning of Blaine

520
 Way We Were, The

and the real message behind this film: You can dream of California, but you’ve got to
live in Blaine.

References
McCreadie, Marsha. Documentary Superstars. New York: Allworth, 2008.
Muir, John Kenneth. Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company. New York:
Applause, 2004.
—John C. Tibbetts

WAY WE WERE, THE. In The Way We Were (1973), director Sydney Pollack wraps
an exquisite love story within an overarching narrative framework oriented around
political and cultural issues that emerged during the middle decades of the twentieth
century. Set against the backdrop of the lead-up to WWII and the war’s aftermath,
Pollack’s love story focuses on the lives of the tragically mismatched Hubbell Gardner
(Robert Redford) and Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand). One of seven films that
Robert Redford and Pollack made together, The Way We Were proved to be a critical
and box-office success.
We first encounter the indomitable Katie as she scurries across the busy streets of
New York City to one of her many jobs, this one as an assistant to radio producer Bill
Verso (Herb Edelman). When Bill’s date unexpectedly cancels on him, Katie has the
good fortune of being taken by her boss to the famous El Morocco nightclub. Filled
with servicemen and their dates, the nightclub is a glittering respite from the horrors
of war. Mesmerized by the setting, Katie’s eyes scan the room until they light upon
Hubbell; resplendent in uniform, Hubbell sits with eyes closed, subtly swaying on a
bar stool. Smiling, Katie’s mind drifts back to when she and Hubbell were students
at a prestigious Eastern college.
The two could not have been more different. Hubbell was the all-American golden
boy attending school on an athletic scholarship. A star on both the track and rowing
teams, seemingly without a care in the world, he is involved with Carol Ann (Lois
Chiles), a lovely young woman who comes from money. Katie, on the other hand,
must work a host of jobs to support herself. An extraordinarily serious student, she is
also a campus radical. Their ill-fated attraction to each other begins to be revealed
during an on-campus Peace Rally. The president of the Young Communist League,
Katie gives a speech in support of the Soviet Union’s resistance to Franco’s rise to power
in Spain. Decrying Hitler’s and Mussolini’s use of Spain as a “testing ground for
another World War,” Katie calls upon her classmates to pledge themselves to “world
peace now.” In the audience, Hubbell listens with rapt attention.
Significantly, the Young Communist League was a real-life student organization that
emerged during the 1930s as a core part of the American Youth Congress. Supported by
Eleanor Roosevelt, members of the YCL were some of the most vocal antiwar advocates
during the 1930s. In Pollack’s film, Katie embodies the YCL movement, and,

521
Way We Were, The

consumed by her political pas-

sions, she cannot understand her
attraction to the seemingly feck-
less Hubbell. She begins to
change her mind about him, how-
ever, when she listens to their pro-
fessor read aloud one of Hubbell’s
short stories—“The All American
Smile”—in a literature class Katie
and Hubbell share: “In a way he
was like the country he lived in,”
the story begins, “everything came
too easily to him.” Devastated
that her story was not chosen to
be read, Katie still cannot help
but listen—like Hubbell to her
speech—with rapt attention. And
so their bond is forged.
After bringing us back to El
Morocco, Pollack allows us to
watch as Katie and Hubbell fall
in love. Now a staunch supporter
of President Roosevelt and his
WWII foreign policies, Katie is
surprised that Hubbell, whom
she comes to realize is much more
than just a pretty face, is not as
interested in politics as she:
Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand embrace in a publicity “You’d rather talk politics,” says
photo from the film The Way We Were, directed by Sydney Hubbell, “all the contradictions. . .
Pollack, 1973. (Fotos International/Getty Images) . It’s all a bunch of political double
talk, but you hold on. I don’t see
how you do it.” “I don’t see how
you can’t,” retorts Katie. As it turns out, not only does Katie stump for Roosevelt, but
a number of her jobs—including the one at the radio station—are connected to the
Office of War Information, a federal agency that Roosevelt brought into existence when
he signed Executive Order 9182 on June 13, 1942. The Office of War Information was
established, the order declared, “In recognition of the right of the American people
and of all other peoples opposing the Axis aggressors to be truthfully informed about
the common war effort.” Much like George Creel’s World War I–era Committee on
Public Information, which had taken advantage of the fledgling film industry by using
it to communicate the prowar messages of Woodrow Wilson, the OWI enlisted the aid
of radio producers and Hollywood film directors to help give expression to Roosevelt’s
own prowar messages.

522
 Way We Were, The

Although her passion intrigues Hubbell, Katie’s all-consuming commitment to the

world of politics almost drives him away. Having salvaged the relationship, though,
the couple marries and relocates to Los Angeles after Hubbell sells his novel to
Hollywood. Well-off, with a beachfront house, a boat, and a sports car, the two seem
to have reconciled their differences—until Katie gets involved in the cause of the so-
called Hollywood Ten. The Hollywood Ten was the name given to a group of real-
life writers and directors who were cited for contempt of Congress when they refused
to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which
was investigating alleged communist influence in Hollywood. The first official Holly-
wood blacklist was instituted on November 25, 1947, the day after the 10 men of
the group were cited for contempt. In a press release issued a week later by Eric Johns-
ton, then head of the Motion Picture Association of America, 48 of the most powerful
studio heads in the industry stated that they “deplore[d] the actions of the 10 Holly-
wood men who have been cited for contempt by the House of Representatives.”
Although they claimed that they did not “desire to prejudge their legal rights,” they
nevertheless declared that they had no choice but to “forthwith discharge or suspend
without compensation” each member of the “10 until such time as he is acquitted or
has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist.”
All of the members of the group were ultimately fined and jailed for their refusal to
bow to the dictates of Congress and industry heads.
Katie is depicted as a fellow traveler of the Hollywood Ten, literally attending their
hearings in Washington, D.C. After she and Hubbell are accosted by a group of fren-
zied anticommunist protestors, the couple exchanges angry words: “You didn’t expect
to come to Hollywood and get a chance to tell off the world, did you?” says Hubbell.
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” responds Katie. “You bet I do,” says Hubbell bit-
terly. Once again, Katie’s politics prove too much for Hubbell, and the couple begins
to break apart, this time for good. In the film’s wonderfully romantic final sequence,
Katie and Hubbell encounter each other on a busy New York City thoroughfare.
Katie is there to gather signatures and pass out flyers protesting the use of the
H-Bomb, the horrible nuclear weapon developed by both the United States and the
Soviet Union during the early 1950s; Hubbell, accompanied by his new girl, is there
writing a television show. “You never give up,” says Hubbell about her continuing
protest activities. “Only when I’m absolutely forced to,” responds Katie, “but I’m a
very good loser.” “Better than I am,” Hubbell admits. “Well, I’ve had . . . more prac-
tice,” replies Katie softly.
See also: Pollack, Sydney; Streisand, Barbra

References
Lewis, Jon. American Film: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Meyer, Janet L. Sydney Pollack: A Critical Filmography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.
Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. Boston:
McGraw-Hill, 1981.
—Philip C. DiMare

523
West Side Story

WEST SIDE STORY. Like many movie musicals, West Side Story (1961) was first a
Broadway hit. The play by Arthur Laurents, adapted by Ernest Lehman, is an updating
of Romeo and Juliet, cleverly set in New York City’s Upper West Side with youth gangs
in place of the feuding families that complicate young love. Directed by Jerome Rob-
bins and Robert Wise, the United Artists release features choreography by Robbins
and music and lyrics by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, respectively. Lead-
ing actors, none of whom transferred from Broadway, are Natalie Wood (Maria),
Richard Beymer (Tony), George Chakiris (Bernardo), Rita Moreno (Anita), and Russ
Tamblyn (Riff ); both Wood’s and Beymer’s songs were dubbed by lesser-known artists.
The story revolves around the doomed love affair of Tony and Maria. Tony is a for-
mer member of the Jets, an Anglo gang led by Riff, and anxious to protect their
territory from the newly arrived Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks. Maria is engaged to
Chino, her brother Bernardo is the Sharks’ leader, and Anita is her friend and Bernar-
do’s girlfriend. The film opens with a potential rumble between the gangs being
avoided only when the police arrive. Tensions erupt again at a dance attended by the
gangs and “their girls,” while Tony and Maria fall in love. Meanwhile, a war council
is in the works to settle who will dominate the streets. The fight that ends Act I also
ends in tragedy: Bernardo has killed Riff and Tony has killed Bernardo. In Act II Tony
and Maria still vow to be together despite the quest for revenge on both sides. Anita is
assaulted by some Jets and responds by claiming Chino has killed Maria. When Tony
hears this he seeks out Chino, telling Chino to kill him, too; at the last minute Tony
sees Maria alive but Chino does shoot him as the lovers run toward one another. In a
departure from Shakespeare, Maria survives and the film ends on a note of hope as
members of the two gangs carry Tony’s body away.
Its semi-tragic ending is one of several ways West Side Story holds a unique place in
movie musical history, continuing many aspects of the postwar genre but in ways geared
to then-contemporary themes, music, and politics. The love story, for example, is the sta-
ple of the postwar musical, but the film does not deliver the happily-ever-after ending
audiences had come to expect. Similarly traditional are memorable tunes that can exist
independently of the show, and West Side Story delivers many, including “America,”
“Maria,” “Something’s Coming,” “Somewhere,” and “Tonight.” The fact that they are
Bernstein-Sondheim songs, though, means they depart from the melodic conventions
of the earlier musicals while aptly conveying the bittersweet flavor of the show. Finally,
dance, a crucial element of plot development since Oklahoma!, is used to great effect in
scenes both typical (Tony and Maria at the dance) and unusual (dancing gang members).
Undoubtedly the mixture of the familiar and the contemporary contributed to the
film’s appeal to a wide range of viewers, both in 1961 and after. The specter of the “juve-
nile delinquent,” a perennial American concern, was revived in the fifties, and not just by
educators and sociologists, but in films such as The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without a
Cause (1955), and Blackboard Jungle (1955). West Side Story linked these concerns to
issues of immigration and urban ethnic tension, especially in relation to the post-WWII
“Great Migration” of Puerto Ricans to New York City. This made West Side Story not only
timely but also exceptional, in that it allowed the voices of immigrant others to be heard
during a time when they were most often silenced. This expressive shift of perspective is

524
 When Harry Met Sally

seen—and heard—in the film’s reimagined version of the production number “America.”
In the on-screen version, the Sharks’ Puerto Rican gang members are included in the
number, and answer the overly sentimental pronouncement that “Life is all right in
America” with the poignantly cynical refrain, “If you’re all white in America.”
West Side Story has often been described as the most honored movie musical ever
made, and rightly so. It received 11 Academy Award nominations and won ten, includ-
ing Best Picture, Best Director (for both Robbins and Wise), Best Supporting Actor
and Actress, and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. Only three films have won more
Oscars, and only nine other musicals have been named Best Picture. West Side Story
is on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 list, contains three of its Top 100 Songs,
and is rated number two on its list of the 25 Greatest Movie Musicals of All Time.
See also: Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema; Musical, The; Music in the Movies

References
Berson, Misha. Something’s Coming, Something Good: West Side Story and the American Imagina-
tion. New York: Applause, 2010.
Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004.
Monush, Barry. West Side Story: Music on Film Series. New York: Limelight, 2010.
—Vicki L. Eaklor

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY. Produced and directed by Rob Reiner, and starring
Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, When Harry Met Sally is a romantic comedy that exposes
the challenges of finding love and staying married. Released in the summer of 1989,
the film’s edgy and sophisticated screenplay earned writer Nora Ephron an Oscar nom-
ination.
The film opens with Harry Connick’s rendition of “It Had to Be You” playing in the
background, preparing the viewer for the possibility of romance. Harry (Crystal) and
Sally (Ryan) are introduced as they drive all night from Chicago to New York City.
During the 18 hours they spend together, they discuss love, sexual relationships, and
the differences between men and women. Harry thinks that “Men and women can’t
be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” When they reach New York City
the next morning, they part ways, although we realize that a spark between the two has
been lit. They meet again five years later, but both are in committed relationships.
After another five years, they meet once more; now, though, their respective relation-
ships ended, they become friends. Harry, surprised at himself, muses, “Great . . . a
woman friend.”
The extremely intimate yet nonsexual relationship that develops between Harry and
Sally is cleverly depicted by Reiner, who shows the pair, through the use of split screen,
snuggled in their own beds talking to each other on the phone while they watch the
same movie; taking long meandering walks; shopping together; and sharing meals.
When their relationship finally does turn sexual, it is Harry who cannot decide how

525
When Harry Met Sally

Scene from the 1989 film When Harry Met Sally, starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal. Directed by
Rob Reiner. (Photofest)

this shift will affect their friendship; in the end, as Harry predicted long before during
their fateful car ride to New York City, the friendship cannot survive “the sex part.”
Of course, as is the case with all romantic comedy couples, we know Harry and Sally
are right for each other even if they don’t. It takes Harry and Sally another two years to
admit to themselves that they are, indeed, perfectly suited, and they quickly marry. As
Harry says, “when you realize that you want to spend the rest of your life with some-
body, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
Reiner uses documentary-style interviews with older couples to mark out the filmic
points of transitions in the relationship between Harry and Sally. Interestingly, the
experiences of love and intimacy discussed by these older couples are all initiated with
“love at first sight” moments that lead to lasting marriages. These couples serve to
emphasize the idealistic notion that there actually is one “right person” out there for
all of us who is just waiting to be found. Even though they don’t recognize their own
“love at first sight” moment, it was there, and, just like those couples in the interviews,
ultimately they do come to love each other deeply. Pictured in their own interview at
the end of the film, it appears that their relationship will endure.
According to Reiner, the movie was based on his own tortured experiences. He had
discussed the project with Nora Ephron, seeking out a woman who would understand
and be able to write about the experiences of other women. Their conversations ranged
over topics such as friendship and sex, and they eventually led Reiner to pose the ques-
tion to Ephron: “Can men and women be friends without having sex?” Based on

526
 White Christmas

Ephron’s screenplay, we are never sure about the answer to that question—after all, the
“sex part” did get in the way of the friendship between Harry and Sally, at least until
they admitted they were in love. Indeed, in one of the most iconic scenes in American
film, an older woman (played by Reiner’s mother), who is sitting in a restaurant in
which Harry and Sally are eating, watches with rapt attention as Sally demonstrates,
for all to see and hear, how perfectly a woman can fake an orgasm. When the waiter
approaches the women to take her order, she says simply, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
See also: Ephron, Nora; Romantic Comedy, The

References
Emery, Robert J. The Directors: Take Two. New York: Allworth, 2007.
Shumway, David R. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis. New York: New
York University Press, 2003.

—Vicky Bach

WHITE CHRISTMAS. Following the success of Holiday Inn in 1942, and the
identification of the Academy Award-winning Irving Berlin song “White Christmas”
with the Christmas season, Paramount decided to use Holiday Inn as the inspiration
for a new film and call it White Christmas (1954). As with Holiday Inn, White Christmas
featured a soundtrack composed by Irving Berlin; the picture was also intended to be
the third screen collaboration of Holiday Inn co-stars Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.
After reading the script, however, Astaire decided to pass on the film, and the role was
given to Donald O’Connor. Unluckily, O’Connor injured his leg during filming, and
the part ultimately went to Danny Kaye.
White Christmas tells the story of a song-and-dance duo, Bob Wallace (Crosby) and
Phil Davis (Kaye), who, after meeting in the army, become fast friends and develop a
show-business partnership. After returning to the States, the two performers decide
to take some much-needed time off. They head to a New England ski resort with
two showgirl sisters, Betty (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy Haynes (Vera-Ellen). On
arriving at the resort, they discover that the owner, Thomas Waverly (Dean Jagger),
is their former army general. Unfortunately, the resort is almost bankrupt, as no snow
has fallen that year. In order to help General Waverly, the group decides to stage a ben-
efit gala for him. The benefit is a success, snow starts to fall, the resort is saved, and Bob
and Phil find love in the arms of Betty and Judy.
White Christmas is an example of the feel-good, family entertainment common
during the 1950s. Its happy, some would say overly sentimental, ending suggests that
while the troubles of wartime are hard to overcome, brotherhood, love, and, of course,
Christmas, have transformative, even redemptive powers, an idea that was particularly
appealing to viewers living in Cold War America. These notions, it seems, are embodied
in the film’s eponymous title song. Indeed, “White Christmas” is a song imbued with
the wartime mood. Sad and wistful, it captures emotions shared by both returning

527
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?

soldiers and civilians at home. The song, like the film, recalls the emotions of wartime;
and when it sounds out at the end of the film, it acts as a trigger for nostalgic yearnings
for the peace and happiness traditionally associated with Christmas. The song could not
be nominated for an Academy Award for its use in White Christmas, however, as it had
already won that award when it was used in Holiday Inn. Instead “Count Your Blessings
Instead of Sheep” was nominated for Best Original Song, losing to “Three Coins in
the Fountain” from the film of the same name. Nevertheless by the 1980s, “White
Christmas” had become the best-selling song of all time.
See also: Musical, The; Music in Film

References
Connelly, Mark, ed. Christmas at the Movies: Images of Christmas in American, British and
European Cinema. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000.
Hirschhorn, Clive. The Hollywood Musical. New York: Crown, 1981.
Woll, Allen L. The Hollywood Musical Goes to War. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983.
—Victoria Williams

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? was

released in 1966 by Warner Bros. The debut film of director Mike Nichols, it was both
a critical and commercial hit, grossing more than $14.5 million. The film stars Eliza-
beth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were, at the time, the most famous couple in
the world. Adapted by Ernest Lehman from the play by Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf ? follows a night in the life of married couple George (Burton), a his-
tory professor, and Martha (Taylor), the daughter of the president of the university.
Filmed in black and white, and composed largely of long takes and facial close-ups,
the visual austerity of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? is balanced by the density of its
dialogue. Nichols’s desire to maintain both Albee’s rhythm and commentary on lan-
guage use made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? the first picture intentionally shot with
overlapping dialogue.
George and Martha have an apparently embittered marriage, but it is on this night
that things “snap” and they declare “total war” on each other. Despite the couple’s con-
stant bickering, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? is a dark romantic comedy. Although
their ferocious wordplay suggests nefarious intentions, it is also proof that they are
a good match. The story occurs mostly in George and Martha’s home in the fictional
town of New Carthage, where they host a recently hired biology professor and his
wife, Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis). The young couple becomes
instrumental to George and Martha’s infighting. The narrative develops through a
series of verbal “games” orchestrated by George and Martha to hurt each other and
their guests. Martha repeatedly attacks George’s lack of ambition, belaboring Nick’s
status as a biology professor to incite internecine rivalries; she makes sexual advances
toward the ambitious Nick, who does not resist since he wants to “plow a few perti-
nent wives” in order to ascend the university ladder. Over the course of the night, and

528
 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?

Scene from the 1966 film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth
Taylor. Directed by Mike Nichols. (Apic/Getty Images)

as the couples become increasingly drunk, secrets appear to be uncovered. However,

the film maintains a veil of ambiguity, and never allows the spectator to be certain
about the facts of George’s and Martha’s pasts. We always suspect their stories might
be based in some truth but, at the same time, are partially invented to inspire particu-
lar reactions in each other (and their guests). The evening culminates in the
revelation that the son George and Martha claimed to have is a product of their
imaginations.
The film’s frank sexual themes reflected the trend toward mature content evidenced
by the growing popularity of non-Hollywood films gaining favor in America in the
1960s, but it was its graphic language—including words never before heard on American
screens—that made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? a milestone cinematic work. It
became the first movie to challenge successfully the Motion Picture Production Code
established by Will Hays in 1934. Initially, the Code refused to approve the film, but after
a series of threats to release the film regardless of the Code’s approval, Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf ? was finally granted a Code seal as an exemption from its standard
strictures based on the belief that it was a “superior picture.” Similarly, the influential
Catholic Legion of Decency approved the film for adults, as it fit into their “think film”
category. Thus, having essentially defeated the Production Code (which would be dis-
mantled only two years later and replaced by the Motion Picture Association of America

529
Wild Bunch, The

ratings system), it changed the course of Hollywood cinema, arguably marking the begin-
ning of the period often termed “New Hollywood.”
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, and is
notable for being one of the few films whose entire cast was nominated for the Oscar.
It won five, including Best Actress (Taylor); Best Supporting Actress (Dennis); Best Art
Direction, Black and White (Richard Sylbert and George James Hopkins); Best
Cinematography, Black-and-White (Haskell Wexler); and Best Costume Design,
Black-and-White (Irene Sharaff ). Among other accolades, the film won three British
Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards, including Best Picture. In 2007, it
ranked 67th on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest Films.
See also: Melodrama, The; Nichols, Mike; Taylor, Elizabeth

References
Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
Gelmis, Joseph. The Film Director as Superstar. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.
O’Steen, Sam. Cut to the Chase: Forty-Five Years of Editing America’s Favorite Movies. Studio
City, CA: Michael Wiese, 2001.

—Kyle Stevens

WILD BUNCH, THE. The opening sequence of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch
(1969) introduces the film’s themes and motifs. A group of men wearing U. S. Army
uniforms rides slowly into a small town in South Texas. The members of the group look
uneasily at a number of children tormenting scorpions in a pile of red ants, an action
foreshadowing the fates of the men. Everything seems normal as they arrive in the town.
This tranquility is shattered, however, when the men enter the local bank and pull out
their guns as Pike Bishop (William Holden), their leader, shouts, “If they move . . . kill
’em.” The robbers soon discover they have walked into a trap. Bounty hunters led by
Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) are waiting on top of a building across the street. Bishop’s
men wait until the South Texas Temperance Union marches by to open fire, and bodies,
most belonging to innocent citizens, begin dropping. Bishop and four of his men escape,
leaving the rest behind to crazed scavengers (Strother Martin and L. Q. Jones).
This shockingly violent—for 1969—opening sequence helps to establish the mem-
bers of Bishop’s gang as men who are being left behind in the rapidly changing indus-
trial world of the early twentieth century. Even they realize, it seems, that as the new
century dawns, times are changing in America. This theme of displaced men struggling
against the reality of a fading frontier began to be played out a decade earlier in John
Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven—one can even see resonances of the idea in John Ford’s
The Searchers (1956)—and Arthur Penn addressed the same subject in Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid, also released in 1969. In these films, especially in The Wild
Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, there would be no romanticization
of the American West.

530
 Wild Bunch, The

Scene from the 1969 film The Wild Bunch, starring (from left) Ben Johnson (as Tector Gorch),
Warren Oates (as Lyle Gorch), William Holden (as Pike Bishop), and Ernest Borgnine (as Dutch
Engstrom). Directed by Sam Peckinpah. (Photofest)

With no place left for them within American boundaries, the members of Bishop’s
gang make their way across the border into Mexico. Pursued by Thornton, they find
themselves in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, a decade-long revolt spanning
the period from 1910 to 1920. They go to the village of Angel (Jaime Sanchez), which
has been attacked by the rampaging federal army of General Mapache (Emilio Fernan-
dez). An antisocial opportunist, Mapache uses the peoples’ revolt as an excuse to take
whatever and kill whomever he wants. Despite experiencing certain ethical misgivings,
Bishop eventually agrees to help Mapache by stealing a shipment of weapons from the
U.S. Army. This decision is one of several underscoring similarities between Bishop
and Thornton, both of whom allow circumstances to release them to violate their
codes of conduct.
In Peckinpah’s West, the present is always receding too quickly into the past, as his-
tory intrudes on the rugged individualists who populate his films. Peckinpah, who
co-wrote the screenplay for The Wild Bunch with Walon Green, does not overempha-
size this point, however, introducing it subtly—the outlaws look on quizzically as an
automobile rumbles past, for instance, an ominous sign of encroaching progress.

531
Winchester ’73

Casting aging actors such as Holden, Ryan, Borgnine, and Ben Johnson also helped
demonstrate how time was catching up with the West. Holden, for instance, who
was turning 50 when he made the film, makes Bishop seem increasingly burdened by
his awareness of his own mortality.
Another of Peckinpah’s westerns, Ride the High Country (1962), makes many of the
same points made in The Wild Bunch; but the former film has an elegiac poignancy
lacking in the latter. Just as the Old West was jolted by change, America changed dras-
tically between 1962, when Ride the High Country was released, and 1969, when The
Wild Bunch was released. This was particularly true in regard to the nation’s sentiment
concerning the Vietnam War. Just as many Americans were unable to reconcile them-
selves to a seemingly pointless, unwinnable war, Bishop’s gang finds itself plunged into
a situation that makes little sense. Because Bishop has allowed Angel to take some of
the weapons so that his village can better defend itself, Mapache has the young Mexi-
can tortured. The outlaws try to ignore his mistreatment because what, after all, can
they do when they are so outnumbered. Then their strange ethical code kicks in—
the idea that a man is not a man if he stands by and sees his friend slowly being killed.
The outlaws are going to die anyway, so why not go out in a blaze of glory? Oddly vio-
lent notions of friendship, loyalty, honor, and being true to oneself—these are founda-
tional elements within Peckinpah’s slowly fading West.
See also: Peckinpah, Sam; Western, The

References
Kitses, Jim. Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship
within the Western. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1970.
Seydor, Paul. Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration. Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1997.
Weddle, David. “If They Move . . . Kill ’Em”: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah. New York:
Grove, 1994.

—Michael Adams

WINCHESTER ’73. One of Hollywood’s landmark westerns, Winchester ’73

(1950) is marked by a moral and psychological complexity that had rarely been seen
in this genre. The picture was also the first of a series of films that emerged from the
prolific and productive partnerships that director Anthony Mann established with star
James Stewart and screenwriter Borden Chase. Between 1950 and 1955, Mann and
Stewart made eight films together, most of them psychological westerns in the mold
of Winchester ’73, with Chase writing three of them.
Winchester ’73 follows cowboy Lin McAdam (Stewart), who, alongside his friend
“High-Spade” Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell), is searching the West for Dutch
Henry Brown (Stephen McNally), the man who murdered his father. This quest
brings them to Dodge City, the location of a shooting contest that will be presided
over by Wyatt Earp (Will Geer). A priceless “One in a Thousand” 1873 Winchester

532
 Winchester ’73

rifle will be awarded as first prize, and McAdam knows that Dutch will be unable to
resist competing for it. The depth of the men’s animosity is immediately apparent
when they first meet, as both men reach for the pistols Earp forced them to surrender
upon entering town. Their long-standing and violently intimate relationship is further
hinted at during the contest, when they exhibit identical shooting styles. In the final
round, McAdam defeats Brown, claiming the Winchester. His victory is short-lived,
however, as Brown and his comrades attack McAdam, steal the rifle, and flee town.
At this point, the film breaks into an innovative double narrative. One strand fol-
lows McAdam and High-Spade as they pursue Dutch into Texas, helping a cavalry unit
fight off an Indian raid and meeting a beautiful showgirl, Lola Manners (Shelley
Winters), along the way. The other thread follows the rifle itself as it passes from one
owner to the next: from Dutch Henry it goes to a gun trader (John McIntire), an
Indian chief on the warpath (Rock Hudson), Lola’s cowardly fiancé (Charles Drake),
and notorious gunslinger Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea). Waco is a sometime ally
of Dutch Henry, and it is here that the strands of the story reunite, for the two outlaws
plan to rob a bank together. Seeing Waco in possession of “his” rifle, Dutch demands
its return, and the gunslinger agrees. Afterward, he admits to Lola, whom he has kid-
napped, that he plans to murder Dutch following the bank heist. McAdam and
High-Spade help foil the robbery, gunning down Waco in the process. From Wilson
we learn that Dutch is in fact McAdam’s brother, and that Dutch killed their father.
In the film’s climactic showdown, McAdam gets revenge by killing Dutch and
reclaiming the Winchester.
As they did in their later westerns, including The Naked Spur (1953) and The Man
from Laramie (1955), Mann and Stewart challenged the traditional conventions of the
genre in Winchester ’73, questioning the use of violence to solve problems, examining
the human cost of revenge, and focusing on a psychologically damaged protagonist.
McAdam has given up everything to pursue his quarry, and when High-Spade asks
what he will do after killing Dutch, McAdam can offer no clear plan for the future;
he is consumed by his maniacal quest, rendering him unable to think of anything else.
Indeed, while McAdam is clearly drawn to Lola, he is incapable of consummating their
romance until he has killed Dutch. His obsession with avenging their father’s death, it
seems, prevents him from having any semblance of a normal life. Interestingly, though,
in a sentimental turn, and one that breaks with the genre convention of the westerner
as a loner, once he has killed Dutch, McAdam returns to Lola and is able to get on with
the life his quest for vengeance had previously denied him.
See also: Western, The

References
Basinger, Jeanine. Anthony Mann. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
Kitses, Jim. Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies in Author-
ship within the Western. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969.
—Bryan Kvet

533
Witness

WITNESS. Witness (1985) was directed by Peter Weir, with screenplay by Earl W.
Wallace and William Kelley, and music by Maurice Jarre. At the 1986 Academy
Awards, Witness was nominated for eight Oscars including Best Actor, Best Director,
and Best Music. The movie won two Oscars for Best Film Editing (Thom Noble)
and Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen (Earl W. Wallace,
William Kelley, Pamela Wallace). The movie was Australian director Weir’s first
Hollywood film, and Harrison Ford’s first Academy Award nomination.
Witness uses the backdrop of a Pennsylvania Amish community to tell the story of an
Amish woman, Rachel Lapp, and her son Samuel. Following the death of her husband,
Rachel and her son leave their Lancaster County farm and travel to visit her sister in
Baltimore. At a stopover en route, Samuel witnesses the brutal murder of a policeman
in a Philadelphia train station bathroom. A detective, John Book, investigates the case,
and he is wounded by the murderer. Realizing that Samuel is in danger, Book returns
with Rachel and Samuel to Lancaster County to recover. Book’s entry into the Amish
community brings two cultures together—the traditional rural and the violent urban.
Weir uses music and dialogue sparingly, inviting viewers to rely on their senses of
sight and sound. He creates scenes that rely only on sounds of the natural world or
the voice, bringing the viewer closer to the reality of the Amish world, with its lack
of electricity, television, or radio. We hear the sounds of horses’ hooves on the pave-
ment and the sound of a typewriter in the police station. On the farm, we hear the
sounds of animals and the hammering of nails at a barn-raising. Maurice Jarre provides
music on the synthesizer, an inspired instrumental contrast to the simplicity and tradi-
tional lifestyle of the Amish community. As the movie opens, we see a windswept field
of wheat, and the simple tonal quality of the synthesizer provides a spiritual, transcen-
dent mood to the scene. This mood and music take us through the scenes of the train
ride and continue as Samuel wanders through the large train station, underscoring his
wonder at these new sights.
Book brings the contemporary urban world into the Amish community. Yet,
although he is an outsider, the simplicity of his name, John Book, implies that there
is, perhaps, a link between this policeman who lives by violence, and the community
for whom violence is anathema. Within this community Book recovers; adopts the
plain, black clothing of the Amish; and is faced with the impact of the Amish culture
on his life. There are several scenes of growing sexual tension between Book and
Rachel, and she is warned of the punishment the community would mete out should
she succumb to her desires. Both struggle to come to terms with the choice of leaving
their own community. Although they do make love toward the end of the movie,
Rachel is aware that in choosing to leave, the harm she would bring on her son and
her community would be permanent and beyond repair. When she realizes that Book
will return to Philadelphia, she struggles for confirmation when speaking with her
father-in-law Eli. “But why?” she asks. “What’s he going back to? Nothing . . . ” Eli
states what she knows to be true: “He’s going back to his world, where he belongs.
He knows it . . . and you know it too.”
The theme of witnessing runs throughout the movie. Initially it is the boy Samuel
who witnesses a horrific murder. Book himself is witness to the traditional ways of

534
 Wizard of Oz, The

the Amish community and is drawn into its daily life. The community is witness to the
growing relationship between Rachel and Book and is quick to show its displeasure.
However, the climax of the film comes when the murderer and his accomplices arrive
at the farm to kill Book and Samuel. The entire community is assembled as if “bearing
witness” to the destructive force they have actively shunned. Book takes strength from
the community around him, and, in the last scenes, instead of using violence, he uses
words to end the brutality. As Book finally leaves the farm, Eli says to him: “You be
careful out there among the English.” This is as close as the two cultures will get—
Book has found a different way of reacting to violence, and Eli has expanded his realm
of possibilities to include the “English” man Book.

References
Hansen, L. “Perspectives: A New Image of Nonviolence in Popular Film.” Journal of Popular
Film and Television 14(3), 1986: 136–41.
Hentzi, Gary. “Peter Weir and the Cinema of New Age Humanism.” Film Quarterly 44(2),
1999: 2–12.
McGowan, John P. “Looking at the (Alter)natives: Peter Weir’s Witness.” Chicago Review 35(3),
1986: 36–47.

—Vicky Bach

WIZARD OF OZ, THE. The Wizard of Oz (1939) is a musical motion picture,

directed by Victor Fleming and produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Based
on L. Frank Baum’s children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), the film tells
the story of Dorothy Gale, a troubled young farm girl from Kansas, who is transported
on a fantastic journey to the Land of Oz, and ultimately comes to realize that “there’s
no place like home.”
The film juxtaposes drab, sepia-toned images of heartland America against the bril-
liant Technicolor of Oz, as it delivers an explicit message that the search for happiness
only brings the seeker back to his or her roots. The routines and minor heartaches of
daily life in Kansas with her Aunt Em (Clara Blandick) and Uncle Henry (Charles
Grapewin), seem unbearable to young Dorothy (played by 16-year-old Judy Garland),
until she finds herself swept away—house and all—by a raging tornado. Jarred as the
house abruptly hits the ground, Dorothy opens the door to discover that she has been
delivered into the exquisite Land of Oz. Wandering from the house, she finds that she
has killed a wicked witch, come into possession of a pair of magical ruby slippers, and
engendered the enmity of the first witch’s (even more) wicked sister. Desperate to find
her way home, Dorothy—along with her dog, Toto, and her newfound friends, a
Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) in need of a brain, a Tin Man (Jack Haley) in need of a heart,
and a Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) in need of courage—embarks on a quest down the
Yellow Brick Road to find the Emerald City, home of the Wizard of Oz.
The MGM adaptation of Baum’s book was not the first—it was preceded by two
silent films, His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914) and The Wizard of Oz (1925),

535
Wizard of Oz, The

The Scarecrow, played by Ray Bolger, and Dorothy, played by Judy Garland, encounter some
hazards on the way to Oz in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Along with Gone with the Wind,
The Wizard of Oz was one of the most famous movies of the 1930s. (AP/Wide World Photos)

directed by Larry Semon—but it is considered to be the definitive cinematic version of

the story. The script, crafted by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan
Woolf, differs from the novel in several ways, with characters and events expanded or
deleted to suit the new medium. Most significantly, while the cinematic Oz is cast as
a dream, the literary Oz was intended to be an actual place—one to which Dorothy
would return in later adventures. Color, throughout the film, precisely delineates the
boundaries between fantasy and reality: the scenes in Kansas were shot in black and
white but given a uniform sepia tint that suggested both the warm familiarity of old
photographs and the sun-bleached grimness of the Dust Bowl. The Oz scenes, on
the other hand, have the vibrant, saturated colors made possible by the three-strip
Technicolor process. This sharp distinction underscores the film’s central message:
dusty-brown Kansas is, for Dorothy, preferable to vibrant Oz because it is real and
because in the fantasy of Oz, there is “no place like home.”
Throughout their journey, the seekers experience breathtaking wonders and curi-
osities: the Munchkins, flying monkeys, talking trees, a horse that changes color (the
proverbial “horse of a different color”), and the Wizard himself (Frank Morgan).
The Emerald City proves, however, to be a hollow world of spectacle and illusions.

536
 Wizard of Oz, The

The fearsome disembodied face and booming voice of the Wizard are merely elaborate
special effects, and the “wizard” who produces them proves to have neither great
powers nor magical gifts to bestow. The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton),
who pursues and threatens Dorothy throughout the film, dissolves away into nothingness
when accidentally splashed with water, and even Dorothy’s main ally, Glinda, the Good
Witch of the North (Billie Burke), appears and disappears in a translucent bubble. Oz’s
lack of real substance reflects the film’s central conceit and key departure from Baum’s
book: the idea that Dorothy’s adventures in Oz are elements in some sophisticated dream,
with friends and foes that are no more than thinly disguised versions of characters from
her real life. The redemptive ending—a symbolic and literal coming-of-age moment that
finds Dorothy happily restored to her Kansas home—celebrates her transition from
rebellious, dissatisfied child to appreciative young adult, who, possessing a more mature
outlook, cheerfully accepts—indeed embraces—her social and familial role.
Far from simply a moral message for children, The Wizard of Oz is laden with
meaning for adults, as well, reflecting the anxieties and concerns of its era. In fact, at
the time of its release, a review in Variety magazine observed that “Oz has a message
well-timed to current events.” Those events—the Great Depression and the enactment
of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—shaped the political-economic landscape from
which the film emerged, and for many, were reflected in its allegorical storyline.
According to E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, the lyricist honored with an Academy Award for
the film’s iconic song “Over the Rainbow,” the Emerald City was, in fact, the New
Deal—the bright, shining hope of Depression-era Americans, desperately in need of
the confidence to shape their own destinies. In a way uncharacteristic of most cin-
ematic songwriters, Harburg, who actively supported Roosevelt’s policies, crafted lyrics
that shaped the film’s message, and served as a celebration of the country’s benevolent
“Wizard” and the New Deal programs that led the American heartland “out of the
woods . . . out of the dark . . . into the light.”
As Dorothy found, though, that light emanates not from the Emerald City—nor by
extension, the promises and programs of Roosevelt’s New Deal—but from the values
already present in the American heartland. Oz, for Dorothy, is a land of anxiety and
confusion, where the norms of everyday life are discarded, and the wonders of prosper-
ity are freely available rather than earned. The Wizard, while “a very good man,” is in
fact, “a very bad wizard”—a fraud, hidden from view—his power deriving solely from
his ability to create beautiful and fearsome illusions. Through her newfound friends,
however, Dorothy learns lessons of substance: the values of community, ingenuity, hard
work, and faith. Only by making common cause with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cow-
ardly Lion, and even Toto is she able to overcome adversity and see through the Wiz-
ard’s facade. Her belief in his power comes to nothing; her belief in herself and her
friends, however, restores order and happiness.
The film made its first appearance on television in 1956, as part of CBS’s Ford Star
Jubilee anthology series, after which the network continued to air it annually, until
1991, establishing the story and its characters as indelible parts of American popular
culture. Cited by the Library of Congress as the most watched film in history, it was
among the first titles of “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance” to be named to

537
Woman of the Year

the National Film Registry (1989). A television event that continues through the
present day, The Wizard of Oz has been subject to remakes, spin-offs, and commercial
tie-ins for decades, ranging from the Broadway hit Wicked, to “Dorothy” cookie jars,
to bumper stickers that urge “Run, Toto, run!”

References
Nathanson, Paul. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1991.
Rushdie, Salman. The Wizard of Oz. London: British Film Institute, 1992.
Scarfone, Jay, and William Stillman. The Wizardry of Oz: The Artistry and Magic of the 1939
MGM Classic, Revised and Expanded. New York: Applause, 2004.
—Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper

WOMAN OF THE YEAR. Woman of the Year features the legendary screen duo
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in their first film appearance together. Hepburn
plays Tess Harding, an international reporter for a New York City newspaper who is
wrapped up in the events of World War II. Audiences in the 1940s would have noticed
how Hepburn’s character mirrored the real life of renowned journalist Dorothy
Thompson. Spencer Tracy plays Sam Craig, a sports journalist who takes up the cause
of basic American values. Woman of the Year was both a box-office and critical success.
It earned Hepburn an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and brought home
Oscars for Original Writing and Original Screenplay. (Miller, 2008)
Woman of the Year was produced prior to the United States entry into World War II—
its release date was January 1942—yet it revealed the issues presented by wartime
exigencies. Tess states in a radio interview that perhaps baseball should be suspended
during the war. Sam is incensed with her comments, and the war of the sexes begins in
the public and personal lives of the two journalists. Their animosity fades into love
and they are married; however, this is not a simple happily-ever-after story. Tess, as the
embodiment of 1940s feminism, maintains her independence and public life, much like
the characters played by Bette Davis in Front Page Woman and Rosalind Russell in His
Girl Friday. All three of these influential female stars, playing assertive and yet extremely
attractive female journalists, reflected significant American cultural trends expressed
during this era. Ms. Hepburn’s portrayal of an independent career woman, glamorous,
opinionated, and sexy in trousers, paralleled the wartime role American women would
be asked to assume after Pearl Harbor. Her intelligence, political savvy, and autonomy
were as essential to the war effort as the activities of the soldiers, the no-nonsense all-
American males portrayed by the stoic Mr. Tracy. In February 1942, New York Times
film critic Bosley Crowther gave Woman of the Year a “triumphant” review. He com-
mented that the film would appeal emotionally to average Americans, both male and
female. He described a scene in the film when a radio announcer asked a group of men
surrounding Tracy at the local coffeeshop to list the two current topics most frequently

538
 Working Girl

discussed by average American citizens. The answer was obvious: war and sports. The
romantic comedy played out by Tracy and Hepburn made these topics fair game.
Men of the 1940s respected the hard work and wit of their women, but they still
wanted a feminine domestic partner. As historian Nancy Woloch suggests, by the
1940s the image of the intelligent, wage-earning woman gave way to a female heroine
who put her traditional gender roles as wife and mother first. Thus, it is not surprising
that after Sam leaves Tess because she is too self-centered, she ultimately comes to her
senses, offering to give up her career if her husband will have her back. American soci-
ety expected its women to return to the home and give up their jobs when the war was
over. William Mann commented in the New York Times (2007) that Katharine
Hepburn would always lose in the Hollywood films when she and Tracy engaged in a
battle of the sexes. He suggests that the film star understood that American postwar
culture might allow some celebration of female independence; but in the end, she
would have to give in to male authority.
See also: Hepburn, Katharine; Romantic Comedy, The; Women in Film

References
Mann, William. “Hepburn, Revisited.” New York Times, May 12, 2007.
Miller, Frank. “Woman of the Year: The Essentials Synopsis.” Turner Classic Movies. http://
www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=14145&category=Articles.
Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience, 3rd ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

—Katharina Tumpek-Kjellmark

WORKING GIRL. Working Girl, staring Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill, Sigourney
Weaver as Katharine Parker, and Harrison Ford as Jack Trainer, explores the social net-
works of 1980s corporate America. Tess, a secretary with ambition and “street smarts,”
finds herself working for Katharine, a no-nonsense captain of industry whose business
practices are proven to be questionable. After a skiing accident keeps Katharine out of
the office, Tess takes advantage of the situation to forward to Jack a business idea she
had originally pitched to Katharine, an idea that Katharine intends to claim as her
own. The working relationship between Tess and Katharine is further complicated by
the fact that Jack and Katharine have been involved in an ill-fated, and seemingly sterile,
personal relationship—one that is ending as Jack and Tess begin their own romantic
involvement. Tess’s ambition and intelligence ultimately serve her well, and by the
end of the film she has become a high-paid executive, while Katharine has been embar-
rassed in front of colleagues and faces the possibility that she will be forced from her job
as a result of her unethical behavior with Tess.
The relatively small percentage of women who made it to the highest positions in
corporate America during the 1980s found themselves in the awkward position of
being outsiders on the inside. This idea is expressed in the film’s opening scene, which
focuses on a commuter ferry making its way into Manhattan from the New Jersey

539
Working Girl

shore—the alternating shots of

the crowds of commuters and
the Statue of Liberty are meant
to remind viewers of the immi-
grants that built America; just as
these foreigners were assimilated
into America’s burgeoning multi-
cultural society, women during
the 1980s were being assimilated
into the corporate world and
proving themselves to be valuable
players in that high-powered
community. Yet, even though
these women came to be integral
parts of the workforce, they still
found themselves largely excluded
from it.
The character of Tess embod-
ies the struggles facing women
and the efforts they made during
this period to prove themselves
essential components of corpo-
rate America. Tess’s lack of a
degree from a prestigious univer-
sity, for instance—she received
her degree “with honors,” but
from night school, as she is
reminded during the course of
the film—is held against her, and
although she proves that she is
Poster for the 1988 film Working Girl, starring Sigourney intelligent as well as intuitive,
Weaver, Harrison Ford, and Melanie Griffith, peeking out she is still relegated to working
from behind her two co-stars. Directed by Mike Nichols.
as a temp-agency secretary
(Photofest)
throughout the early part of the
picture. In an effort to improve
herself professionally, Tess is taking business and diction courses and seeking to land
a “serious” job in the upper echelons of the corporate community.
The film sets Tess and Katharine in juxtapositional tension. Katharine has been
accepted into the corporate “old boys club” and personifies its practices. Significantly,
although she, just like her male counterparts, is every bit the cool professional, in busi-
ness settings she distinguishes herself by wearing bright-colored clothing and even hint-
ing that sexual favors are in the offing should the right deal present itself. Thus,
Katharine is portrayed as having climbed the corporate ladder both by becoming just
like her unscrupulous male colleagues and by at least implying that she is willing to

540
 Working Girl

compromise her own sense of self by sleeping her way to the top. Tess, on the other
hand, although she is portrayed as having a “head for business and bod for sin,” struggles
to break free from the trap of being valued only for her looks and what she can provide
men in the bedroom, instead of being valued for what she has to offer in the boardroom.
Interestingly, while finally rejecting everything that Katharine represents, Tess becomes
both the executive and the woman she wants to be by embracing, and expressing, the
much more ethical, and sensitive, ideals of Jack—the corporate male who is aggressive
and yet refuses to compromise his own integrity to “get the deal done.” In the end, Tess
and Jack, who value each other for all the right reasons, are perfect together.
Working Girl, then, not only depicts the struggle that women faced when they began
entering the upper echelons of the business community during the 1980s, it also
reminds us, in a wonderfully provocative way, that ability, hard work, and commit-
ment should mean more, even in the corporate world, than do gender and class.
See also: Women in Film

References
Davies-Netzley, Sally Ann. “Women above the Glass Ceiling: Perceptions on Corporate Mobil-
ity and Strategies for Success.” Gender and Society 12(3), June 1998: 339–55.
Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. New York: Routledge,
1998.
Wajcman, Judy. Managing Like a Man: Women and Men in Corporate Management. University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

—Elise Guest

541
This page intentionally left blank
 v
Y
YANKEE DOODLE DANDY. The George M. Cohan biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy
(1942) illustrates how historical films often reveal as much about the era in which they
are made as the one they depict. Ostensibly about the American composer/performer’s
amazing run of Broadway hits from the 1900s through the 1930s, the success of this
biographical film can be explained more by timeliness than the particularity of its take
on Cohan. With a release date in early 1942, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor in
late 1941, the composer’s patriotic World War I–era hits “Over There” and “You’re a
Grand Old Flag” were newly relevant and ready for revival. The rhetorical high point
of the film excerpts a scene from his starring role in the 1937 Rodgers and Hart musi-
cal I’d Rather Be Right. The emphatic performance of lines added to address current
global conflict—”We’ll take [France] back from Hitler and put ants in his ‘Japants’
and that’s for the record”—underscore the imperative of producers to make this a
timely World War II–era film.
Yankee traces Cohan’s (James Cagney) rise to fame from his days as a young boy
when he traveled as part of the Four Cohans, his family’s vaudeville act. This context
represents a significant point of departure from many other musical biopics, which typ-
ically work in the mode of The Jazz Singer (1927), in which the musical prodigy’s
enthusiasm for popular music is questioned by his religious and traditional family. As
George successfully capitalizes on his superior talents at a very early age, it is his own
egoism that provides the film’s earliest conflict. Cohan outgrows his youthful cockiness
and serves his country as a diligent patriot. The film’s treatment of the composer as an
American icon is, in fact, explicitly discussed when Cohan’s producer, Sam (Richard
Whorf ), tries to recruit a more highbrow Broadway singer, Fay Templeton (Irene
Manning), to perform his songs. Fay initially resists, saying she will only perform in a
“quiet, dignified musical play,” and that Cohan’s work represents “loud, vulgar, flag wav-
ing.” Sam takes Fay to task for her elitism, explaining his understanding of American
taste and convincing her to “hitch your wagon to his star right now.” Cohan, Sam argues,
is “the whole darn country squeezed into a pair of pants . . . [he] invented the success
story. And every American loves it because it happens to be his own private dream.
He’s found the mainspring in the Yankee clock: ambition, pride, and patriotism.”

543
Yankee Doodle Dandy

James Cagney performing in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Undated movie still. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Fitting this aggrandized portrayal of an American individual, and the reputation of

its studio director Michael Curtiz, Yankee Doodle Dandy is much more a star vehicle
than an auteurist masterpiece. James Cagney, chosen by Cohan himself after Fred
Astaire turned down the role, was afforded the opportunity to play against type.
Cagney typically played violent, masculine characters, so this film gave the actor a
chance to dramatically expand his range. Cagney’s upbeat, surprisingly dance-heavy
performance was rewarded with his only Academy Award for Best Actor.
Production memos reveal how fully Cohan involved himself in the adaptation pro-
cess, often to the aggravation of the producers; at one point “Cohan read [the initial]
script with great interest—then tossed it aside and immediately countered with one
of his own, numbering 170 pages” (Tibbetts, 2005). Along with the new script, Cohan
included a revealing note: “To my mind the only sweetheart your hero can have in the
early stages is the theater itself ” (130). Here, far from insisting on any strict fidelity to
his life story, Cohan, incredibly, describes himself in the third person, as a stock char-
acter under the ownership of the producers. In this respect, the composer and the film’s
staff were in agreement. Similarly, Cohan cited certain facts of his life—multiple mar-
riages, opposition to labor unions, and disputes with popular critics—that would be
best left offscreen (129–30). The producers concurred on these omissions, and the film

544
 Yankee Doodle Dandy

depicted, according to Cohan’s daughter, “the kind of life that Daddy would like to
have lived!” (102).
See also: Cagney, James; Music in Film; Musical, The

References
Cameron, Kenneth M. America on Film: Hollywood and American History. New York:
Continuum, 1997.
Custen, George. Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1992.
McGilligan, Patrick. Yankee Doodle Dandy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981.
Tibbetts, John C. Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2005.
—Jesse Schlotterbeck

545
This page intentionally left blank
PEOPLE

547
This page intentionally left blank
 v
A
ALLEN, DEDE. Dede Allen was one of Hollywood’s most important and innova-
tive screen editors. Indeed, during the 1960s and 1970s, she was one of the most
sought-after editors in the industry. Allen was nominated several times for Academy
Awards and sat on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts
and Sciences.
Born Dorothea Caruthers on December 3, 1923, in Cleveland, Ohio, Allen came
from a middle-class family. Her father worked for Union Carbide and, until she was
married, her mother was an Edwardian stage actress. Influenced by her mother’s love
for the movies, Allen viewed as many films as she was able while she was young. Edu-
cated in Europe, she left for Hollywood in 1943 in order to become a director. Initially
forced to work as a messenger for Columbia Studios, within a year of being hired, she
was promoted to the sound editing department, where she began as an assistant sound
editor. She spent her nights working at the Actor’s Lab, a Hollywood theater company
made up mostly of expatriate New Yorkers. Allen credits the Actor’s Lab with teaching
her how to structure dramatic scenes.
As more and more men who worked in the film industry were sent overseas during
WWII, job opportunities opened up for women; it was at this point that Allen became
a sound editor at Columbia. In 1945, she married Stephen Fleischman, who would
ultimately work as a writer, director, and producer in television. Between 1945 and
1950, Allen took time out to have a family and moved to New York. She had one
son, Tom Fleischman, who later became a sound editor. Still in New York, Allen took
a job at a commercial movie company, Filmgraphics, working there as an editor, sound
editor, and script girl. In 1957, she edited a film short, Endowing Your Future, and in
1958, a grade-B feature film, Terror from the Year 5000, also known as Cage of Doom.
In 1959, director Robert Wise, who edited both Citizen Kane and The Magnificent
Ambersons for Orson Welles, hired Allen to edit Odds against Tomorrow (1959), a film
noir shot in New York, that featured Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan. Wise encour-
aged Allen to experiment with the scenes, and he was very pleased with the final cut.
Recognizing her enormous talent, Robert Rossen brought her on to edit his
1961 masterpiece The Hustler. The film was nominated for numerous Oscars,

549
Allen, Dede

including those for Best Picture; Best Director; Best Actor, for Paul Newman; and Best
Supporting Actor, for Jackie Gleason (although also nominated for a Best Supporting
Actor award, George C. Scott refused the nomination). Allen was nominated by the
American Cinema Editors, USA for its award for best Edited Feature Film.
Perhaps Allen’s greatest career achievement came with the 1968 film Bonnie and
Clyde. Allen’s editing of this iconic film was revolutionary, innovative, and extraordi-
narily influential, and after the picture was released, she became one of the most
sought-after editors in the industry. Continuing to work on feature films, she also
began training novice editors, eventually establishing what came to be known as the
New York School of Editing. Her students included Jerry Greenberg, Evan Lottman,
Barry Malkin, Richard Marks, Jim Miller, and Steven Rotter.
After her success with Bonnie and Clyde, Allen would go on to edit such pictures as
Rachel, Rachel (1968), Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Little Big Man (1970), Slaughterhouse
Five (1972), Serpico (1973), and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), for which she was nomi-
nated for an Academy Award. While she did not win the Oscar, she did win the British
Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for film editing. She continued
her work through the 1970s and ’80s, editing such pictures as The Missouri Breaks
(1976); Slap Shot (1977); The Wiz (1978); Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), which she
co-produced and for which she was again nominated for an Academy Award; The
Breakfast Club (1985); The Milagro Beanfield War (1988); Henry and June (1990);
The Addams Family (1991); and 2001’s Wonder Boys, for which she received yet
another Oscar nomination.
In 1992, Warner Bros. executives persuaded Allen to move to California to become
the Vice-President in Charge of Creative Development at their studio. She was eventu-
ally promoted to Senior Vice-President in Charge of Creative Development. She served
on the board of trustees for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, repre-
senting the Film Editors branch; and also as the vice president of the Board of Directors
of the Motion Picture Editors Guild. Although she never won an Oscar for her work as
an editor, Allen won a Crystal Award from Women in Film, a Career Achievement
Award from the American Cinema Editors, and a Fellowship and Service Award from
the Motion Picture Editors Guild. Allen died on April 17, 2010; she was 86.

Selected Filmography
John Q (2002); Wonder Boys (2000); The Addams Family (1991); Henry & June (1990); Let It
Ride (1989); The Milagro Beanfield War (1988); The Breakfast Club (1985); Reds (1981); The
Wiz (1978); Slap Shot (1977); The Missouri Breaks (1976); Dog Day Afternoon (1975); Night
Moves (1975); Serpico (1973); Slaughterhouse-Five (1972); Little Big Man (1970); Alice’s Restau-
rant (1969); Rachel, Rachel (1968); Bonnie and Clyde (1967); America, America (1963); The
Hustler (1961); Odds against Tomorrow (1959); Because of Eve (1948)

References
Gentry, Ric, and Dede Allen. “An Interview with Dede Allen.” Film Quarterly 46(1), Fall 1992:
12–22.

550
 Allen, Woody

Lumme, Helena. Great Women of Film. New York: Billboard Books/Watson-Guptill, 2002.
McGilligan, Patrick. “Dede Allen.” In Kay, Karyn, and Gerald Peary, eds. Women and the Cin-
ema: A Critical Anthology. New York: Dutton, 1977: 199–207.
McGrath, Declan. Editing and Post-production. Boston: Focal Press, 2001.

—Scott Sheidlower

ALLEN, WOODY. A legendary filmmaker and consummate auteur, Woody Allen

has been writing and directing films since 1966. Since 1969 he has averaged one movie
per year. His unique style generally favors the script and actors over avant-garde cin-
ematic techniques and special effects. While he occasionally experiments with narrative
techniques, his films are noted for complex characters, long scenes of dialogue, and
location shoots. He is one of a few filmmakers who retains complete creative control
over his films.
Allan Stewart Konigsberg was born December 1, 1935 in Brooklyn, New York, to
Nettie and Martin Konigsberg. His mother was a bookkeeper and his father a jeweler.
While Allen’s parents were both born and raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side,
Allen and his sister were raised in middle-class Brooklyn, where he attended public
schools. After high school Allen attended NYU, but didn’t apply himself and was even-
tually expelled.
Even before he graduated from high school, Allen was ghostwriting jokes for
Sammy Kaye, Guy Lombardo, and Arthur Murray. After he dropped out of college,
he signed with the William Morris Agency to write comedy skits for Pat Boone, Buddy
Hackett, and others. In 1953, he left for Hollywood to work on the Colgate Comedy
Hour for NBC. While he was in Hollywood he met Danny Simon, the brother of Neil
Simon, who became his mentor. In 1956, Allen returned to New York, where he wrote
nightclub routines for a number of celebrities. In 1958, he left the William Morris
Agency and formed a business relationship with Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, who
launched his film career and continue to work with him, producing most of his films.
During the 1960s Allen wrote for television and worked as a stand-up comic, touring
the country and appearing frequently on The Tonight Show. His film career began in
1965 with the box-office hit, What’s New Pussycat?, which he scripted. Since then he
has written and directed over 40 films.
Allen is a prolific filmmaker. Every year he has a film in release, one in production,
and one he is writing. His filmmaking approach, which is based on a restricted number
of takes and tight schedules, keeps his budgets low (currently around $12 million per
picture) and allows him to keep to his rigorously defined timetable. Allen is philo-
sophical about his filmmaking vision, something reflected in the movies he creates.
For instance, in Manhattan, which Allen co-wrote, Yale (Michael Murphy) suggests
that “the essence of art is to provide a certain working through of the situation for peo-
ple, so that you can get in touch with feelings that you didn’t know that you had.” This
notion emphasizes the therapeutic value of art for the artist. Indeed, films such as Star-
dust Memories, Deconstructing Harry, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, emphasize the point
that art exists for the sake of the artist, often with only a peripheral regard for the

551
Allen, Woody

audience. Reflecting this sense of

art as a process of creative “work-
ing through of the situation,”
Allen’s films frequently repeat
subjects he approached in pre-
vious work: Manhattan is a more
refined version of Annie Hall,
Hannah and Her Sisters fleshes
out some of the ambiguities in
Interiors, while Match Point deals
with the same issues as Crimes
and Misdemeanors. For Allen,
then, it seems that art is also
becoming and, perhaps, never
arrives.
Allen’s films can be divided into
three periods: his early slapstick-
comedy and Diane Keaton films;
his Mia Farrow period; and his
post–Mia Farrow period. (Allen
had long-term, intimate relation-
ships with both women.) Allen’s
early films relied heavily on slap-
stick and visual comedy. During
this period he developed the
Chaplinesque character, most
Director Woody Allen attends the premiere of his film Match often played by Allen himself, of
Point at the 58th International Cannes Film Festival on May the lovable, anxious schlemiel.
12, 2005 in Cannes. From an early career as a gag writer With Annie Hall, Allen moved
and stand-up comic, Allen became one of America’s foremost toward the seriocomedy he would
independent filmmakers. (MJ Kim/Getty Images) master in the 1980s. A romantic
comedy that deals with the com-
plexity of intimate relationships, Annie Hall also relies on various forms of comedy to ease
the filmic tension Allen masterfully creates in this film. In the 1980s, Allen’s films relied
more on situational comedy and situational irony than on physical comedy, as his early
films had. The result is a period of filmmaking that more closely examines the nature of
relationships and growth into middle age, what might be termed “mature comedies.”
While many critics consider his Mia Farrow years to be his best, after his relation-
ship with Farrow ended, his films became more diverse in form and content. (An acri-
monious split between Allen and Farrow led to court battles over their adopted and
biological children and Allen ultimately marrying the much younger Soon-Yi Previn,
the adopted daughter of Farrow and Andre Previn, who had lived with Farrow and
Allen while the two were together.). Everyone Says I Love You (1996) is a musical, while
films like Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and Match Point (2005) bear little resemblance in

552
 Allen, Woody

style to any of Allen’s previous films. Also, he began casting other actors in the “Woody
Allen” character: John Cusak in Bullets over Broadway (1994), Kenneth Branagh in
Celebrity (1998), and Will Ferrell in Melinda and Melinda (2004). In 2004, Allen
made the greatest change in his film career: he started shooting films in England.
New York City had become an integral part of his films; but artistically the change in
location, said Allen, was necessary for him to view the world differently. Many of the
themes Allen has dealt with in the past are there, but English and European culture
play a role in the narrative. While frustrated with Hollywood’s current business model,
which favors blockbusters, Allen sees the move in pragmatic terms: European audi-
ences tend to embrace his films more than American audiences.
Interestingly, especially because Allen, both in his personal life and in his films,
seems hopelessly unable to determine “what women want,” he has directed more
women in Oscar-nominated roles than any other living filmmaker. A close examina-
tion of Allen’s films reveals that most of them reflect his desire to understand women.
This may appear directly, as in films such as Interiors, Alice, Purple Rose of Cairo, and
Vicky Cristina Barcelona, or indirectly, through the male characters’ relationships with
women, in films like Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters
(which covers all manner of sins), and Match Point. Setting the stage for most of the
films that follow, Annie Hall explores Alvy Singer’s attempt to come to terms with his
relationship with women—and Annie in particular. The nature of women is a recur-
ring theme in Allen’s films. Films like Interiors, September, Alice, and Vicky Cristina
Barcelona (none of which Allen appears in as an actor) focus on female protagonists
and examine personal relationships from the female perspective. These characters are
carefully and deeply wrought, and within each film reveal different aspects of the femi-
nine psyche.
Sex is also a prominent and recurring theme in Allen’s films. The 1970s emerged as
an era in America during which sexuality could be discussed more openly. While never
graphically portrayed in his films, the omnipresence of sex through innuendo, jokes, or
postcoital conversations, reflected society’s changing attitudes toward sexuality. But
beneath the jokes and shock value created by the frank discussions of the subject in
his early films (Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex and Sleeper), Allen
presents viewers epistemological inquiries into human sexuality. For instance, in one
scene in Annie Hall, also co-written by Allen, in a postcoital moment between Alvy
(Allen) and Annie (Keaton), Alvy rolls over, turns on the light, and says, “As Balzac
said, ‘there goes another novel.’ ” This statement directly addresses the creative impulse
expressed in both the sexual and the artistic moment. Allen, it seems, is suggesting that
the creative impulse can be expressed through art or sexuality, but that for the artist,
and by extension humanity in general, sexual desire tends to pervert what he under-
stands as the transcendent quality of creativity. Indeed, in many of Allen’s films, the
artist is compromised by his sexual desires.
Another prominent motif in Allen’s films is the city of New York. His recent Euro-
pean films notwithstanding, New York City plays a significant role in almost all of his
work. Allen himself has stated that Manhattan is his homage to New York, and Han-
nah and Her Sisters offers an architectural tour of the city. The city shapes Allen’s

553
Altman, Robert

characters, and is integral to his plots. Indeed, the absence of the city in A Midsummer
Night’s Sex Comedy underscores the significance of the city in modern America. As the
primary symbol of American modernity, Allen appears to be saying that the city acts
to repress humanity’s innate carnal desires; only in some Burkeian place of the sublime,
then, can humanity’s essential self finally emerge. Because Allen’s characters, in both his
comedies and his dramatic films, are so often repressed, so often representative of
charmingly neurotic figures struggling mightily to disclose their own inner selves, it
is not surprising that this brilliant director places most of them in the city, in the
American city, New York City.
Allen continues to make films and gather awards. By 2009, he had received
46 Academy Award nominations and taken home the top prize 10 times. While most
of his nominations have been for screenwriting, for which he holds the record at 14,
most of his wins have gone to women who have acted in his films.
See also: Annie Hall; Manhattan

Selected Filmography
Midnight in Paris (2011); Whatever Works (2009); Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008); Match Point
(2005); Deconstructing Harry (1997); Mighty Aphrodite (1995); Husbands and Wives (1992);
Shadows and Fog (1991); Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989); Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); A
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982); Manhattan (1979); Interiors (1978); Annie Hall
(1977); Sleeper (1973); Bananas (1971)

References
Brode, Douglas. The Films of Woody Allen. New York: Citadel, 1991.
Girgus, Sam B. The Films of Woody Allen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Kapsis, Robert E., and Kathie Coblentz, eds. Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2006.
Nichols, Mary P. Reconstructing Woody: Art, Love, and Life in the Films of Woody Allen. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.
Pogel, Nancy. Woody Allen. Boston: Twayne, 1987.
Silet, Charles L.P., ed. The Films of Woody Allen. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006.
—Dean R. Cooledge

ALTMAN, ROBERT. Robert Altman’s satirical, multi-layered, absurdist, and the-

matically complex films are reminiscent, in their personal vision and artistic daring,
of European art cinema—except that Altman could not touch anything without mak-
ing it strangely and irreducibly American. Not often a successful box-office director,
Altman nevertheless got to do pretty much what he wanted, as he wanted, for most
of his career. As he put it late in life, what director could have asked for more?
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on February 20, 1925, Altman went to private
school and joined the Air Force in 1945 to serve as a bombardier in World War II.

554
 Altman, Robert

After the war he broke into early

TV, and cut his teeth in the 1950s
and 1960s directing and writing a
variety of TV episodes, particularly
westerns such as Bonanza.
Altman’s breakthrough came
in 1970 when he was given the
chance to direct the Korean War
hospital comedy M*A*S*H* after,
as the joke has it, every last direc-
tor left in Hllywood said no to
the project. His two stars, Elliott
Gould and Donald Sutherland,
thought he was inept, and tried
to get him fired. Altman’s meth-
ods were unconventional to say
the least: he threw out most of
screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr.’s
dialogue, and prompted his
ensemble cast to improvise a
series of comic moments. If the
executives at Twentieth Century-
Fox had known that Altman was
following no plot, had adopted
an impertinent improvisational
antiwar tone, and was beginning
his experimentation with overlap-
ping dialogue, they probably Film director Robert Altman poses in New York City on Sep-
tember 20, 1981. (AP/Wide World Photos)
would have shut the production
down. But they were preoccupied overseeing their mammoth WWII epic Tora! Tora!
Tora!, and left Altman alone. By the end of the year Tora! Tora! Tora! became one of
the biggest box-office and critical disasters of all time, and M*A*S*H*, setting the tone
for a new generation’s resistance to staid Hollywood approaches, won the Palme d’Or
at the Cannes Film Festival; garnered a host of Academy Award nominations, includ-
ing Best Picture and Best Director; and was a box-office smash.
The success gave Altman a chance to fulfill his dream of becoming one of the most
independent-minded directors in an era of independent-minded directors. After mak-
ing M*A*S*H*, Altman began his most fertile creative period—the 1970s. In film after
film, he developed a distinct tone and a style, making him one of the most identifiable
directors working in Hollywood. He called his method the “Gypsy caravan style” of
filmmaking, an unusual collaborative approach enhanced by on-the-set improvisation
and his famous roaming, floating camera. The best films of the period included his
revisionist western McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), starring Warren Beatty and Julie
Christie in what critic Pauline Kael called a “beautiful pipe-dream”; The Long Goodbye

555
Altman, Robert

(1973), one of the best and most underrated films of the 1970s, starring Elliott Gould
as a mumbling version of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe; Thieves Like Us
(1974), a lyrical Depression-era crime film that Kael called a masterpiece; and, preemi-
nently, Nashville (1975), Altman’s political epic centered in America’s country music
capital, his most ambitious film to date and his most critically acclaimed.
But the critics, with the exception of Pauline Kael, were not always flattering in their
reviews, and the box-office results for Altman were usually disappointing. After a series
of bizarre critical and financial failures in the late 1970s, including the surreal 3 Women
(1977) and Quintet (1979), a futuristic apocalyptic dream set in the Arctic and seen by
practically no one, even Kael turned her back on Altman, and he was considered poi-
son by every Hollywood studio. The nadir of his career was when Twentieth
Century-Fox refused to release his comedy Health (1980), and Altman, faced with
debts, was shortly thereafter forced to sell his production company, Lions Gate, and
to take jobs shooting wedding videos.
Some American lives not only have second acts, but third and fourth acts, as well. Alt-
man remade himself in the 1980s, directing a series of small-budget film versions of suc-
cessful contemporary American plays, including David Rabe’s Streamers (1983) and Sam
Shepard’s Fool for Love (1985). These films were respectful adaptations of stage plays,
perhaps not fully conceived as films in their own right, but an antidote to the increasingly
blockbuster-conscious Hollywood, and a spur to the growing independent cinema move-
ment. The films kept Altman working and gained him critical respect.
In the 1990s, a few significant films brought him back to new heights of respectabil-
ity and importance. The Player (1992), starring Tim Robbins as a Hollywood studio
executive driven to murder, was a stunningly incisive and entertaining critique of
Hollywood politics and aesthetics, as well as a devastating moral indictment of yuppie
values, and it showed Altman at his most audacious and playful. He followed The
Player with Short Cuts (1993), an adaptation of a series of Raymond Carver short sto-
ries that in style and complexity was reminiscent of Nashville, had the latter been
darker-toned, as it investigated American social decay in and around Los Angeles.
Altman received his fifth Academy Award nomination for Gosford Park (2001), a
charming 1930s “upstairs downstairs” period piece set in a manor house in England
that employed his usual stylistic methods. His last film, the marvelously unpredictable
A Prairie Home Companion (2006), seemed almost an indirect pastiche of Nashville,
and reminded audiences of Altman’s marvelous capacity to create surprising comic
tonalities, and to inform his films with a buoyant atmosphere of happy ensembles.
Having never won a Best Director Oscar, he was awarded the Academy of Motion Pic-
ture Arts and Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. He died on November 20
of that year. Altman had been working on a number of projects, still seeking to map
out his large-spirited and unpredictable vision of America’s dreamers and misanthropes.

Selected Filmography
A Prairie Home Companion (2006); The Company (2003); Gosford Park (2001); Dr T and the
Women (2000); Cookie’s Fortune (1999); The Gingerbread Man (1998); Kansas City (1996);

556
 Arzner, Dorothy

Prêt-à-Porter (1994); Short Cuts (1993); The Player (1992); O. C. and Stiggs (1985); Secret Honor
(1984); Streamers (1983); Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982);
Health (1980); A Perfect Couple (1979); Quintet (1979); A Wedding (1978); 3 Women (1977);
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976); Nashville (1975); California
Split (1974); Thieves Like Us (1974); The Long Goodbye (1973); Images (1972); McCabe and
Mrs. Miller (1971); Brewster McCloud (1970); MASH (1970); Countdown (1968)

References
Cook, David A. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–
1979. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Kael, Pauline. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies. New York: Henry Holt, 1985.
Sterritt, David, ed. Robert Altman: Interviews. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
—Robert Cowgill

ARZNER, DOROTHY. Dorothy Arzner was one of the few female directors ever to
achieve prominence in American moviemaking, even earning notice as one of the “Top
Ten” directors of the 1920s. When her career ended in 1943, she had directed 17 films,
including Paramount’s first talkie. Although she never came out publicly as a lesbian,
she was among many Hollywood figures during its golden age whose homosexuality
was an “open secret” among insiders.
Arzner was born in San Francisco January 3, in either 1897 or 1900 (sources dis-
agree) and grew up in Los Angeles. Her father owned the Hoffman Café in Holly-
wood, and Arzner met many movie notables while waiting tables there. She did not
immediately enter filmmaking, instead enrolling at the University of Southern Califor-
nia as a premed student, dropping out, and driving an ambulance during World War I.
Once the war ended, she worked for a newspaper, but by 1919 she had embarked on
her movie career. Arzner began as a script typist for William DeMille and was quickly
promoted to editing and screenwriting; among her many credits in these capacities are
Blood and Sand (1922, editor), The Covered Wagon (1923, editor and screenwriter),
and Red Kimono (1925, screenwriter).
Her first film as director was the Paramount silent feature Fashions for Women
(1927). She stayed with Paramount through 1932, directing three more silent films
and, beginning with The Wild Party (1929), seven talking pictures. She is the only
female director to work in both formats and is credited with inventing the boom micro-
phone. Her last film with Paramount, Merrily We Go to Hell (1932), is considered
among her most notable, as are most of her post-Paramount films, including Christo-
pher Strong (1933), Nana (1934), Craig’s Wife (1936), The Bride Wore Red (1937),
and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940). During World War II she also directed Women’s Army
Corps training films, returning to the private sector for First Comes Courage (1943), her
last film. A lengthy illness, followed by postwar social mores that required passive,
domestic women, effectively ended her Hollywood career. Arzner then found a niche

557
Arzner, Dorothy

offering classes at the Pasadena Playhouse and in the film department at UCLA (1959–
63), as well as directing dozens of Pepsi-Cola commercials for television.
In her later years Arzner was rediscovered amid second wave feminism and lesbian
activism, which generated new scholarship on the intersections between personal and
public lives. Her films include stories of female bonding and often feature strong
women who question or defy society’s sexism. As a result, some of the most memorable
actresses of the era play leads in Arzner’s productions, a few in their first starring roles:
Lucille Ball, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Merle Oberon,
Maureen O’Hara, Rosalind Russell, and Sylvia Sidney. Interestingly, though she later
acknowledged the “shortcomings” of the Hollywood Code of her era, Arzner asserted
that “the Code at least forced women on screen to do.”
Links between Arzner’s lesbianism and the content and style of her films have been
explored by feminist and queer scholars, most notably Judith Mayne. Like many of her
Hollywood cohorts, Arzner was neither in nor out of the closet as understood today;
her relationships, including brief affairs with Alla Nazimova and Billie Burke, were
known within the industry, as was her lengthy partnership with dancer/choreographer
Marion Morgan (who is credited with influencing the use of dance in Arzner’s films).
In the 1950s, however, the revival of strict gender codes combined with a newer and
virulent homophobia to render Arzner and her films both less relevant and potentially
dangerous. This context may explain her 1978 remark, “The true reason I retired from
Hollywood may forever remain a secret, and I’d rather it does.”
Arzner died in California the next year on October 1, 1979, having finally received
some of the attention she deserved. In 1975, the Director’s Guild of America, of which
she was the first female member, honored her with a tribute; reportedly Katharine
Hepburn’s telegram was read aloud: “Isn’t it wonderful that you’ve had such a great
career, when you had no right to have a career at all.” Her star was added to the Holly-
wood Walk of Fame in 1986.

Selected Filmography
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940); The Bride Wore Red (1937); The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937); Craig’s
Wife (1936); Nana (1934); Christopher Strong (1933); Merrily We Go to Hell (1932); Working
Girls (1931); Honor among Lovers (1931); Galas de la Paramount (1930); Anybody’s Woman
(1930); Paramount on Parade (1930); Sarah and Son (1930); Behind the Make-Up (1930); The
Wild Party (1929); Manhattan Cocktail (1928); Get Your Man (1927); Ten Modern Command-
ments (1927); Fashions for Women (1927); Blood and Sand (1922)

References
Hadleigh, Boze. Hollywood Lesbians, New York: Barricade Books, 1994.
Johnston, Claire, ed. The Work of Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema. London: British
Film Institute, 1975.
Mayne, Judith. Directed by Dorothy Arzner. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Penley, Constance, ed. Feminism and Film Theory. New York: Routledge, 1988.
—Vicki L. Eaklor

558
 Ashby, Hal

ASHBY, HAL. Perhaps because there is no obvious distinctive voice unifying his
work, Hal Ashby is often dismissed as a director whose greatest skill was knowing
how to pick talented collaborators. A full 10 years older than fellow New Hollywood
stalwarts Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese, he never-
theless grew his hair and beard long and refused to abandon his “hippie” existence,
even after his younger contemporaries had embraced far more mainstream lifestyles.
Ashby was born into a Mormon family in Ogden, Utah, on September 2, 1929. His
early life was disrupted by his parents divorce and his father’s suicide. Leaving Utah as a
young adult—having been the one who found his father after he killed himself—
Ashby made his way to California, where he took his first job in the movie industry
photocopying scripts for a film studio. Learning the business from the ground up, he
ultimately became a film editor. Ashby had the good fortune of working on several
movies with Norman Jewison, including his 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. After
Ashby took home the Oscar for editing on that film, Jewison encouraged him to try
his hand at directing. When Jewison bowed out of making The Landlord (1970),
Ashby stepped in and took over the project. Based on the Kristin Hunter novel about
a privileged white kid who buys a building in a New York ghetto and is changed by his
experiences with his black tenants, the film starred Beau Bridges in the title role. The
picture yielded a supporting Oscar nomination for Lee Grant, and was well received
for its honest portrayal of the awkwardness of race relations.
Ashby followed The Landlord with Harold and Maude, the picture with which he is
probably most closely associated. A little gem of a film, the movie explores the unique
relationship that develops between the title characters, played with quirky grace by Bud
Cort and Ruth Gordon. Although it would gain a cult following years later, Harold and
Maude was neither well received critically nor a commercial success at the time of its
release. Respecting Ashby’s talent, however, Jack Nicholson suggested he consider
directing The Last Detail. Robert Towne wrote a screenplay based on Darryl Ponicsan’s
novel of the same title, with Nicholson in mind for the lead. Beset by production prob-
lems—the project was nearly cancelled when Ashby was arrested for marijuana posses-
sion in Canada—the film nevertheless proved a success, earning the Palme d’Or and
the Best Actor Award for Nicholson at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. Towne, Nichol-
son, and Randy Quaid were all nominated for Oscars, although none of them won.
Although it never gained the following that Harold and Maude did, a case can be made
that The Last Detail is Ashby’s best film, a rare offering that looks at working-class life
without irony, condescension, or hand-wringing sentiment.
Ashby followed the success of The Last Detail with another collaborative effort with
Towne. Shampoo (1975), Ashby’s biggest commercial success, is a satire set on the eve
of Richard Nixon’s reelection (it was actually shot as the Watergate scandal unfolded).
A drastic departure from the raw, hard-edged The Last Detail, Shampoo is an engaging
film that explores the tangled web of sexual politics navigated by protagonist George
Roundy, played with irresistible charm by co-writer Warren Beatty. Bound for Glory
(1976), a slow-paced Woody Guthrie biopic, came next. Panned by critics and rejected
by audiences, perhaps the only memorable thing about the film is that it was the first
movie to use the Steadicam. Ashby’s only Oscar nomination as Best Director came

559
Astaire, Fred

for Coming Home (1978), one of a number of antiwar, Vietnam epics released at the
time—Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) and Francis Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now (1979) were two others. Although Ashby did not win his coveted
Oscar for direction, the picture did earn awards for its screenplay and for Best Actress
and Best Actor for leads Jane Fonda and Jon Voight.
By 1979, Ashby had given in to eccentricity and become reclusive and paranoid.
Indulging in drugs more and more frequently, Ashby spent much of his time by him-
self, closed off in his Malibu beach house. Nevertheless, he was able to make Being
There, an adaptation of a Jerzy Kosinski novel starring the extraordinarily gifted Peter
Sellers as Chance, a gardener whose innocence is mistaken for wisdom by ever more
powerful people.
Plagued by drug abuse and his chaotic lifestyle, Ashby’s career went into decline
after he made Being There. The Neil Simon–scripted The Slugger’s Wife (1985), meant
to be a light romantic comedy, is never light and only occasionally funny or romantic.
As America turned increasingly conservative during the Reagan years, Ashby began to
realize that his reputation as an eccentric was limiting his cinematic prospects. He cut
his hair and trimmed his beard, and reportedly gave up drugs. Even so, there was little
work available for him, apart from a pilot for the Hill Street Blues spin-off Beverly Hills
Buntz (1987) and a sword-and-sorcery project with Monty Python’s Graham Chap-
man, which was never completed. Only 59 years old, Ashby died at his Malibu home
of pancreatic cancer on December 27, 1988.

Selected Filmography
8 Million Ways to Die (1986); The Slugger’s Wife (1985); Let’s Spend the Night Together (1983);
Lookin’ to Get Out (1982); Second-Hand Hearts (1981); Being There (1979); Coming Home
(1978); Bound for Glory (1976); Shampoo (1975); The Last Detail (1973); Harold and Maude
(1971); The Landlord (1970)

References
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-‘n’-Roll Generation Saved
Hollywood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.
Dawson, Nick. Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2009.
Friedman, Lester, ed. American Cinema of the 1970s. Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2007.
Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New
York: Penguin, 2008.

—Bill Kte’pi

ASTAIRE, FRED. Fred Astaire, the debonair singing and dancing star of dozens of
twentieth-century film musicals, is known worldwide as one of Hollywood’s most
respected and best-liked performers. Always well-mannered, and modest in his view
of himself, Astaire managed to avoid celebrity scandal all his life while carving out a

560
 Astaire, Fred

unique persona as a genteel yet

thoroughly American figure who
could casually bring high style to
a popular song and, almost at a
whim, spring into a dazzling
dance solo or duet, captivating
in its grace, athletic in its energy.
Born Frederick Austerlitz Jr.
on May 10, 1899, in Omaha,
Nebraska, Astaire was the second
child of an Austrian immigrant,
Frederick Austerlitz, and his
American wife, Joanna Gelius.
His older sister, Adele, demon-
strated dance and performance
abilities at an early age, and
Astaire’s mother bundled Fred
and Adele off to New York when
the boy was four-and-a-half years
old in order to find a place
for them on the vaudeville stage.
In his autobiography, Steps in
Time, Astaire indicates that this
sudden change in his life was not
unwelcome—it represented the
possibility for adventure, as he One of America’s favorite entertainers, Fred Astaire danced
and his sister worked the presti- with a winning, effortless style that drew life from ingenious
gious Orpheum vaudeville circuit combinations of tap, ballroom, and ballet dancing. (Library
for a time, and then began to of Congress)
ascend the show business ladder
by making musicals in London and New York. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, they
performed in shows written by some of the best composers of the day—George Gersh-
win, Cole Porter, and the team of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz.
By 1933, Adele Astaire had retired and Fred moved on to Hollywood, where he had
been offered a small role playing himself in an MGM musical, Dancing Lady. RKO
Studios eventually offered him fifth billing in Flying Down to Rio, in which he would
be teamed for the first time with Ginger Rogers. Cast as a couple, Rogers and Astaire
stole the show from the three performers whose names appeared above theirs on the
marquee—Dolores Del Rio, Gene Raymond, and Raul Roulien. It was the pair’s mes-
merizing dance routine of the tango-like “Carioca” that caught the public’s eye, some-
thing that did not go unnoticed by the studio heads at RKO, which made Rogers and
Astaire headliners in their next film. Appearing together in a number of subsequent
films, the pair became a top 10 box-office draw for several years in the mid-1930s.

561
Astaire, Fred

The black-and-white pictures Astaire made with Rogers for RKO ultimately came
to define him. Most of these films were directed by Mark Sandrich, with Hermes
Pan assisting Astaire in choreographing the dance numbers, Pandro S. Berman produc-
ing, and Carroll Clark providing the art direction (within a visual mode originated by
Van Nest Polglase). Fairy-tale sets with glossy dance floors and lots of formal wear,
especially for the men, characterized these confections.
The Gay Divorcee was the first, and one of the two best, of the six quintessential
Astaire-Rogers RKO productions. Rogers was never lovelier than she was when she
played Mimi Glossop in this film. Mimi is a reluctant partner to Astaire’s Guy Holden,
who woos her with his dazzling dance moves. In the film’s signature dance sequence, set
to Cole Porter’s languorous “Night and Day,” Holden, in white tie and tails, seduces
the shy Mimi, drawing her into an elegant dance floor courtship, the two in perfect
romantic harmony.
In the 1940s and ’50s, after the Astaire-Rogers team had split, Astaire appeared in
several spectacular color film musicals (mostly for MGM), including Easter Parade,
Royal Wedding, The Band Wagon, Daddy Long Legs, Funny Face, and Silk Stockings. In
these pictures, he was paired with a new generation of dance and film partners, includ-
ing Judy Garland, Jane Powell, Leslie Caron, and Cyd Charisse.
Noted as a couples dancer, Astaire was often unfavorably compared to Gene Kelly as a
solo performer; although in individual sequences such as his Bojangles dance in Swing
Time, he nevertheless delighted audiences. Although clearly an incredibly gifted dancer,
whether performing with a partner or by himself, it may be that Astaire is, indeed, best
remembered in top hat and tails, gliding across the dance floor with Rogers in his early
RKO musicals.
Astaire was married to Phyllis Livingston Potter for 21 years before her death in
1954; and to Robyn Smith from 1980 until his death on June 22, 1987, in Los
Angeles.
See also: Musical, The; Romantic Comedy, The

References
Astaire, Fred. Steps in Time. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959.
Croce, Arlene. The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book. New York: Galahad, 1972.
—James Delmont

562
 v
B
BEATTY, WARREN. In 1967, Warren Beatty starred in and produced Arthur
Penn’s controversial Bonnie and Clyde. The film elicited significant critical debate, pit-
ting traditional critics such as Bosley Crowther against hip, liberal provocateurs such as
Pauline Kael. Most importantly, perhaps, the film had far-reaching effects on the
Hollywood film industry, supercharging Beatty’s career, bringing forward a brace of
new talent (Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, David Newman, Robert Benton, and
others), and inaugurating a profoundly important phase of countercultural American
filmmaking at the end of the 1960s.
Interestingly, although Beatty during the late 1960s was emblematic of a new type
of Hollywood filmmaking, he also remained wedded to the traditions of the earlier
studio system era. Indeed, although he is identified as one of the figures in Hollywood
that facilitated the decline of the studio system, it is important to note that Beatty
actually provided a bridge between Hollywood’s past and its late twentieth-century
present. Handsome, hip, and provocative, Beatty embodied the matinee idol ideal of
Hollywood’s golden era; as a producer, he created affectionate remakes of classic
films—Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Love Affair (1994), for example; and as a director,
he provided audiences with pictures that seemed to be homages to cinematic icons—
Bulworth (1998), for instance, has a Frank Capra-like man-against-corrupt-society
feel, while Reds (1981) bears the unmistakable mark of David Lean’s sweeping period
epics. Beatty, then, comes into focus as an intermediate figure straddling old and new
Hollywood.
Born Henry Warren Beaty, in Virginia on March 30, 1937, he began to study acting
in New York at age 20; his sister, Shirley MacLaine, was already a successful Hollywood
actor at this point. Highly regarded roles in television and local theatre led Beatty onto
the Broadway stage. He won approving notices for his 1959 debut in William Inge’s A
Loss of Roses, and immediately turned his sights toward movie roles. Elia Kazan’s Splen-
dor in the Grass (1961) launched Beatty’s Hollywood career and brought the young
actor almost instant stardom. Playing opposite Natalie Wood, and working from a
script penned by Inge, Beatty was called upon to convey to viewers a sense of tor-
mented masculinity; film critics and audiences alike found his performance incredibly

563
Beatty, Warren

moving, and Beatty began to be

compared to actors like Marlon
Brando and other screen rebels of
the 1950s.
Wary of typecasting, Beatty
sought to diversify. He was
improbably but ingeniously cast
as an Italian libertine in The Roman
Spring of Mrs. Stone (1962),
adapted from the only novel by
Tennessee Williams. He was even
willing to take roles that did not
elicit viewer empathy, consciously
choosing to play characters that
tended to be both apathetic (All
Fall Down, 1962) and opaque (Lil-
ith, 1964). These films, along with
Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965),
showcased Beatty’s steadily
expanding screen repertoire. A
brief hiatus in Britain yielded two
uninspired pictures, Promise Her
Anything (1965) and Kaleidoscope
(1966); although he demonstrated
a deft comedic touch and deepen-
ing screen persona in these films,
neither was praised. Against these
Warren Beatty (right, shown here with his wife, actress prosaic comedies, the adventurous
Annette Bening) is a popular actor and filmmaker. He began Bonnie and Clyde stood out in star-
his career as a leading man but has expanded his talents to tling relief.
include producing, writing, and directing. Beatty produced,
During this period Beatty’s
directed, and starred in the 1981 film Reds and won the
Academy Award for Best Director. (Getty Images)
screen persona coalesced, and it
found an ideal context in the
1970s New Hollywood. Blending
character flaws with the Hollywood hero’s optimism, the Beatty protagonist proved able
to support the sort of pessimistic and revisionist storytelling being imported from Euro-
pean art-house cinema. In Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), for instance,
Beatty’s frontier hero fosters romantic ideals, but his aspirations are dashed thanks to the
character’s fatal hubris. With its hesitant and ineffectual protagonist, the film constitutes
a piercing rebuttal not only of the myths of American ideology and identity, but of the
classic Hollywood westerns that promoted and propagated them. McCabe and Mrs.
Miller also cemented Beatty’s taste for entrepreneurial characters blighted by personal
failure or external aggressors. Sometimes the Beatty protagonist is motivated by wholly
material concerns (Dollars/$, a.k.a. The Heist, 1971), but often he harbors more exalted

564
 Beatty, Warren

aspirations, as in McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Bonnie and Clyde. Recurrently, the charac-
ter’s psychological flaws accelerate his failure or death. This doomed element of Beatty’s
persona meshed with the downbeat denouements of New Hollywood pictures, and later
films such as Bugsy (1991) and Bulworth would extend the trope into the age of the
blockbuster. For some critics, the bleak climatic sequences of the latter films supplied
evidence of Beatty’s vanity and narcissism; for others, it revealed the poignancy of cur-
tailed enterprise, delivering affecting stabs of pathos.
By the 1970s, Beatty was becoming increasingly well known not only as an actor/
director, but also as a ladies’ man and political activist. Significantly, his offscreen pur-
suits informed his cinematic projects. Agitated by the assassinations of John and Rob-
ert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, he embraced subject matter that seemed overtly
political. The Parallax View (1974), for example, presents a formally spare depiction of
political conspiracy and cover-up; shot in the wake of Beatty’s Democratic fundraisers
for George McGovern, the film’s shadowy intrigue offers an apocalyptic view of Nixo-
nian America. Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (1975) went even further, wedding the erotic to
the political by framing Beatty’s hypersexualized, anticonformist lead character within
the boundaries of the 1968 presidential campaign, which saw the election of Richard
Nixon and the first glimpse of the moral-majority America that would emerge in ear-
nest during the Reagan-era 1980s.
Unadorned by political pretensions, The Fortune (1975) and Heaven Can Wait are
apt to look frivolous compared to Shampoo, but both films are consistent with Holly-
wood’s growing optimism from 1975 onward. The movies aptly demonstrated Beatty’s
comedic skills—in The Fortune he utilizes darting glances, knitted brows, and clipped
speech to create a staid counterpoint to Jack Nicholson’s zany swindler, while in the
wistful love story Heaven Can Wait, he adopted a gentler comedic tone playing oppo-
site his then real-life companion Julie Christie. The latter film in particular generated
huge revenues ($80 million worldwide), and at this point Beatty seized greater artistic
control of his projects, turning to screenwriting and directing, and assuming the role of
producer for the first time since Bonnie and Clyde.
Although during the 1980s Beatty’s output dwindled, it was during this time that
he made one of his most important, ambitious, and highly regarded films, Reds, which
earned him the Best Director Oscar. A biopic of American John Reed, the film man-
aged to fuse a sweeping historical examination of the masses caught up in the Russian
Revolution with intimate portrayals of individuals caught up in the drama of the
moment. Unlike Beatty’s 1970s films, Reds seemed wholly incongruous with its indus-
trial and cultural context. Institutionally, its historical subject matter flouted a current
trend for conservative filmmaking based on spectacle. Politically, its sympathetic
approach to the Russian Revolution contradicted an ethos of Reaganite capitalism.
Clearly an instance of “personal filmmaking,” Reds is considered by many critics
Beatty’s major cinematic achievement. Beatty’s star dimmed a bit in the late 1980s
when he—along with Dustin Hoffman—made the ill-advised decision to participate
in Elaine May’s disastrous project Ishtar (1987), an innocuous comedy with a bloated
budget ($40 million) that proved not only a critical disappointment but a complete
box-office failure.

565
Beatty, Warren

As the 1990s opened, Beatty made one of his most provocative pictures, Dick Tracy
(1990), a triumph of special effects characterized by a splashy comic-strip aesthetic.
Steeped in noir iconography, the picture revived classic filmmaking techniques and
was heralded as a nostalgic paean to both 1930s Hollywood and Chester Gould’s origi-
nal comic strip. Having become involved with Madonna—who co-starred with him in
Dick Tracy—Beatty appeared in her filmic memoir, Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991),
which chronicled the singer’s experiences during her notorious “Blond Ambition” tour.
Offering up fawning observations about his former lover, Beatty seemed less the self-
assured ladies’ man and more the awkward adolescent with a school-boy crush on the
iconic rock star. Interestingly, the same year that Madonna: Truth or Dare was released,
Beatty would go on to star in and produce the Barry Levinson gangster biopic Bugsy
(1991); while making the picture, the long-time bachelor fell in love with his co-star
Annette Bening, and they eventually married.
Beatty and Bening would co-star in the less-than-inspired Love Affair (1994)—
Katharine Hepburn’s final screen appearance—before Beatty made the intriguing
political satire Bulworth in 1998. Increasingly, though, critics began to characterize
Beatty as a film industry figure flirting with absence—not only because he made fewer
and fewer films, but because to some he seemed almost to be a spectral, remote figure
on screen. Significantly, the notorious micro-manager turned over control of the much
maligned Town & Country (2001) to director Peter Chelsom; and as the early 2000s
unfolded, it seemed that Beatty—his cinematic legacy long since assured—favoured
familial domesticity over moviemaking, as he limited public appearances to political
events and career retrospectives.

Selected Filmography
Town & Country (2001); Bulworth (1998); Love Affair (1994); Bugsy (1991); Dick Tracy (1990);
Ishtar (1987); Reds (1981); Heaven Can Wait (1978); The Fortune (1975); Shampoo (1975); The
Parallax View (1974); $ (1971); McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971); The Only Game in Town
(1970); Bonnie and Clyde (1967); Kaleidoscope (1966); Promise Her Anything (1965); Mickey
One (1965); Lilith (1964); All Fall Down (1962); The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961); Splen-
dor in the Grass (1961)

References
Crowther, Bosley. “Bonnie and Clyde Arrives,” New York Times, August 14, 1967; and Kael,
Pauline. “Bonnie and Clyde,” New Yorker, October 21, 1967. Reviews reprinted in Fried-
man, Lester D. ed. Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2000.
Thomson, David. Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a Story. London: Secker & Warburg,
1990.
—Gary Bettinson

566
 Bergman, Ingrid

BERGMAN, INGRID. Ingrid Bergman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on

August 29, 1915, to a Swedish father and German mother. Losing both of her parents
at an early age, she went to stay with an aunt and uncle. At the age of 18, Bergman was
accepted at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School in Stockholm, where she studied acting
and made her stage debut. Her first film role came in Gustaf Molander’s Munkbrogr-
even in 1935. A year later she starred in Molander’s Intermezzo, the film that would
propel her to stardom on the big screen. Intermezzo caught the attention of Hollywood
producer David O. Selznick, who bought the rights to remake the film in English, with
Bergman in mind for the lead role. The Hollywood version (1939) of the film was such
a success that Selznick signed Bergman to a seven-year contract. Bergman, however,
made only two films with Selznick, partly because he took a break from making films,
and partly because Bergman was loaned out to other studios by Selznick. She played a
variety of roles during this early period in her career, including a Victorian barmaid in
MGM’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), and the iconic Ilsa, opposite Humphrey
Bogart’s Rick, in Warner Bros.’ Casablanca (1942).
Selznick persuaded Ernest Hemingway that the beautiful young actress was perfect
for the female lead in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943); her performance earned Berg-
man her first Best Actress Academy Award nomination. She would win the first of
her three Best Actress Oscars the following year for Gaslight (1944), in which she por-
trays a naive wife driven toward insanity by her husband. Gaslight is one of several films
in which Bergman’s character suffers at the hands of her husband—others included
Notorious (1946) and Under Capricorn (1949), both directed by Alfred Hitchcock,
who also directed Bergman in Spellbound (1945). Proving her versatility as an actress,
Bergman played Sister Mary Benedict in her next film, The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945).
Featuring fan-favorite Bing Crosby as Father Chuck O’Malley, the friendly rival of
Sister Mary at the local parish, the picture proved to be Bergman’s biggest box-office
success and earned her another Academy Award nomination. In 1946, she returned
to the stage, playing the lead role in Joan of Lorraine on Broadway. The performance
earned her a Tony Award for Best Actress. In 1949, she went on to star in Joan of
Arc, a screen adaptation of Joan of Lorraine. Although the film was a box-office disap-
pointment, Bergman received another Best Actress Academy Award nomination for
her performance.
Later in 1949, Bergman made the fateful decision to send Italian director Roberto
Rossellini what was basically a fan letter, in which she indicated that she was very much
interested in working with him. Rossellini responded by rewriting a part in his script
for Stromboli and offering the role to Bergman (1949). While filming Stromboli, Berg-
man and Rossellini, both married, began a torrid affair. Both would seek divorces from
their current spouses, although Bergman’s husband agreed to their split only after she
revealed to him that she was carrying Rossellini’s child, a son, Roberto, who was born
in 1950. Although Bergman and Rossellini ultimately married, news of the couple’s
affair, and of Bergman’s willingness to leave not only her husband but also their daugh-
ter to be with Rossellini, cost her many of her American fans and negatively affected
her Hollywood career. Bergman and Rossellini lived in Italy and made five films

567
Berkeley, Busby

together between 1950 and 1955.

In 1952, Bergman gave birth to
twin girls, one of whom, Isabella,
became a noted actress and model.
Bergman worked solely with
Rossellini until 1956, when she
made Elena et les hommes with
Jean Renoir, a film that reignited
international interest in the
actress. During the same year, she
was welcomed back to Holly-
wood, starring in the Twentieth
Century-Fox production of Anas-
tasia, for which she won another
Best Actress Oscar. Although her
Hollywood career was back on
track, her relationship with Ros-
sellini was deteriorating, and the
couple divorced in 1957.
In 1959, Bergman won an
Emmy for her lead role in a televi-
sion production of The Turn of the
Screw; and in 1965, she made her
Film star Ingrid Bergman reclines against the arm of a sofa, London theatre debut. She won
1941. (Getty Images) her third Academy Award in
1974—a Best Supporting Actress
Oscar—for her role in Murder on the Orient Express. Divorced from her third husband
and diagnosed with cancer in 1975, Bergman made her last film in 1978, Ingmar Berg-
man’s Autumn Sonata. Her final role came in the television miniseries A Woman Called
Golda, in which she played the part of Golda Meir. The role won Bergman an Emmy
and a Golden Globe. She died in London on August 29, 1989 on her 67th birthday.

References
Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and
Sexuality. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Jewell, Richard B. The RKO Story. London: Octopus, 1982.
Macpherson, Don, and Louise Brody. Leading Ladies. London: Conran Octopus, 1986.
—Victoria Williams

BERKELEY, BUSBY. Busby Berkeley William Enos was a choreographer and a

director who helped revitalize the movie musical in the 1930s. Born to a theatrical
family in Los Angeles on November 29, 1895, Berkeley served in the U.S. Army
during World War I. He eventually made his way to New York, where he became both

568
 Berkeley, Busby

an actor and a choreographer. His

choreography impressed film crit-
ics and studio heads alike, and
when actor Eddie Cantor went to
Hollywood to star in Whoopee
(1930), Berkeley was sent along
to choreograph the film. Prior to
Berkeley’s work, musical numbers
in movies were filmed with a sta-
tionary camera. Berkeley freed
the camera so that rather than
merely showing the chorus girls
dance, the camera moved about
them as they created various kalei-
doscopic patterns that were
recorded from the sides, the front,
the back, and especially from
above.
In 1933, Berkeley moved to
Warner Bros. There, for eight
years, he choreographed num-
bers for some of the studio’s best
musicals, each more sophisti-
cated, larger, and more spectacu-
lar than the previous one.
Warner Bros. had been on the A still from Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933. Berkeley
verge of bankruptcy when Berke- was famous for using his dancers to create stunning geometric
ley was asked to choreograph patterns on-screen. (Underwood & Underwood/Corbis)
42nd Street (1933). In this film
he choreographed the dance
numbers using the same techniques he had employed before: the mobile camera, cut-
ting to expand the dance space, close-ups of beautiful girls, and overhead shots. He also
packed the dance numbers together at the end of the movie. The film was a success and
established Berkeley as one of Hollywood’s most important choreographers. That same
year he choreographed Gold Diggers of 1933. Like 42nd Street, this film starred Ruby
Keeler and Dick Powell. It is memorable because in one number, “The Shadow Waltz,”
Berkeley used the new technology of neon lights.
Also in 1933, he choreographed Footlight Parade, which included the song “By a
Waterfall.” This was one of the first cinematic production numbers to be shot as a
water ballet. Until he moved to MGM in 1939, Berkeley choreographed and directed
19 more films for Warner Bros. While not all were musicals—he made the crime
drama They Made Me A Criminal in 1939, for instance—most of the pictures were.
They included such visually arresting production numbers as the title song of Dames
(1934) and “Lullaby of Broadway” in Gold Diggers of 1935.

569
Berkeley, Busby

After Berkeley moved to MGM, he directed and choreographed three Mickey

Rooney-Judy Garland musicals. He was also in charge of For Me And My Gal
(1942), and in 1943 he choreographed the “I Got Rhythm” number in Girl Crazy.
While these numbers were less ambitious than the work he had done at Warner Bros.,
they were still imaginative. Also in 1943, he directed and choreographed The Gang’s All
Here for Twentieth Century-Fox. This formulaic wartime musical, starring Alice Faye
and Carmen Miranda, included some of his most fantastic and creative work. For Car-
men Miranda he choreographed “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat.” In the 1960s, this
number, which included a 60-foot-high headpiece for Carmen Miranda, was consid-
ered the height of camp. He also choreographed the stunning “Polka Dot Polka” for
Alice Faye. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, he did three films with Esther Williams.
The finale of Easy to Love (1953), which was filmed in Florida, included Williams div-
ing from a helicopter over 100 water-skiers. Berkeley’s last film was as the second-unit
director for 1962’s Jumbo, in which he directed and choreographed most of the musi-
cal numbers. In 1971, Berkeley directed and choreographed Ruby Keeler in No,
No Nanette on Broadway. This was his last professional production. He died on
March 14, 1978, at the age of 80, in his home near Palm Springs, California.
Although budget constraints make it almost impossible to include the kind of
elaborate song-and-dance productions favored by Berkeley in contemporary musicals,
his visual sense, innovative camerawork, and creative staging continue to shape almost
every musical from the 1930s forward.

Selected Filmography
Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949); Cinderella Jones (1946); The Gang’s All Here (1943); Cabin
in the Sky (1943); For Me and My Gal (1942); Babes on Broadway (1941); Ziegfeld Girl (1941);
Blonde Inspiration (1941); Strike Up the Band (1940); Forty Little Mothers (1940); Fast and Furi-
ous (1939); Babes in Arms (1939); They Made Me a Criminal (1939); Comet Over Broadway
(1938); Garden of the Moon (1938); Men Are Such Fools (1938); Hollywood Hotel (1937); The
Go Getter (1937); Stage Struck (1936); I Live for Love (1935); Bright Lights (1935); Gold Diggers
of 1935 (1935); Dames (1934); She Had to Say Yes (1933); 42nd Street (1933)

References
Hanley, Robert. “Busby Berkeley, the Dance Director, Dies.” New York Times (1857-Current
file), March 15, 1976. Available at http://www.proquest.com.
Pike, Bob, and Dave Martin. The Genius of Busby Berkeley. Reseda, CA: CFS Books, 1973.
Rubin, Martin. Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993.
Thomas, Tony, and Jim Terry, with Busby Berkeley. The Busby Berkeley Book. Greenwich, CT:
New York Graphic Society, 1973.
—Scott Sheidlower

570
 Berry, Halle

BERRY, HALLE. Halle Berry,

beauty queen, spokesmodel,
actress, and producer, was the
first woman of color to receive
the Academy Award for Best
Actress. One of the highest-paid
actresses in Hollywood, she is
also one of the few African
American performers to have
received an Emmy Award,
Golden Globe, and Screen
Actors Guild Award (Ewey John-
son, 2008). She garnered all
three of these awards for her
work in the HBO biopic Intro-
ducing Dorothy Dandridge
(1998), on which she also served
as executive producer. Berry has
been instrumental in breaking
down barriers that have long
restricted women of color from
Actress Halle Berry poses during a press conference for the
playing roles other than those as film X-Men: The Last Stand, at the 59th International Film
maids, servants, or prostitutes. Festival in Cannes in 2006. Berry became the first African
Born Maria Halle Berry on American women to win the Academy Award for Best Actress,
August 14, 1966, in Cleveland, for her performance in Monster’s Ball, 2001. (AP/Wide World
Ohio, to Judith Ann Hawkins, a Photos)
psychiatric nurse from England,
and an African American man Jerome Berry, who worked as a hospital attendant, she
changed her name legally to Halle Berry in 1971. Her parents divorced when she
was four; she has an older sister, Heide, from whom she is estranged. She graduated
from Bedford High School and attended Cuyahoga Community College. Berry began
entering beauty contests in the 1980s. She won the “Miss Teen All American” pageant
in 1985, and a year later, the “Miss Ohio USA” pageant. She was a “Miss USA”
runner-up, and subsequently the first African American entrant in the “Miss World”
contest. Deciding to try her hand at acting, she secured a role in the spin-off series
Living Dolls in 1989, playing the character of Emily Franklin; she followed this with
a regular role on the popular television series Knots Landing. Appearing in music videos
and a significant number of films during the 1990s, she won several important awards
for her performances.
In 1991, Berry appeared in what many consider her break-out role in Spike Lee’s
Jungle Fever, which starred Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra. She went on to co-
star in the film Strictly Business (1991). This was followed by appearances in The Last
Boy Scout, with Bruce Willis (1991) and Boomerang (1992), which starred Eddie Mur-
phy, Martin Lawrence, and Chris Rock. Berry also continued her work in television,

571
Bigelow, Kathryn

starring in the ABC miniseries Queen: The Story of an American Family (1992)—
adapted from an Alex Haley book—for which she won an NAACP Image Award. In
1994, Berry played the role of the seductive secretary Sharon Stone in the movie The
Flintstones. A more serious role came in Losing Isaiah (1995), in which she played a
recovering drug addict attempting to regain custody of her son. Berry became a spokes-
model for Revlon in 1996, and later secured contracts with Versace and Cody Inc. She
received critical acclaim for her role in the political satire Bulworth (1998), starring
opposite Warren Beatty. In 1999, Berry took the role of Dorothy Dandridge in HBO’s
critically acclaimed biography of the performer. Ironically, the real Dorothy Dandridge
was the first African American woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for
Best Actress. Berry would go on to win that award in 2001, for her role in Monster’s
Ball opposite Billy Bob Thornton (Mapp, 2008).
Berry starred in several blockbusters after receiving the Academy Award, including
the X-Men trilogy (2000–2006), Die Another Day (2002), and Catwoman (2004);
she received $12.5 million for the latter picture, an enormous sum for a female actor.
In 2005, Berry returned to television, starring in the Oprah Winfrey adaptation of
the Zora Neale Hurston novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Berry continues to be one
of the hardest-working actors in America.

References
Ewey Johnson, Melissa. Halle Berry: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2009.
Farley, Christopher John. Introducing Halle Berry. New York: Pocket Books, 2002.
Mapp, Edward. African Americans and the Oscar: Decades of Struggle and Achievement. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
—Hettie Williams

BIGELOW, KATHRYN. Of the more than two dozen women who have both written
and directed films in the United States over the past three decades, Kathryn Bigelow (born
November 27, 1951) has enjoyed a greater measure of critical esteem than many of her
contemporaries, though only occasionally an equal measure of box-office success. She
has been praised repeatedly—and somewhat ironically—as the most “masculine” of femi-
nine directors working today, chiefly because she continues to display a fascination for
action narratives and for characters caught up in violent conflict. Seldom will any reviewer
of her films abstain from the use of phrases like “testosterone-charged” and “adrenalin
rush” to describe the energy and momentum of the human drama that is indeed central
to all of her work, and the implied subtext of such commentary would seem to be that
Bigelow has somehow intruded on an otherwise masculine domain once exclusively domi-
nated by a Don Siegel or a Sam Peckinpah.
Curiously, for an action-oriented, high-intensity filmmaker, Bigelow’s creative roots
lie in the more cerebral forms of painting known as conceptual art, and she continues
to think of her work in largely visual terms. Her decision to shift the focus of her art

572
 Bigelow, Kathryn

Academy Award-winning film director Kathryn Bigelow speaks during the 2010 Ernst & Young
Strategic Growth Forum in Palm Springs, California, on Saturday, November 13, 2010. Bigelow
won an Oscar for Best Director for her film The Hurt Locker, which won a total of six Academy
Awards, including Best Picture, in 2008. (Bloomberg/Getty Images)

work from painting to cinema—signaled by her move from the Art Institute of San
Francisco to the Film Program at Columbia University—was inspired by the belief
that filmmaking would allow her to communicate a greater range of expressive pos-
sibilities. Her subsequent determination, however, not to enter the industry “ghetto”
reserved for novice women directors, making the kind of movies commonly known
as “chick flicks,” reflects a consistent desire for independence from the studio system
and its assumptions about culture and gender, assumptions she has challenged consis-
tently throughout her career.
Bigelow’s earliest films are thus both deliberately imitative and just as deliberately
transgressive, taking up a familiar genre and then proceeding to twist it out of shape.
Her debut film, The Loveless (1982), co-directed with Monty Montgomery, is a stylized
homage to The Wild One (1954) with Willem Dafoe cast in the Marlon Brando role of
a moody, impulsively violent leader of a motorcycle gang going “nowhere.” Unfortu-
nately, Bigelow’s narrative focus constantly shifts away from the impending conflict
between unruly outsiders and redneck townsfolk toward the interior conflicts of her
biker protagonist, leaving her audience uncertain as to whether she has any story to tell.
Her next venture in genre exploitation/experimentation—a far more successful one,
both artistically and commercially—is a fusion of two otherwise unrelated film types:
the horror movie and the western. Near Dark (1987) follows the gruesome adventures
of a family of gypsy vampires, whose violent assaults on an assortment of victims are
filmed with an unsettling mixture of humor and film noir dread, and once again

573
Bigelow, Kathryn

Bigelow seems far more interested in the interpersonal dynamic of this “family” than in
accounting for their past or present existence. By taking her nightmare characters out
of Transylvania and placing them on the dusty plains of Oklahoma, Bigelow renders
the traditional horror tale almost mundane, a tendency that becomes even more
marked when the unwitting cowboy protagonist of the film (played by Adrian Pasdar)
falls in love with a bloodsucking (but otherwise sweet and affectionate) young blonde
(Jenny Wright), shifting the center of this drama away from murder-and-vampire may-
hem toward romance and redemption. Curing vampires of their homicidal addiction
through blood transfusions risks a descent into comic banality, but Bigelow’s determi-
nation to bring her cowboy-meets-girl vampire story to a happy ending overrides what-
ever the conventions of either genre seem to demand.
Bigelow’s next experiment in genre-busting is the far more successful Blue Steel
(1989), which takes the demands of the cop-thriller far more seriously than the aes-
thetic of the B-horror flick, and as a result she is able to center her film on a complex
and conflicted heroine. Jamie Lee Curtis’s Megan Turner—a novice cop who must
simultaneously defend her own life and rescue New York City from a psychopathic
serial-killer (who is also a would-be suitor)—is obliged to play two iconic yet incom-
patible roles: a castrating urban combatant whose revolver becomes a fetishized object
of seduction and destruction, and a daughter-lover whose ambivalence toward the men
in her life draws her in several contradictory directions at once. Megan’s humiliation of
her abusive father, her refusal to be either dehumanized or defeminized by the patri-
archal police culture she is a part of, and her steely determination to destroy a virtually
demonic predator/lover (played with maniacal charm by Ron Silver), who seemingly
cannot be killed by ordinary bullets, all raise her to an almost mythic level of feminist
counter-aggression. Yet Curtis’s performance intimates both fragility and emotional
longing, qualities one would never associate with a stereotyped woman warrior.
Bigelow’s next film, Point Break (1991), attempts a similar transformation of all-
too-familiar action figures into conflicted antiheroes, engaged in an existential test of
wills and self-knowledge. Her antagonists this time are a callow FBI agent, Johnny
Utah (played with characteristic inexpressiveness by Keanu Reeves), and a surfer-
bank-robber-guru named Bodhi—short for bodhisattva—played by the late Patrick
Swayze in what would become one of his signature roles. That Point Break has achieved
the status of a cult favorite among Bigelow’s admirers should surprise no one: it con-
tains precisely those oppositional themes and subversive ironies that practically all of
her films exhibit, only presented here with even greater energy and panache. Her
surfer-bank robbers are thus not an ordinary band of thieves but a family of outsiders,
dedicated to ridiculing “the system.” Disguising themselves as ex-presidents Reagan,
Carter, and Nixon, they begin to take on some of the satiric personae these masks con-
note, culminating in a scene where, in the midst of a bank heist, the “Nixon” robber
holds his hands aloft and shouts “I am not a thief.” That they are destroyed by an
almost adolescent belief in their invincibility rather than by the intelligence and forti-
tude of the government agents who are hot on their path tells us a great deal about just
how ambivalently Bigelow views her criminal protagonists, and a similar inversion of
moral perspective occurs when Reeves’s boyishly naive hero finally realizes his secret

574
 Bigelow, Kathryn

sharer connection to the gang’s leader, throwing away his badge and his career in a ges-
ture made famous by Gary Cooper’s Marshal Will Kane in High Noon.
Bigelow’s 1995 sci-fi extravaganza Strange Days—written and produced by her ex-
husband, James Cameron—failed to attract the audiences that flocked to Point Break,
in spite of its more ambitious visual style and apocalyptic subject. Set years before the
actual fin-de-siècle, the film invokes the specter of the Last Days, with Los Angeles on
the eve of the new millennium as the battleground on which the armies of the night
will clash, and “civilization as we know it” will move closer to the abyss. Her shambling
weakling of a protagonist, Lenny Nero—played with a persistent whine by Ralph
Fiennes—moves about in a surreal cyber world of bootleg porno and snuff CDs that
tap directly into the cerebral cortex, enabling the user to re-experience the most violent
(usually erotic) acts with unbearable intensity. Part Blade Runner, part Day of the
Locust, Bigelow’s nightmare future is an obviously derivative dystopia, complete with
imminent race wars and pervasive police corruption, and with only a determined
African American heroine (played with equal tenderness and ferocity by Angela
Bassett) to save the day. Movie critics were largely unimpressed by both the visual
razzle-dazzle and the forced romantic denouement of this film, and Strange Days was
seen by many as an ambitious but expensive flop.
Bigelow’s next two films represent a departure from the world of subversive mayhem
and existential irony that have marked her work up to this point. The Weight of Water
(2000), based on a novel of the same title by Anita Shreve, juxtaposes the tortured lives
and psyches of two different families, separated by a century but brought together by a
dynamic of sexual longing and moral confusion, coupled with betrayal by the men in
their lives. Bigelow clearly wants the viewer to see these two family melodramas as
reflecting images, one of the other, but the parallel stories never entirely intertwine,
and the violent acts that punctuate the lives of both never really move us toward insight
or even empathy. K-19: The Widow-Maker (2002) is a far more conventional Cold War
action-thriller, with practically every movie cliché of submarine warfare dusted off for
use in this predictable exercise in testosterone-driven personality conflicts in a very
small space. Not even the talents of Liam Neeson and Harrison Ford, as two rival cap-
tains of an endangered Russian sub, can rescue this film from ultimate banality.
Bigelow’s most recent film, The Hurt Locker (2009), has rescued a career that
seemed to be moving irresistibly toward the margins of contemporary filmmaking,
with a remarkably candid, largely cinéma vérité representation of the face of war in
Iraq, and of the inner lives of the men who have fought that war. Her central figure,
Sergeant James (superbly underplayed by Jeremy Renner), heads a bomb-disposal
squad, and his task is to defuse the omnipresent IEDs without blowing up his com-
rades or himself in the process. What we (and Renner’s character) soon discover is that
he enjoys his work—the danger and the resultant adrenalin rush—far more than any-
thing else in his life. Bigelow’s observation that “War’s dirty little secret is that some
men love it” is convincingly borne out when we view her otherwise fearless warrior
baffled and distressed while shopping for breakfast cereals in a supermarket, and her
protagonist’s return to the front follows with a kind of tragic inevitability once we have
viewed his extreme discomfort with civilian life. In The Hurt Locker Bigelow finally

575
Bogdanovich, Peter

appears to have found an action vehicle that can bear the weight of moral reflection
without collapsing under it. This view was obviously shared by members of the
Motion Picture Academy, which voted Bigelow Best Director of 2009—the first
woman to have received this award in the Academy’s history—and also awarded The
Hurt Locker an Oscar for Best Picture.

Selected Filmography
The Hurt Locker (2008); K-19: The Widowmaker (2002); The Weight of Water (2000); Strange
Days (1995); Point Break (1991); Near Dark (1987); The Loveless (1982); The Set-Up (1978)

References
Dargis, Manohla. “Action!” New York Times, June 18, 2009.
Jermyn, Deborah, and Sean Redmond, eds. The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Trans-
gressor. London: Wallflower, 2003.
Karnicky, Jeff. “Georges Bataille and the Visceral Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow.” Enculturation 2
(1), Fall 1998.
Rosefelt, Reid. “Kathryn Bigelow: Don’t Look Back.” SpeedCine, July 13, 2009.

—Robert Platzner

BOGDANOVICH, PETER. Peter Bogdanovich, born on July 30, 1939, in Kings-

ton, New York, is unique in the history of cinema. He is a film critic, film historian,
screenwriter, composer, producer, author, actor, and director. As a young boy in New
York, he was exposed by his father, a Serbian artist, to the wonder of silent and talking
movies. Two films in particular remained in Bogdanovich’s psyche, Howard Hawks’s
Red River (1948) and John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). Bogdanovich’s
passion for film was firmly in place, and he estimates that between the ages of 12 and
30 he saw over 4,000 movies.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bogdanovich wrote film criticism for various
publications, beginning with Film Culture, Film Quarterly, and Movie, and eventually
went on to popular national publications such as Esquire, Vogue, and the Saturday Eve-
ning Post. He produced a series of monographs for the Museum of Modern Art on
directors Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles, and wrote books on
Allan Dwan and Fritz Lang. His first directing experience was in 1959, when he
helmed the Off-Broadway theatre production of Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife.
By the mid-1960s, Bogdanovich had caught the Hollywood bug and started work-
ing with producer/director Roger Corman. He worked as assistant director and screen-
writer on Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966), a low-budget biker flick, and credits
Corman with teaching him how to plan and make movies on a small budget. He then
worked on the less satisfying exploitation picture Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric
Woman (1968); and the same year, he acted in and directed his first feature, the thriller
Targets (1968), which featured the legendary Boris Karloff in an award-worthy

576
 Bogdanovich, Peter

performance. The film, based

loosely on the Charles Whitman
murders, was shelved by Univer-
sal for a brief period because there
was some controversy surround-
ing it. Apparently, the assassin in
Targets drove the same car and
had the same kind of gun as the
person who killed Martin Luther
King Jr. Some of the crew who
worked on Targets went on to work
on the counter culture classic Easy
Rider (1969). Bogdanovich also
made the documentary Directed by
John Ford (1971).
Bogdanovich struck pay dirt
with his next film, The Last Pic-
ture Show (1971), which was
based on the novel by Larry
McMurtry. Shot in black and
white and featuring a then 20-
year-old Cybill Shepherd, the
movie garnered critical praise;
some even argued that it was the
best film since Citizen Kane
(1941). The picture was nomi-
nated for eight Oscars, including
Best Director, and won two: Best Director Peter Bogdanovich attends the TCM Classic Film
Supporting Actor (Ben Johnson) Festival screening of a A Star Is Born at Grauman’s Chinese
and Best Supporting Actress (Clo- Theater on April 22, 2010, in Hollywood. (Getty Images)
ris Leachman). Bogdanovich was
involved in a highly publicized
affair with Shepherd and left his wife, Polly Platt, and two children. He continued his
winning streak with the Barbra Streisand comedy What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and the caper
film The Paper Chase (1973). At this point, it was thought that he could do no wrong in
Hollywood, but Daisy Miller (1974), the musical At Long Last Love (1976), and Nickel-
odeon (1976), while well received critically, were commercial failures.
By 1978, Bogdanovich’s affair with Shepherd had cooled, and in 1979 he worked
again with Roger Corman on the Ben Gazzara picture Saint Jack. He fell in love with
the 20-year-old Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratton, who had a small role in 1980’s
They All Laughed. In a jealous rage, Stratton’s husband shot her and then shot himself.
Bogdanovich, who was crushed, wrote an account of the relationship and murder in
The Killing of the Unicorn (1984). In the book, there are some strong allegations made
against Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, which started a well-publicized feud between

577
Bogdanovich, Peter

Bogdanovich and Hefner. Bogdanovich distributed They All Laughed himself and lost
several million dollars, despite the fact that the film starred Audrey Hepburn. He then
directed the award-winning and critically acclaimed Mask (1985), about a young, dis-
figured boy, which featured singer Cher in the role of the mother. He sued Universal
Studios for cutting some footage he deemed important and for replacing songs by
Bruce Springsteen, which were originally in the soundtrack. Bogdanovich’s next film,
Illegally Yours (1988), went straight to video. Also, in 1988, he married Dorothy Strat-
ton’s younger sister, who was just 20 years old, which led to a minor scandal; they
divorced in 2001.
Twenty years after The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich revisited its characters in
Texasville (1990), which featured a return of the original Picture Show cast. In 1991,
George Hickenlooper made a documentary, Picture This: The Times of Peter Bogdano-
vich in Archer City, Texas, about the experience of making these two movies.
Throughout the 1990s, Bogdanovich continued to write and publish, and he began
to expand into the world of television, directing episodes of the revamped drama
Naked City and the Fallen Angels series. He appeared as a therapist in the highly popu-
lar HBO gangster drama The Sopranos, and in the Truman Capote biopic Infamous
(1986). During the early 2000s, he directed The Cat’s Meow (2001), Mystery of Natalie
Wood (2004), and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Running Down the Dream (2007).
Now in his seventies, Bogdanovich is busier than ever. He is a highly sought after
guest for documentaries on DVD releases of the films of directors like Hitchcock
and Ford, and he often does commentaries for classic Hollywood films, such as Bring-
ing Up Baby (1938). Bogdanovich has often lamented that movies today are all special
effects and hype, and show little concern for story. Throughout his career, the one
thing that has been foremost in his mind was to make movies that told stories, had sub-
stance, but were still entertaining.

Selected Filmography
The Cat’s Meow (2001); The Thing Called Love (1993); Noises Off . . . (1992); Texasville (1990);
Illegally Yours (1988); Mask (1985); They All Laughed (1981); Saint Jack (1979); Nickelodeon
(1976); At Long Last Love (1975); Daisy Miller (1974); Paper Moon (1973); What’s Up, Doc?
(1972); Directed by John Ford (1971); The Last Picture Show (1971); Targets (1968); Voyage to
the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)

References
Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Hell’s in It? Portraits and Conversations. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2004.
Bogdanovich, Peter. Pieces of Time: Peter Bogdanovich on the Movies. New York: Arbor House,
1973.
Giacci, Vittorio. Bogdanovich: Peter Bogdanovich. La nuova: Firenze, 1976.
Yule, Peter. Picture This: Life and Films of Peter Bogdanovich. New York: Limelight, 1992.

—Robert G. Weiner

578
 Borden, Lizzie

BORDEN, LIZZIE. Lizzie Borden is a feminist filmmaker, artist, and critic who has
taken directing to new levels. She has confronted some of the most controversial issues
of her time, including sexuality, prostitution, pornography, voyeurism, and women’s
equality.
Linda Elizabeth Borden was born in Detroit, on February 3, 1954, though some
sources list 1950 as her actual date of birth. To the chagrin of her parents, she adopted,
and later capitalized on the nickname Lizzie. (The original Lizzie Borden [1860–1927]
was tried but acquitted of murdering her parents in Fall River, Massachusetts.) She
studied art at Wayne State University, eventually transferring to Wellesley College in
Massachusetts, where she completed her BFA in 1973. She then attended Queen’s Col-
lege in New York, where she completed her MFA. A gifted writer, in 1975 she pub-
lished Artists’ Performance, a book she coauthored with Susan Brockman. She also
began critiquing art in the journal Artforum at this time.
Self-taught in film production, Borden made Regrouping in 1976, an 80-minute,
black-and-white offering in which she explored the idea that women could achieve a
sense of solidarity if they were willing to unite toward a common cause, even if they
were confronting different issues. She followed Regrouping with Born in Flames
(1983). Set in New York City on the 10th anniversary of a fictitious socialist revolu-
tion, the film presents audiences with a dystopic society wherein the government has
supposedly taken progressive steps to deal with issues of class, race, gender, and sexual
orientation, but where people still suffer from political, economic, and labor abuses.
Hard-edged and marked by what was extremely raw language for the time, Borden
edited the film’s short vignettes together in a fragmented, nonlinear fashion, a process
that radically altered the normative viewing experiences of audiences.
In Working Girls (1986), the first film in which she used professional actors, Borden
examined middle-class prostitution in a documentary fashion. Attempting to dero-
manticize the process, Borden portrayed prostitution as nothing more than a business,
one in which working girls make appointments, keep logs detailing the proclivities of
their clients, insure that they are protected by using the proper contraceptives, and
sometimes even commute to work on bicycles (Crowdus, 2002). Confronting fantasies
about prostitution from the perspectives of both men and women, Working Girls also
explores capitalism and the employer-employee relationship—especially that between
prostitutes and their madams.
An unsettling thriller, Love Crimes (1991, 1992—two versions were released) was
Borden’s first studio film. In the manner of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Steven Soder-
bergh’s 1989 film, Borden explores the disturbing dynamics of voyeurism, desire, con-
trol, and degradation. The film follows a hard-driving female district attorney, Dana
Greenway (Sean Young), who ignores authority and sets her own rules. She becomes
intrigued by the case of a handsome, predatory man, David Hanover (Patrick Bergin,
best known for his role as the despotic husband in Sleeping with the Enemy opposite
Julia Roberts), who poses as a photographer in order to seduce, and abuse, women.
When none of Hanover’s victims will press charges against him, Greenway goes under-
cover in an attempt to make a case that she can use to bring the man to justice. After
making contact with Hanover, and subjecting herself to his abuse, however, Greenway,

579
Brando, Marlon

like the other women on whom Hanover has preyed, finds herself strangely attracted to
her antagonist, and she must reconcile her desire to prosecute this victimizer with her
desire to be controlled by him.
In 1994, Borden joined three other women directors—Clara Law, Ana Maria Mag-
alhães, and Monika Treut—to create the anthology Erotique. Exploring some of the
same themes she addressed in Love Crimes, Borden’s segment, “Let’s Talk About Sex,”
follows a young Hispanic woman, Rosie (Kamala Lopez-Dawson), who desperately
wants to be an actress but continues to run up against stereotypic boundaries that keep
all but the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, “pretty” girls on the outside looking in. Working
as a phone sex operator in order to support herself, Rosie comes to dread listening to
her callers’ fantasies. Unfulfilled at every turn, she enters into an increasingly dis-
turbing, sexually charged phone relationship with Dr. Robert Stern (Bryan Cranston),
a man who is willing to listen to Rosie’s fantasies.
Although Borden has continued to work in the industry, after her work on Erotique
her production has trailed off. She directed an episode of the Red Shoe Diaries for tele-
vision in 1996 and participated—rather eerily—in a 1995 History Channel produc-
tion entitled The Strange Case of Lizzie Borden. Although most of her work to this
point has come early in her career, Borden’s talent and her willingness to involve herself
in cutting-edge filmmaking have made her an important figure in American cinema.

Selected Filmography
Erotique (1994); Love Crimes (1992); Inside Out (1991); “Monsters” (1988); Working Girls
(1986); Born in Flames (1983); Regrouping (1976)

References
Crowdus, Gary, and Dan Georgakas. The Cineaste Interviews 2: On the Art and Politics of the
Cinema. Chicago: Lake View Press, 2002.
Lane, Christina. Feminist Hollywood: From Born in Flames to Point Break. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2000.
McDonald, Scott. “Interview with Lizzie Borden.” Feminist Studies 15(2), Summer 1989:
327–45.
Redding, Judith M., and Victoria A. Brownworth. Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors.
Seattle: Seal Press, 1997.

—Ralph Hartsock

BRANDO, MARLON. Marlon Brando was arguably the finest screen actor of the
twentieth century, winning worldwide acceptance as both a movie star of the first rank
and as a performer of uncommon skill. A so-called Method actor, he was a student of
the Stanislavski approach to stage acting, which he learned first from his mentor, Stella
Adler, and later from Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg, and others who taught at the famous
Actors Studio in Manhattan.

580
 Brando, Marlon

The son of Marlon Brando Sr. and Dorothy Julia Pennebaker, Brando was born in
Omaha, Nebraska, on April 3, 1924. His mother had a hand in founding the presti-
gious Omaha Community Playhouse at a time when Henry Fonda appeared there;
and his sister, Jocelyn, also became an actor. After an indifferent school career, Brando
set out for New York City in 1943, where he began to study with Adler. It was during
this time that he developed the habit of observing people—often with such intensity
that he annoyed them—eventually acquiring the ability not only to imitate their man-
nerisms and vocalisms, but, seemingly, to embody their very essence. Expelled from
secondary school for engaging in mildly insurrectionary pranks, Brando retained a
streak of mischievousness and rebellion his entire life. In the end, this would serve
him well, as in many of his most celebrated film roles he played rebels, criminals, or
outlaws.
Early on in his career, he had to settle for small parts in stage productions, such as I
Remember Mama and Truckline Café; but his casual, powerful presence ultimately
caught the eye of critics and audiences alike. Despite a tendency to mumble, he
brought a fresh, naturalistic style to his roles. Above all, Brando exuded sexuality. An
uncommonly handsome young man, he earned a slightly tougher look when the tip
of his nose was flattened in a friendly boxing match.
His unique look and style impressed director Elia Kazan and playwright Tennessee
Williams, both of whom felt he was right for the part of Stanley Kowalski in the 1947
Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Wearing skin-tight jeans and torn
T-shirts, Brando, giving expression to a powerful sense of working-class angst, wowed
audiences and stole the show from veteran actress Jessica Tandy, who played the vul-
nerable, sensitive, but sexually corrupt Blanche, sister to Kowalski’s wife, Stella. Bran-
do’s fresh, powerful reading of Stanley helped make the play both a sensation and a
success. It also earned Brando invitations from Hollywood, which he accepted; he
never returned to the stage.
After playing a disgruntled paraplegic in The Men in 1950, Brando reprised his role
as Stanley Kowalski in Kazan’s 1951 screen version of Streetcar, garnering an Oscar
nomination for his performance. Kazan had a unique skill in handling Brando, and
he was able to get the most out of his young star. Indeed, Brando gave one of his finest
performances in Kazan’s next film, Viva Zapata (l952), in which he played the Mexican
revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. An atmosphere-soaked period piece, the film sported a
superb cast, which included Anthony Quinn (who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar
as Zapata’s brother), Jean Peters, and Joseph Wiseman. Brando was again nominated
for Best Actor. In what many consider his finest performance, Brando played Terry
Malloy in another Kazan film, On the Waterfront (1954). The Malloy character was a
street tough who betrays his brother and other union-related, local gangsters, and
Brando was brilliant in the role. Playing opposite the ingenue Eva Marie Saint and vet-
eran performers Lee. J. Cobb, Karl Malden, and Rod Steiger, Brando gave a naturalis-
tic performance, enhanced by the feature distorting makeup he wore, in a stunning
display of Method acting. This bravura performance won Brando a Best Actor Oscar.
Even at this early point in his career, Brando was already world famous. Much of
this had to do with his willingness to accept difficult roles. Demonstrating his

581
Brooks, Mel

versatility as a performer, for instance, he took the role of the singing, dancing Sky
Masterson in Guys and Dolls; he also took up the challenge of playing Mark Antony
in a screen adaptation of Julius Caesar, a production that featured a star-studded cast,
including British acting stalwarts James Mason and John Gielgud. Brando more than
held his own in this film, and he was invited by Gielgud to do a run of Shakespeare
plays in England, although he declined the invitation.
In the interval between making Julius Caesar and On the Waterfront, Brando agreed to
play a motorcycle hoodlum in the cult film The Wild One (1953), forgettable for every-
thing except the brooding, explosive vulnerability Brando brought to his role. Unlike
James Dean, another brilliant protégé of Kazan’s, who died in a tragic car accident after
making only three films, Brando combined vulnerability with menace. Indeed, where
Dean touched audiences with his ability to express a certain sense of young, male fragil-
ity, Brando’s characters, even the young men, seemed wholly grown—and very danger-
ous. Interestingly, later in his career, Brando would play a series of paternalistic
characters, most notably in The Godfather (1972), Last Tango in Paris (1973), and
Apocalypse Now (1979), whose rage, carefully controlled and hidden beneath placid exte-
riors, boils just under the surface, making them threats to everyone around them.
Brando was sometimes accused of being lazy—an extraordinary natural talent, who
tended to be self-indulgent and undisciplined, and who never fully realized his true
potential. This is often a criticism leveled at those to whom things seem to come too
easily. Yet, in Brando’s case, starting in his mid-twenties, he made 27 films in 23 years,
earning multiple Oscar nominations and working with such heralded directors as
Kazan, Bernardo Bertolucci, Arthur Penn, John Huston, Sidney Lumet, Fred Zinne-
mann, Charlie Chaplin, and Francis Ford Coppola. In his fifties, and having given
numerous iconic performances, he was ready for semiretirement, during which he
wanted only to play small parts with outsized salaries. Brando made a dozen films at
this point, none of them particularly memorable. After providing audiences some of
the most viscerally exciting, dynamic, and startling performances in screen history,
Brando died in 2004.

References
Brando, Marlon, with Robert Lindsey. Songs My Mother Taught Me. New York: Random House,
1994.
Grobel, Laurence. Conversations with Brando. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1991.
Manso, Peter. Brando: The Biography. New York: Hyperion, 1994.
—James Delmont

BROOKS, MEL. A deeply devoted family man who is profoundly committed to his
Jewish faith, Mel Brooks has long been one of Hollywood’s most influential figures.
Known for his outrageous—and some would say offensive—films, Brooks has built a
reputation as a master comedic writer.

582
 Brooks, Mel

Mel Brooks poses before the set of his Broadway production The Producers in 2001. In that year The
Producers won a total of 12 Tony Awards, the most ever for a Broadway production.

Born Melvin Kaminsky on June 28, 1926, in New York City to Jewish immigrant
parents, Brooks was the youngest child in his family. Following his father’s death in
1929, Brooks became preoccupied with his own mortality, paying close attention to
his physical well-being. He took great comfort in watching movies—his early favorite
was the 1931 production of Frankenstein—as well as listening to radio comedies such
as The Yiddish Philosopher featuring Eddie Cantor. After graduating high school in
1944, Brooks joined the army. Serving in Belgium during World War II, Brooks was
frustrated and angered by the anti-Semitism that marked America’s armed forces at
the time. Following the war, he turned to comedy, accepting a job from Sid Caesar
as a writer for The Admiral Broadway Revue.
Although the show lasted for only 19 episodes, Brooks impressed Caesar with his
abilities as a comedic writer. Caesar eventually hired him to write for Your Show of
Shows, which he did from 1950 to 1954. In 1961, Brooks was hired to help Jerry Lewis
and Bill Richmond write the script for the feature film The Ladies Man. In 1963, he
wrote and starred in The Critic, a short film in which he watches abstract animations
and, not understanding their meaning, heckles the cartoons.
Brooks’s first stand-alone feature was the 1968 hit The Producers. The story follows
Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), a Broadway producer, and his accountant Leo Bloom
(Gene Wilder), as they purposely attempt to produce a failed musical. The Producers,
which won the 1969 Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay, was a huge hit

583
Burton, Tim

for Brooks and remains his most successful title. A Broadway adaptation of the film
opened in 2001 and went on to win 12 Tony Awards. In 2005, a remake of the original
film was released, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick reprising their stage roles
as Bialystock and Bloom.
Brooks continued his feature film success with two 1974 spoofs: Young Frankenstein,
a parody of his favorite childhood movie, and Blazing Saddles, which took satirical aim
at traditional westerns. His next features, High Anxiety (1977) and History of the World:
Part I (1981), were both met with mixed critical reviews. Brooks’s next feature, Space-
balls (1987), however, was a critical and commercial success. Apart from writing the
sci-fi parody, Brooks also starred as President Skroob, who attempts to steal the air
from planet Druidia. The 1990s saw two more parodies: Robin Hood: Men in Tights
(1993) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). More recently, Brooks wrote a film
adaptation of his 1960s television series Get Smart; the picture was released in 2008.
Brooks’s films are marked by their unpredictability, featuring a surprising mix of
crude sight gags and childish jokes. In a 1991 interview, Brooks admitted that this
often jarring juxtaposition of forms is a significant part of his comedy. Some film critics
have suggested that Brooks seems to have a difficult time maintaining a consistent
comedic tone throughout his films. In History of the World, for instance, he provides
viewers with both a hilarious, even iconic, song-and-dance number concerning the
Spanish Inquisition, as well as a tedious, drawn-out musical sequence on the French
Revolution. It may be that this qualitative unevenness is largely responsible for the less
than positive reviews of some of Brooks’s films.

Selected Filmography
Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995); Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993); Life Stinks (1991);
Spaceballs (1987); The History of the World: Part I (1981); High Anxiety (1977); Silent Movie
(1976); Young Frankenstein (1974); Blazing Saddles (1974); Twelve Chairs, The (1970); Produc-
ers, The (1968)

References
Crick, Robert Alan. The Big Screen Comedies of Mel Brooks. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.
Parish, James Robert. It’s Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks. Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley, 2007.
—Sean Graham

BURTON, TIM. Tim Burton was voted the 49th greatest director of all time in
1996 by Entertainment Weekly. He was the youngest director on the list. Burton
became an influence in Hollywood at a young age due to his unique, darkly humorous,
and often quirky cinematic vision. His films are intensely personal and highly stylized.
Born Timothy William Burton on August 25, 1958, in Burbank, California, he
spent much of his childhood secluded and entertained himself by watching horror

584
 Burton, Tim

movies and drawing. Burton lived

near a cemetery and has com-
mented on the “weirdness” of the
situation. His rather macabre child-
hood has influenced his film-
making.
After high school, Burton stud-
ied animation at the California
Institute of the Arts, founded by
Disney, from whom he would
eventually obtain a fellowship. He
worked at Disney on The Fox and
the Hound (1981) and The Black
Cauldron (1985), but found that
he often had artistic differences
with his colleagues. Allowed by
Disney to work on personal proj-
ects, he created a six-minute tribute
to the horror actor Vincent Price
titled Vincent (1982), and the
movie Frankenweenie (1984),
which was judged by studio admin-
istrators as unsuitable for children.
Paul Reubens (a.k.a. Pee-wee
Herman) was so impressed by
Frankenweenie that he asked the
then 27-year-old Burton to direct
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985),
which, to the delight of studio Director Tim Burton, November 2010. (Getty Images)
heads, turned out to be a huge
hit. His successful turn with this
film led to his being chosen to direct the quirky supernatural comedy Beetlejuice
(1988), which starred Michael Keaton and which was embraced by critics and audi-
ences alike. Based on the critical and box-office success of these two films, Burton
was tapped to direct the enormously expensive Batman (1989), on which he again
worked with Keaton.
His next movie, Edward Scissorhands (1990), is considered by many his seminal
work. The film, which featured the extraordinarily talented Johnny Depp as the eerily
seductive Scissorhands, found Burton at the height of his creative powers and show-
cased his ability to create a highly stylized and painstakingly designed film. The work-
ing relationship between Burton and Depp has been a fruitful one, as they have gone
on to make five more films together.
Batman Returns (1992) saw Burton once again working with Keaton. The film was
darker and stranger than the original, showing how much creative freedom he had

585
Burton, Tim

won. The film did well, but many people were disappointed by it. While working on
Batman Returns, he also produced the wildly popular The Nightmare Before Christmas
(1993), which he had written himself. The stop-motion animation movie emphasized
Burton’s gothic style and dark humor. Mixing two of his favorite themes, Christmas
and Halloween, today it has become a cult classic.
Although Ed Wood (1994), his tribute to the legendary “worst director of all time,”
did poorly at the box office, it received some of the best critical reviews of Burton’s
career. The vibrant Mars Attacks! (1996) was a step away from his typical style and
was met with mediocre reviews and little box-office success, despite the appearances
by big name stars.
Burton returned to form with Sleepy Hollow (1999), where he again worked with
Depp. His next two films were more conventional. The remake Planet of the Apes
(2001) did well at the box office but was panned by critics. He followed with Big Fish
(2003), which disappointed fans.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), a more faithful retelling of Roald Dahl’s
original story, was a commercial and critical success. His second stop-motion film,
Corpse Bride (2005), received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Fea-
ture Film and garnered more critical praise. Many consider it to be the spiritual succes-
sor to The Nightmare Before Christmas.
His most recent work, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007),
received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Director and won an Oscar for Best
Achievement in Art Direction.
As of 2009, all but three of his feature films have been nominated for an Academy
Award in some category. Sweeney Todd won the Best Motion Picture (Comedy or
Musical) and Best Actor (Comedy or Musical) Awards at the 65th Golden Globe
Awards.

Selected Filmography
Alice in Wonderland (2010); Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007); Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory (2005); Big Fish (2003); Planet of the Apes (2001); Sleepy Hollow (1999);
Mars Attacks! (1996); Ed Wood (1994); Batman Returns (1992); Edward Scissorhands (1990);
Batman (1989); Beetlejuice (1989); Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

References
Burton, Tim, and Mark Salisbury. Burton on Burton. London: Faber. 2000.
Burton, Tim, and Kristian Fraga. Tim Burton: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi. 2005.
Woods, Paul A. Tim Burton: A Child’s Garden of Nightmares. London: Plexus. 2002.
—James Heiney

586
 v
C
CAGNEY, JAMES. One of the greatest film actors of all time, and one of the twen-
tieth century’s most recognizable faces, James Cagney was the quintessential movie
tough guy. Although famous for portraying gangsters, Cagney was also a capable
singer, dancer, and light comedian who excelled in a variety of roles. He was nomi-
nated three times for an Academy Award, winning once for his performance as lead
actor in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). The unique cadence of his voice also made
him one of the most mimicked film personalities of all time.
James Francis Cagney Jr. was born July 17, 1899, in New York City, the son of an
Irish American bartender and part-time boxer. One of seven children, Cagney was
sickly as a small child but grew up as something of a street brawler. He worked odd
jobs to help support his family, including stints as a newspaper copyboy, a waiter, a
bellhop and a billiard racker in a pool hall. In 1918, he graduated from Stuyvesant
High School and briefly attended Columbia University before dropping out after the
death of his father. An excellent athlete, Cagney was an accomplished amateur boxer
and baseball player who at one time considered trying to make baseball a career. While
working as a package wrapper at Wanamaker’s Department Store, Cagney heard from
a fellow employee about a vaudeville troupe looking for entertainers and willing to pay
$35 a week, good money at the time. Cagney auditioned for the outfit and, ironically,
the future tough guy won a place in an all-male chorus that cross-dressed as females.
Ignoring his mother’s pleas to give up the pursuit of a stage career, Cagney sought
out more theater work and eventually joined the vaudeville circuit, touring primarily
as a singer, dancer, and comedian. In 1922, he married actress Frances Willard Vernon,
with whom he would remain for the rest of his life. The couple had two children.
After years in vaudeville and performing in plays, Cagney got his big break by landing
a role starring opposite Joan Blondell in the Broadway production of Penny Arcade
(1929). He earned rave reviews for his performance, and as a result Warner Bros. signed
the actor and cast him in Sinners’ Holiday (1930), the film version of the play. More films
followed, and in 1931 Cagney won widespread praise for his breakthrough performance
as a gangster in The Public Enemy. In the film, Cagney’s character violently smashed a
grapefruit into the face of actress Mae Clarke in what many film historians describe as

587
Cagney, James

one of the most significant scenes

in movie history. The scene estab-
lished Cagney’s rough-and-
tumble reputation in the mind of
the public and led to more “darker
roles.” He starred in a string of
successful films with good friend
Pat O’Brien, including Devil Dogs
of the Air (1935), Ceiling Zero
(1935), Angels with Dirty Faces
(1938), and Torrid Zone (1940).
Cagney also gave memorable per-
formances as the gangster who
gunned down Humphrey Bogart
in The Roaring Twenties (1939)
and as a blind boxer in City of
Conquest (1940). As a result, by
the beginning of the 1940s the
41-year-old star had established
himself as one of Hollywood’s big-
gest box-office draws.
In 1942 Cagney shed his
tough-guy image to take on what
for him was a dream role, starring
as multitalented singer, dancer,
composer, and theatrical pro-
ducer George M. Cohan in
Yankee Doodle Dandy. Many con-
sidered this Cagney’s greatest per-
Movie poster for the 1934 film Jimmy the Gent, starring
formance, and the patriotic
Jimmy Cagney and Bette Davis. (Library of Congress)
theme of the film played well to
an American public only a few
months removed from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The film earned eight Oscar
nominations, and Cagney received the Academy Award for Best Actor in a lead role for
his performance. That same year, Cagney formed his own production company and was
elected president of the Screen Actors Guild. After the release of Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Cagney raised money for the war effort and tirelessly toured military bases in the United
States and Britain, performing for thousands of troops.
Through the 1940s and 1950s Cagney continued making movies, either through
Warner Bros. or his own production company. In 1961, at the age of 62, he retired
from films after starring in the Billy Wilder comedy One, Two, Three. He remained
retired for the next 20 years until 1981, when he appeared in Milos Forman’s Ragtime,
his last film performance. During the latter stages of his life Cagney received countless
accolades for his body of work, including Lifetime Achievement Awards from the

588
 Campion, Jane

American Film Institute and the Screen Actors Guild. On March 30, 1986, Cagney
died at his farm in Stanfordville, New York, at age 86. President Ronald Reagan deliv-
ered the eulogy at the actor’s funeral.

References
Cagney, James. Cagney by Cagney. New York: Doubleday, 1976.
Dickens, Homer. The Complete Films of James Cagney. New York: Citadel, 1989.
McCabe, John. Cagney. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999.
Warren, Doug. James Cagney: The Authorized Biography. London: Robson, 1998.

—Ben Wynne

CAMPION, JANE. Jane Campion is a highly acclaimed director from New Zealand
who began her career in the 1980s. Winner of the Palme d’Or for short film in 1986
and feature film in 1993, Campion is also only one of four women nominated for an
Academy Award for direction. Her films are known for complex character relation-
ships—often dealing frankly with sexuality and family dysfunction—and rich cinema-
tography and costume design. Campion frequently writes as well as directs her films,
and has received awards for original screenplays.
Campion was born April 30, 1954, to Richard Campion, theatrical director and co-
founder of the New Zealand Players Company, and Edith Armstrong, a stage actress.
She grew up in New Zealand and attended Victoria University, graduating in 1975
with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. After college, she moved to Australia for
art school, graduating from the Sydney College of Arts with a bachelor’s in painting
in 1979. Scholarly examinations of her work have cited her academic experiences as
significant to her filmmaking, pointing to her background in painting as an influence
in her use of colored lighting and her background in anthropology as an influence in
her explorations of multicultural issues.
It was at the Sydney College of Arts that she made her first film, a short called Tissues,
about a father who is arrested for child molestation. This film won her entrance to
the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School, from which she graduated in
1984. While a student there, she made a number of critically popular short films. Her
first effort, Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest, wove a parallel story between famed En-
glish mountaineer George Mallory’s failed attempt to scale Everest and the fictional
Geoffrey Mallory’s seduction of a female writer. The picture cut between the two sto-
ries, utilizing newsreel footage and original film and applying silent movie-style title
cards in between the individual scenes. Her first critically successful film, An Exercise
in Discipline-Peel, was made in 1982. The short film, about the escalating tension
between a man, his sister, and his son during a car trip, won Campion her first Palme
d’Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. Campion followed Exercise in Discipline-Peel
with Passionless Moments, a series of linked short subjects written and directed by Cam-
pion and her boyfriend Gerard Lee. The film, which dealt with inconsequential
moments in the lives of various people in a neighborhood, won the most popular short

589
Campion, Jane

film award at the 1983 Sydney Film Festival. Campion’s final film at AFTRS was her
thesis project, A Girl’s Own Story, a tale of adolescent girls in the early 1960s that dealt
with themes of family dysfunction and adolescent sexuality.
After graduation, Campion worked on several projects for Australian television,
directing the film Two Friends, centered on two adolescent female friends and their
gradual alienation from one another. The film inverted its plot, telling the story in
reverse, from a point of total alienation to the earlier days of friendship. During this
period, she also directed an episode of the television show Dancing Daze for Australian
television and made the miniseries An Angel at My Table, based on the autobiographies
of New Zealand author Janet Frame, focusing especially on her struggle with mental
illness and her emergence as a poet. This miniseries would go on to be adapted into
a single film and shown at international film festivals in Venice and Toronto.
Campion’s 1989 film Sweetie was her feature film debut, based partially on the dissolution
of her relationship with Gerard Lee. In Sweetie, Campion dealt with one of the themes she
would return to again and again, family dysfunction. The film begins by exploring the rela-
tionship between Kay and Louis; Kay gets involved with Louis based on a fortune teller’s
advice. After they move in together, they decide to plant a tree in their small backyard, creat-
ing a great deal of tension between them. Their relationship, already dysfunctional, is compli-
cated by the arrival of Kay’s mentally unstable sister, Sweetie. The separation of Kay’s parents
and other complications in her life lead to a confrontation with a naked, painted Sweetie in a
wobbly tree house—although a bit heavy-handed, the metaphors of stability/instability are
nonetheless touching—that results in Sweetie’s death. While this film was shown at Cannes
and also nominated for the Palme d’Or for full-length film, it met with a mixed audience
response, due in part to its exploration of the controversial theme of mental illness.
It was Campion’s second feature, The Piano, that would bring her great acclaim.
The picture, starring Holly Hunter, Sam Neill, and Harvey Keitel, is set in colonial
New Zealand and is based on a love triangle between Alisdair Stewart (Neill), a
colonial settler; Ada McGrath (Hunter), his mute mail-order bride who communicates
primarily using the titular instrument; and George Baines (Keitel), another settler with
close ties to the native Maori. The film was strongly influenced by the European folk-
tale “Bluebeard” and by the novel Wuthering Heights, as well as by the history of
European-Maori contact in New Zealand. The picture also introduced Anna Paquin
as the young Flora McGrath, Ada’s daughter. After it was screened at Cannes,
Campion became the first female director to win the Palme d’Or; the film went on to
win Academy Awards for writing and acting.
In 1996, Campion directed Portrait of a Lady, an adaptation of the Henry James novel,
starring Nicole Kidman, who Campion had first met back when Kidman was in high
school. Although the film featured acclaimed talent—including John Malkovich, Barbara
Hershey, and John Gielgud—making it proved challenging for Campion, as much of the
tension introduced in the source text is centered within the characters. Kidman in particu-
lar had difficulty expressing the emotional struggle waged by Isabel Archer, and the film
did not garner the same sort of acclaim that was lavished on The Piano.
Campion’s follow-up to Portrait of a Lady was 1999’s Holy Smoke. Reuniting with
Harvey Keitel, Campion co-wrote the screenplay for the picture—with her sister

590
 Campion, Jane

Anna—as well as directing it. The film, which explores the complex relationship
between a former cult member and the man attempting to deprogram her, stars Kate
Winslet as Ruth and Keitel as P. J. Waters. As with her previous films, Holy Smoke dealt
with complex issues related to sexuality, alienation, and loss. The film does end on a
redemptive note, however, with Ruth and P. J. corresponding with each other, even
as they involve themselves in their new, happier lives.
Campion had originally intended once again to team with Nicole Kidman for In the
Cut (2003). Kidman, though, withdrew from the project due to her divorce from Tom
Cruise, and Meg Ryan stepped into the starring role. In the Cut follows the life of Frannie
(Ryan), an English teacher who becomes embroiled in an investigation into a serial killer
being carried out by Detective Malloy, played by Mark Ruffalo. Marketed as a thriller,
the film received mixed reviews; although some critics found the pacing too slow for a
thriller, others pointed out that Campion had done a fine job in exploring the psycho-
logical elements that defined the different characters. In the end, the film received more
attention for its explicit sexual content than for anything else, especially since Ryan—
who was well known for her girl-next-door roles in romantic comedies—had replaced
Kidman, who would seem to have been better suited for the role of Frannie.
Campion made two short films after 2000, both as part of larger multidirector proj-
ects. She contributed The Water Diary, a segment examining the effects of a drought
that causes a family to sacrifice their horses in order to secure food and water, to the film
8 (2009), which dealt with various issues of world poverty. Her contribution to Chacun
son cinema (2007) was a three-minute short titled The Lady Bug, which focused on a
janitor in a theater poking at a ladybug while a movie in which two women berate a
man for his inadequate sexual performance plays in the background.
In 2009, Campion returned to feature films with Bright Star, a biographical sketch of
the poet John Keats and his romance with Fanny Brawne. Bright Star presented a mel-
ancholy look at love, focusing on the letters and interactions of the romantic partners
rather than on Keats’s poetry. The film was praised for the performances of its leads,
Abbie Cornish and Ben Winshaw, and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Campion cites a number of significant directorial influences on her film career,
including Akira Kurosawa and Francis Ford Coppola, whose first Godfather film she
watches religiously once each year. Additionally, she has been influenced by the work
of a number of contemporary female directors, including Gillian Armstrong, Alison
McLean, Niki Caro, and Sally Potter. Campion continues to speak out about the pauc-
ity of woman working in the industry, especially behind the camera. As the only female
director to have won the Palme d’Or, and one of only four to have been nominated for
an Academy Award for direction, however, she has become an inspiration for other
woman trying to break into the field.
See also: Piano, The

Selected Filmography
Bright Star (2009); In the Cut (2003); Piano, The (1993); Sweetie (1989); A Girl’s Own Story
(1984); Passionless Moments (1983)

591
Capra, Frank

References
Aldred, B. Grantham. “Binary Structures, Clothing and Jane Campion’s The Piano.” Midwest-
ern Folklore 31(1–2), 2007.
Hogg, Trevor. “Burning Brightly, a Jane Campion Profile.” December 2009. Flickering Myth 10,
June 2010. http://flickeringmyth.blogspot.com/2009/12/burning-brightly-jane-campion
-profile.html.
McHugh, Kathleen Anne. Jane Campion. Champaign: Univeristy of Illinois Press, 2007.
Wexman, Virginia Wright, ed. Jane Campion: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1999.
—B. Grantham Aldred

CAPRA, FRANK. An Italian immigrant, Frank Capra was a major contributor to

the development of the American film industry. A director, writer, and producer of
narrative pictures and documentaries, Capra created films characterized by humanistic
themes and a unique cinematic style. His enormously popular pictures of the 1930s
and 1940s—among them It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
(1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)—are
still considered some of the best films ever made.
Frank Russell Capra was born Francesco Rosario Capra in Bisacquino, Sicily, on
May 18, 1897, and immigrated to the United States in 1903 with his father, mother,
and siblings. The family joined an older brother who had previously settled in California.
The youngest child, Capra attended school, sold newspapers, and worked at other
jobs to finance his education. He graduated from Manual Arts High School in Los
Angeles and then the Throop Institute (now the California Institute of Technology)
with a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering.
During World War I, Capra enlisted in the U.S. Army; allowed to finish his college
studies, he entered the military in October 1918. Not yet a naturalized citizen, he was
stationed at Fort Winfield Scott, at the Presidio of San Francisco, where he taught bal-
listics and mathematics to artillerymen. His military career was short-lived, however, as
he contracted the Spanish flu and was medically discharged in December 1918. Capra
changed his name to Frank Russell Capra when he became a U.S. citizen in 1920.
After leaving the service, Capra tramped through Arizona, Nevada, and California,
tutoring, hustling poker, playing guitar, and selling different products door-to-door. In
San Francisco, he answered an advertisement from a “movie studio” and learned to
make one-reel silent films based on poems. Enthralled by that first, limited experience,
he set out to learn every step of the process of making films. He became a prop man,
editor, and a gag writer for Bob Eddy. In Hollywood, working for Hal Roach, he wrote
gags for the Our Gang kids. Writing for Mack Sennett’s Keystone Comedies, he
learned the dynamics of staging comedy: timing, building a gag, the heaping of “busi-
ness on business” until the big one, the “topper,” was revealed.
Capra made his first feature films, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, The Strong Man (1926),
and Long Pants (1927), for Harry Langdon, a famous, baby-faced comic with a gift
for pantomime and an innocence bordering on the grotesque. Writing for the

592
 Capra, Frank

Our Gang kids and for Harry

Langdon, Capra learned to respect
the integrity of characterization:
the gag was important, but it had
to fit into the plot and be true to
the personality of the characters.
Working under Harry Cohn—
“His Crudeness”—at CBC, a
small “poverty row” studio that
later became Columbia, Capra
made a series of silent films and
began dabbling in the mechanics
of sound. It was at this time that
he made his first A-picture, Subma-
rine (1928), and developed a close
working relationship with camera-
man Joseph Walker and screen-
writers Jo Swerling and Robert
Riskin. He also began to develop
his own cinematic style.
Convinced that a director
should be responsible of every
aspect of the filmmaking process,
Capra began to make progressively
more complex pictures. These
included The Donovan Affair
(1929), Ladies of Leisure (1930),
The Miracle Woman (1931), Plati-
num Blonde (1931), Forbidden
Lieutenant Colonel Frank Capra in London on August 19,
(1932), and American Madness 1943. Capra, a Hollywood filmmaker who was shocked by
(1932). Working with Riskin, Pearl Harbor, enlisted and was assigned to produce war films
Capra introduced themes of ideal- during World War II. (AP/Wide World Photos)
ism and sentimentality into these
early pictures, setting the stage for
what was to come in his later films.
Although a box-office failure, Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) had the
distinction of being the first motion picture to make its screen debut in Radio City
Music Hall. He followed Bitter Tea with Lady for a Day (1933), a box-office hit that
was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.
His brilliant It Happened One Night (1934), generally considered the film world’s first
romantic comedy, started out with several strikes against it. Its working title, Night Bus,
was uninspired; and because of the storyline, the actors would have few costume changes
and visit a limited number of locales. While the first script was turned down by perhaps a
dozen noted actors, Capra was able to convince Claudette Colbert—available for just a

593
Capra, Frank

few weeks at double her usual salary—and Clark Gable—on loan from his home
studio—to come onboard. Capra and Riskin then worked their magic on the script,
making it contemporary, witty, and, as it turned out, timeless. A rich and spoiled social-
ite, literally escaping an arranged marriage—she is forced to dive from her father’s yacht
and swim ashore—boards a night bus in New York City, where she encounters an
unemployed, fast-talking reporter—a man who doesn’t even wear an undershirt! The
film proved to be a Depression-era fairy tale: the Princess and the Commoner meet, fall
in love, and live happily ever after. Opening slowly, the film turned out to be the “must-
see” movie of 1935; it also won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best
Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay.
The films that followed It Happened One Night saw the development of Capra’s sig-
nature style; his use of themes and visual treatments that came to be described as
“Capra-esque.” Most of these films were essentially comedies of manners, witty con-
temporary morality plays that celebrated the values of small-town America and the vir-
tues of democracy. Generally, they pitted a good man—usually a naive, sincere, and
unaffected man—against the forces of evil permeating American society: the corrup-
tion of the moneyed elite and the ruthlessness of arrogant politicians. Most notable
among these films were Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can’t Take It with You—
which earned Capra his second and third Oscars for direction—Lady for a Day
(1933), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
During World II, Capra, commissioned as a major in the U.S. Army Signal Corps,
supervised the making of documentary films, in particular his Why We Fight series:
Prelude to War (1942), The Nazis Strike (1942), The Battle of Britain (1943), Divide
and Conquer (1943), Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), Tunisian Victory (1945), and
Two Down and One to Go (1945). These documentaries may be understood as the-
matic montages—not so much directed as edited, or in the case of Why We Fight,
redacted from existing war-footage, much of it taken from enemy newsreels and Nazi
propaganda films. Overlaying this filmic material with anti-Nazi commentary, the pic-
tures in the Why We Fight series served as military training films that were supposed to
help soldiers, and the American people, understand the ideological background to the
war. Significantly, the production of the series earned Capra a Distinguished Service
Medal. In addition to be recognized by the armed forces, Prelude to War won the
1942 Academy Award for Documentary Feature; by the end of the war in 1945, this
film had been seen by nine million people.
Although Capra continued to make films for another four decades after America
climbed out of the Depression and helped win World War II in the 1940s, his pictures
became less and less popular with audiences. His sentimental idealism and homespun
heroes seemed naive and intellectually dishonest to an increasing number of postwar
viewers. Yet, even though they fell out of favor in postwar America, Capra’s films, with
their well-crafted comedic sensibilities, their whimsical characterizations, and their
message of the basic goodness of humanity, continue to resonate with contemporary
audiences.
In 1982, Capra was honored by the American Film Institute with a “Salute to Frank
Capra,” and in 1986, he received the National Medal of Arts. Capra died in 1991.

594
 Carpenter, John

Selected Filmography
Pocketful of Miracles (1961); A Hole in the Head (1959); Here Comes the Groom (1951); Riding
High (1950); State of the Union (1948); It’s a Wonderful Life (1946); Your Job in Germany
(1945); Arsenic and Old Lace (1944); Meet John Doe (1941); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939); You Can’t Take It with You (1938); Lost Horizon (1937); Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936);
It Happened One Night (1934); Lady for a Day (1933); The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)

References
Capra, Frank. Frank Capra: The Name above the Title. New York: Da Capo, 1997.
Carney, Raymond. American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Gehring, Wes. Populism and the Capra Legacy. Westport: Greenwood, 1995.
Glatzer, Richard, and John Raeburn, eds. Frank Capra: The Man and His Films. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1975.
McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1992.
—Arbolina L. Jennings

CARPENTER, JOHN. John Carpenter is one of the key figures in American horror
and science fiction filmmaking. He influenced the direction of the genres through his
intelligent and moody films that bear his unmistakable style. His career has spanned
four decades and encompassed over 30 movies as producer and director. He has also
left his mark as a writer, actor, and composer. His compositions and movies have
won numerous special interest awards.
Born John Howard Carpenter on January 16, 1948, in Carthage, New York, he was
raised in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where his father, who had a profound musical in-
fluence on him, was the head of the music department at Western Kentucky University.
Carpenter composes the music for almost all of his films. His most famous theme is that
from Halloween. His music is generally synthesized with piano accompaniment and
atmospherics. He enrolled in the prestigious film program at the University of Southern
California. Carpenter’s first directorial effort was Dark Star, part of his master’s thesis. It
received limited theatrical release, was praised by critics, and became a cult classic.
Notable was his ability to make a good movie on a limited budget, $60,000 for this
film. He also began his tradition of formally prepending “John Carpenter’s” to the
movie title for movies that he directed. This was his only movie not filmed in wide-
screen. Carpenter is an advocate of the composition space that wide-screen affords.
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) was his first professional endeavor and a salute to
Howard Hawks. It is an example of the influence that westerns had on Carpenter.
Halloween (1978) established Carpenter as a master of the horror genre. He avoided
the gore of other slasher films and instead built suspense through visual elements, most

595
Carpenter, John

notably his hallmark of minimal-

ist lighting and nuance. Part of
the movie’s success is due to
Carpenter’s chilling score. Hallow-
een grossed more than $65 million
in its initial release and went on to
become one of the industry’s most
successful independent films.
Carpenter frequently appears
as an actor in his own movies
and did so in The Fog (1980).
He was displeased with the final
cut of The Fog and, as a sign of
his integrity as a director, shot
additional scenes until it was
acceptable to him. He followed
The Fog with the critically
acclaimed Escape from New York
(1981), which gained both a cult
following and mainstream suc-
cess. Kurt Russell, with whom
Carpenter had previously worked
when making the made for TV
movie Elvis, was featured in
Escape from New York. Russell
became part of the community
Director John Carpenter poses at the 58th International Film of actors and crew members
Festival, September 2001, in Venice, Italy. (AFP/Getty with whom Carpenter especially
Images) enjoys working.
The Thing (1982), ostensibly a
remake of the 1951 picture The Thing from Another World, provided Carpenter with his
largest budget ($15 million) to date. Although it was his first financial failure, the movie
did find an audience on cable and home video and is now regarded as an excellent hor-
ror film. Carpenter won over critics with the release of his 1984 picture Starman. A
departure from his horror films, Starman was a science fiction romance featuring Jeff
Bridges and Karen Allen. A modest commercial success, many felt that the offering
was Carpenter’s attempt to make up for the disappointing numbers from The Thing.
In 1986, Carpenter released Big Trouble in Little China, a big-budget action-
adventure comedy that also produced disappointing box-office numbers. After this,
he would have trouble finding financing. Returning to his horror film roots, he
directed two well-made, low-budget features in the 1980s: Prince of Darkness (1987)
and They Live (1988). The 1990s proved to be a decade in which Carpenter released
a series of poorly performing films, the one bright spot being Vampires (1998), which
starred the always reliable James Woods in the lead role.

596
 Cassavetes, John

Ghosts of Mars, released in 2001, was panned by critics. Carpenter’s reputation as a

filmmaker who can deliver brilliant horror and science fiction pictures remains intact
with his fans, however. His earlier films are considered classics and have continued to
perform well on home video. Several have been remade, including Assault on Precinct
13 and The Fog (both 2005). More recently, Rob Zombie has produced and directed
Halloween (2007), a reimagining of Carpenter’s 1978 film.
See also: Halloween

Selected Filmography
L.A. Gothic (2010); Ghosts of Mars (2001); Vampires (1998); Escape from L.A. (1996); Village of
the Damned (1995); Memoirs of the Invisible Man (1992); They Live (1988); Prince of Darkness
(1987); Big Trouble in Little China (1986); Starman (1984); Escape from New York (1981);
Fog, The (1980); Halloween (1978)

References
Boulenger, Gilles. John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press.
2003.
Conrich, Ian, and David Woods. The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror.
London: Wallflower. 2004.
Muir, John Kenneth. The Films of John Carpenter. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 2000.
—James Heiney

CASSAVETES, JOHN. One of the most influential figures in American indepen-

dent cinema, John Cassavetes was a writer, director, and actor whose uncompromising
personal vision made him a perpetual Hollywood outsider during his lifetime and an
inspirational legend after his death.
Born on December 9, 1929, in New York City, John Nicholas Cassavetes was the
second son of Greek immigrant parents. Shifts in fortunes led to frequent moves
throughout the 1930s, including a return to Greece, but the family eventually settled
on Long Island in the 1940s. After graduating from Port Washington High School
and flunking out of several colleges, Cassavetes decided to become an actor and entered
the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in 1949.
For several years after graduating from the academy, Cassavetes struggled to get
parts. Although trained for the stage, he discovered that the new medium of television
provided him the best opportunities. Between 1954 and 1959 Cassavetes made close
to 100 television appearances, eventually landing the starring role in Johnny Staccato,
an NBC television series about a piano-playing detective, in 1959. Television led to film
roles; and, despite a reputation in Hollywood for being difficult, Cassavetes crafted
many memorable characters in the 1960s, such as Johnny North, the willing victim in
The Killers (1964); Victor Franko, the tough convict turned soldier in The Dirty Dozen
(1967); and Guy Woodhouse, the deceitful husband in Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

597
Cassavetes, John

Actor and director John Cassavetes poses during an episode of the television anthology series The
Alfred Hitchcock Hour on January 21, 1964. The episode, co-starring Cassavetes’s wife Gena
Rowlands and directed by John Brahm, was originally broadcast on March 6, 1964. (Getty Images)

Despite his success, Cassavetes was dissatisfied with the parts he was offered and
with the bland commercialism of American television and film. He quickly got
involved in side projects that allowed him to explore roles and artistic ideas that the
mainstream industry considered too radical. His first film project grew from improv-
isations at the Variety Arts Studio, a workshop he co-founded with Burt Lane in
New York in 1957. Shadows (1959) was an experimental film that dealt with interracial
relationships and racism, featuring a jazz soundtrack by bassist Charles Mingus and
saxophonist Shafi Hadi. The improvisational film was championed by Film Culture
founder Jonas Mekas, and helped launch the New American Cinema movement in
the 1960s. Cassavetes’s next film, Too Late Blues (1961), had a similar focus on jazz
and spontaneity. With his third film, Faces (1968), Cassavetes came closest to achieving
mainstream success. A radical condemnation of middle-class values shot in cinéma vér-
ité style, Faces earned three Academy Award nominations, several international prizes,
and respectable box-office receipts.

598
 Chaplin, Charlie

Like many independents, Cassavetes relied on a group of collaborators that consis-

tently helped with his productions. Seymour Cassel remained a close friend through-
out Cassavetes’s life, and appeared in many of his films. He earned an Oscar
nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his role in Faces. He also starred in Minnie
and Moskowitz (1971), playing the zany parking lot attendant, Seymour Moskowitz,
who ultimately finds true love. Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara were also close collabora-
tors. Both appeared with Cassavetes in Husbands (1970), and both would star in sub-
sequent Cassavetes films. Falk played the oppressive construction worker Nick
Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence (1974). Gazzara starred as Cosmo Vitelli
in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976).
No collaborator worked on more of Cassavetes’s films than actress Gena Rowlands,
whom Cassavetes married in 1954. Rowlands was twice nominated for Academy
Awards as Best Actress in performances that Cassavetes directed. In A Woman Under
the Influence, Rowlands played Mabel Longhetti, an eccentric housewife and mother
who gradually loses her grip on reality. In Gloria (1980), she played a gangster’s moll
who winds up taking care of a child whose parents were murdered. Cassavetes often
wrote parts to showcase Rowlands’s talent for playing women in crisis. She played an
aging actress who has sacrificed everything for her career in Opening Night (1977),
and a mother whose husband and daughter reject her in Love Streams (1984).
Although Cassavetes’s films were never widely distributed in his lifetime, he is one of a
handful of American artists to be nominated for Academy Awards in three separate catego-
ries: acting (The Dirty Dozen), writing (Faces), and directing (A Woman under the Influence).
Cassavetes died on February 3, 1989, of cirrhosis of the liver, leaving behind three
children, Nick, Alexandra, and Zoe. A major influence on Martin Scorsese and count-
less other filmmakers, Cassavetes’s films testify to his determination to make pro-
foundly personal statements regardless of cost.

Selected Filmography
Big Trouble (1986); Love Streams (1984); Gloria (1980); Opening Night (1977); The Killing of a
Chinese Bookie (1976); A Woman under the Influence (1974); Minnie and Moskowitz (1971); Hus-
bands (1970); Faces (1968); A Child Is Waiting (1963); Too Late Blues (1961); Shadows (1959)

References
Carney, Ray. Cassavetes on Cassavetes. London: Faber & Faber, 2001.
Charity, Tom. John Cassavetes: Lifeworks. London: Omnibus, 2001.

—Joseph Christopher Schaub

CHAPLIN, CHARLIE. One of the most famous and recognizable figures in cin-
ema, Charles (Charlie) Spencer Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889, in London.
His parents, Charles Sr. and Hannah Chaplin, were both music hall performers on
South London’s vaudeville circuit. Chaplin’s childhood was plagued by poverty and

599
Chaplin, Charlie

hardship. Following his birth, Charles Sr. abandoned Hannah, a very young Charlie,
and his half-brother Spencer Hawks. To help support the family, Chaplin danced
and performed in the streets for change.
Chaplin’s skills as a performer caused him to be noticed by vaudevillian troupes. In
1898, at the age of nine, he began to tour with a clog-dancing troupe, the Eight
Lancashire Lads. Chaplin’s talents at improvisation and pantomime opened doors to a
number of minor roles in theatrical productions. He returned to vaudeville in 1906,
joining Casey’s Circus, a troupe that specialized in impersonating prominent personal-
ities of the day. By 1907, Chaplin was brought to the attention of Fred Karno, the
founder and leader of England’s most famous pantomime troupe. Spencer, already a
member of Karno’s Troup, lobbied hard to get his brother Charlie a spot in the group.
Mentored by Karno, Chaplin soon emerged as a featured player of the troupe. With the
Karno Troup, he toured England, Paris, and, later, the United States, in 1910 and 1913.
Praised by critics, he gained the attention of Mack Sennett, founder of the Keystone Film
Studio. Chaplin, seeking to expand his career beyond the stage, signed with Keystone in
May 1913. After the release of his first film in February 1914, Making a Living, he appeared
in 33 one- or two-reel comedies and one feature film for Keystone. He immersed himself in
the process of filmmaking and soon was writing and directing films for Keystone.
It was with Keystone that he created his most endearing character, the Tramp.
Unsure how to utilize Chaplin’s talents, Sennett ordered him to develop a costume
for his bit part in the film Mabel’s Strange Predicament. Donning oversized trousers
and shoes (size 14, so large they had to be worn on the wrong feet), undersized coat
and derby, a cane, and wearing a toothbrush mustache, he created an iconic figure of
the early cinema. The Tramp, or a variation of the character, was a Chaplin staple for
the next 22 years.
A number of disputes emerged between Chaplin and Keystone, primarily over
salary and artistic control. Leaving Keystone, he signed next with Essanay Studios in
November 1914. He completed 14 films for Essanay, including The Tramp (released
April 11, 1915). During his time with Essanay, his popularity continued to soar.
Known as “Chaplinitis,” his characters inspired fans to imitate their hero. Songs were
written about him, merchandise sold, and numerous impersonators emerged. Essanay,
seeking to profit from his popularity, pushed him to release more and more films.
Chaplin, however, was taking longer to finish each picture. With the end of his Essanay
contract, he signed a one-year contract with Mutual Film Corporation worth
$670,000 and that gave him complete artistic freedom. He completed 12 two-reel
films over the next year.
In June 1917, Chaplin left Mutual and signed with First National Films. First
National allowed him to produce his own films and to establish his own studio. His
studio, constructed on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, was the setting for his films
for the next 35 years. His initial First National release, A Dog’s Life, paired Chaplin’s
Tramp with the down-and-out dog Scraps. This laid the foundation for his teaming
with young Jackie Coogan in 1921’s The Kid.
It was during his time with First National that Chaplin began to use his influence
within the cinematic community to push his political agenda. With the entry of the

600
 Chaplin, Charlie

United States into World War I, he enlisted, only to fail the physical. Personally anti-
militaristic, he aided the war effort by touring with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fair-
banks on the third Liberty Bond Drive. Impressed with the support for the war that
he witnessed on the tour, he put on a uniform for the 1918 film Shoulder’s Arms, in
which his character actually captures the German Kaiser.
In 1921, Chaplin made a triumphal return to England. Scandal, however, followed.
Upon leaving the United States, he was asked his opinion of Bolshevism. His vague
comments led many in the United States to the conclusion that he was a communist
sympathizer. Upon his return to the United States, he began working for United
Artists, a production company founded by Chaplin, Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and
Pickford. It was while he was with United Artists that Chaplin produced his most
famous films, including The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times
(1936). Interestingly, even with the development of talking motion pictures, he
remained steadfast in his support of the silent film. Modern Times, however, marked
the end of his silent career, and also the retirement of his Tramp persona.
His first sound film, The Great Dictator (1940), was his most controversial. A satiri-
cal look at Hitler and Nazism, the final speech, given by Chaplin’s character, led many
critics to believe his sentiments lay with communism and the Soviet Union. His next
film, Monsieur Verdoux (1947), continued to stir up controversy and was banned in
parts of the United States.
Controversy and scandal finally caught up with Chaplin. Traveling to England with
his family, he was informed in September 1952 that he could not return to the United
States until he addressed questions concerning his political affiliations. He decided to
remain in exile in Switzerland, returning to the United States only once more, in
1972, to receive a special Academy Award for his contribution to the cinema. Overseas,
he produced and starred in two more films, the last being A Countess from Hong Kong
in 1966. Chaplin died on December 25, 1977.

Selected Filmography
A Countess from Hong Kong (1967); The Chaplin Revue (1959); A King in New York (1957); Lime-
light (1952); Monsieur Verdoux (1947); The Great Dictator (1940); Modern Times (1936); City Lights
(1931); The Circus (1928); The Gold Rush (1925); A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923); The
Pilgrim (1923); Pay Day (1922); Nice and Friendly (1922); The Idle Class (1921); The Kid (1921); A
Day’s Pleasure (1919); Sunnyside (1919); The Professor (1919); Shoulder Arms (1918)

References
Gehring, Wes D. Charlie Chaplin A Bio-Bibliography. Westport: Greenwood, 1983.
Harness, Kyp. The Art of Charlie Chaplin: A Film-by-Film Analysis. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2008.
Milton, Joyce. Tramp The Life of Charlie Chaplin. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Smith, Julian. Chaplin. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
—Robert W. Malick

601
Chayefsky, Paddy

CHAYEFSKY, PADDY. One of the most distinguished dialogue writers in American

cinema, Sydney “Paddy” Chayefsky was a multimedia talent, writing for film, radio, tele-
vision, and the Broadway stage. Born on January 29, 1923, to Jewish parents in the
Bronx, New York, Chayefsky played semiprofessional football and studied accounting
and languages in college. Serving in World War II until a landmine explosion cut his army
career short and earned him a Purple Heart, Chayefsky gained the nickname “Paddy” as a
result of his attempts to avoid kitchen duty by attending Catholic mass. While recovering
from his injuries in London, Chayefsky began writing the musical No T.O. for Love
with fellow patient and composer Jimmy Livingston. Actor Curt Conway discovered
Chayefsky’s script and produced it as a successful Special Services show in London and
Paris, with Chayefsky as a cast member. The show ultimately led to Chayefsky spending
the rest of his military career working on the war documentary The True Glory.
After a brief stint working in his uncle’s print shop, Chayefsky made his first
attempt at a writing career; he was initially disappointed, however, suffering through
a botched move to Hollywood and a brief tenure writing radio gags for Robert Q.
Lewis. Chayefsky eventually got his career on track, though, taking on writing assign-
ments adapting plays for radio and television. During his television career, he wrote
over a dozen teleplays, some of which—Printer’s Measure (1953), Middle of the Night
(1954), and The Catered Affair (1955), for example—demonstrated how thoroughly
he had been influenced by growing up in a multiethnic, immigrant Bronx neighbor-
hood. Garnering critical acclaim for his work, he became the first television writer to
have his collected teleplays published. Of his numerous television successes, his 1953
teleplay for Marty—an endearing story about a lonely, lovelorn 34-year-old Bronx
butcher—led to a Hollywood contract.
Learning from his earlier Hollywood failures, Chayefsky asked for an unprec-
edented contract that gave him full creative control over the screenplay for Marty
(1954), a decision that led to him taking $13,000 and 5 percent of the film’s net profit
rather than the customary six-figure fee. Enlisting Delbert Mann to direct and Ernest
Borgnine to play the lead, Chayefsky embarked on a thorough preproduction rehearsal
schedule that sharply contrasted with standard practices in studio film production.
Despite his unorthodox methods—or perhaps as a result of them—Marty earned
him his first Academy Award for screen writing; the film also won Oscars for Best Pic-
ture, Best Actor, and Best Director.
In the wake of Marty’s success, Chayefsky adapted his teleplays The Bachelor Party
(1957) and Middle of the Night (1959) as feature film screenplays and sold The Catered
Affair (1956) to MGM. Over Chayefsky’s mild objections, the studio hired Gore Vidal
to adapt the latter teleplay. He now focused his attention on The Goddess (1958),
a John Cromwell film loosely based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Though he
received an Academy Award nomination for his work on this picture, it did not prove
to be as critically or financially successful as Marty.
After The Goddess and Middle of the Night, Chayefsky’s career underwent a change,
as his writing shifted away from working-class realism toward an aesthetic rooted
in technical jargon and social satire. Adapting William Bradford Huie’s novel The
Americanization of Emily (1964) for Arthur Hiller, he turned his source material into

602
 Coen, Joel and Ethan

a World War II satire, set in London, that explored notions of bravery and nationalism
and led to Production Code clashes over the film’s explicit sexuality and nudity. After
adapting the Gold Rush musical Paint Your Wagon (1969) for his friend Joshua Logan,
he reteamed with Hiller to write the script for The Hospital (1971). The biting critique
of the dehumanization of urban medical centers and the failure of 1960s-style counter-
culture earned Chayefsky his second Academy Award.
His most enduring work was the screenplay he wrote for Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film
Network. Interestingly, the original screenplay, concerning “the mad prophet of the air-
waves” Howard Beale (Peter Finch) and his exploitation by prophet-hungry media
executives, took direct aim at the industry that gave Chayefsky his start. Lumet slightly
altered his own omniscient narrative format to accommodate Chayefsky’s stylized
voice-overs, and Network won Chayefsky his third Academy Award. His final screen-
play was an adaptation of his own novel Altered States (1980); the writer clashed vio-
lently with director Ken Russell, reaching the point where he demanded that his
name be removed from the final credits.
Despite his film success, Chayefsky asserted that the “theater was his homeground,” and
he worked steadily on Broadway, adapting Middle of the Night to the stage and creating
original works such as The Tenth Man and Gideon while collaborating with iconic figures
such as Elia Kazan, Joshua Logan, and Arthur Miller. He also became politically active
in the 1970s—a move that was reflected in his writing—founding Writers and Artists
for Peace in the Middle East and serving as a delegate to the International Conference
on Soviet Jewry. Chayefsky died from an unspecified form of cancer on August 1, 1981.

Selected Filmography
Altered States (1980); Network (1976); The Hospital (1971); Paint Your Wagon (1969); The
Americanization of Emily (1964); Middle of the Night (1959); The Goddess (1958); The Bachelor
Party (1957); Marty (1955); As Young as You Feel (1951); The True Glory (1945)

References
Bowles, Stephen E. Sidney Lumet: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.
Cagle, Chris. “Two Modes of Prestige Film.” Screen 48(3), Autumn 2007: 291–311.
Clum, John M. Paddy Chayefsky. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
New Dramatists Alumni Publication Committee. Broadway’s Fabulous Fifties: How the Play-
makers Made It Happen. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002.

—Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield

COEN, JOEL AND ETHAN. Joel and Ethan Coen (born November 29, 1954, and
September 21, 1957, respectively, in Minneapolis) have written and directed more
than a dozen films that reflect modern American culture on a number of levels. Span-
ning a range of genres, the brothers are difficult to categorize. Essentially, their films fit
into three broad categories: heartland crime thrillers, Great Depression America, and
slapstick class commentary.

603
Coen, Joel and Ethan

Apart from their early script

for Sam Raimi’s Crimewave and
Ethan’s role as co-writer on two
small pieces, the Coen brothers
have directed all of their scripts.
Beginning with their directorial
debut, Blood Simple (1984), cul-
ture and landscape are revealed
as major influences on charac-
ters. The first of their heartland
crime thrillers, this picture sets
an eerily calm backdrop for the
grim analysis of adultery and
murder. The Coen brothers
would revisit the vast Texas sce-
nery again in No Country for
Old Men. Featuring blackmail
and a love affair that leads to
murder, The Man Who Wasn’t
There (2001) shares plot similar-
ities with Blood Simple. Shot in
Screenwriters, producers, and directors, brothers Ethan (left) black and white and set in 1959
and Joel Coen. (AP/Wide World Photos) Santa Rosa, it does differ from
the Coen brothers’ first feature,
as it includes humorous caricatures that offset the dark, somber plot.
Perhaps the brothers’ most successful heartland picture to date is No Country for Old
Men (2007). This picture follows a disturbed bounty hunter and the police officer
tracking him across West Texas in 1980. Landscape is a key factor, not only as an arena
but also as a representation of the Old West, where cowboys rule. This picture earned
Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing, and Best Supporting Actor. Shar-
ing sinister characters with No Country for Old Men, Fargo (1996) employs the amus-
ing dialect of the Eskimo-hat-wearing citizens of Fargo, North Dakota. Unlike the
superficial characters seen in the Coen brothers’ slapstick social commentaries, Fargo
and No Country for Old Men explore shadowy criminal personalities juxtaposed with
down-home police officers. Fargo became famous not only for its shocking conclusion,
but also for the unusual timbre and the humorous turns of phrase that characterized
the speech of the picture’s characters. The film garnered Oscars for Best Writing and
Best Actress for Frances McDormand.
In their early work, the Coen brothers wrote and directed two Great Depression
period pieces, beginning with Miller’s Crossing (1990). This Prohibition-era picture
follows gang lieutenant Tom Regan as he warily attempts to reconcile a mob war.
With careful depictions of bossism and mafia warfare, the film offers a vivid por-
trayal of crime culture in 1930s America. Interestingly, the Coens wrote Barton Fink
(1991), a story about a Hollywood golden age screenwriter with writer’s block, while

604
 Coen, Joel and Ethan

they themselves were struggling with the story for Miller’s Crossing. Set in 1941, it is
full of references to classic American film and literature, including loose representa-
tions of writers William Faulkner and Clifford Odets.
Later in their careers, the brothers returned to the Great Depression with O Brother,
Where Art Thou? (2000). Based on Homer’s Odyssey, this Mississippi travelogue follows
three escaped convicts as they weave their way in and out of key moments in American
history. The trio encounters crooked politicians, a one-eyed Bible salesman, the KKK,
and George “Babyface” Nelson. As with The Ladykillers (2004), which is also set in
Mississippi, O Brother Where Art Thou? incorporates bluegrass, gospel, blues, and country
music to help paint a portrait of an era and a culture.
While they have enjoyed more critical success with heartland crime thrillers like
Fargo and No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers are well known for their love
of screwball and slapstick comedies. The first of these projects was Raising Arizona
(1987). Set in Tempe, Arizona, the film depicts the desert as a mirror of the dull, empty
lives of a bumbling petty criminal and his doe-eyed wife. This lower-class couple is
envious of the life of a wealthy, obnoxious car salesman. The salesman, they decide,
not only has too much money but more than enough children. They decide to kidnap
his toddler, resulting in a humorous but cautionary look at class conflict. This commen-
tary is expanded in The Big Lebowski (1998), which follows “The Dude” as he stumbles,
in a perversely charming way, through the role of a private investigator in early 1990s
Los Angeles.
While the Coen brothers touched upon corporate greed in Raising Arizona, Barton
Fink, and The Big Lebowski, this critique took full shape with the metropolitan fantasy
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). The film follows a simple-minded mail clerk as he falls
backwards into the role of CEO of the corporate giant Hudsucker Industries. A scath-
ing portrayal of fat cats duping stockholders, The Hudsucker Proxy sets the tone for
future slapstick class commentaries Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and Burn after Reading
(2008). In Intolerable Cruelty, the Coen brothers characterize American stereotypes in
a higher economic class than Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. The main charac-
ter is a dim but successful divorce attorney, and his obsession with a vindictive, gold-
digging divorcée costs him dearly. Intolerable Cruelty places silly people in high places,
and assigns each wealthy fool a metaphorical plank from which to jump as the compul-
sory murder plot comes tragically undone.
Burn after Reading accomplishes a similar critique, but this outlandish vision of
modern urban America adds a more diverse selection of pay grades. Adultery and
financial tensions abound among personal trainers, CIA officials, a treasury agent,
and a pediatrician. And, as usual with the Coen brothers, the punishment is death.
This trend is perhaps their most consistent and effective, contributing to their com-
mentary on the social circles they explore. With strange and shocking depictions of
past and present American lifestyles, the films of the Coen brothers offer us alternative
and penetrating views of our not-so-everyday lives.
See also: Fargo; No Country for Old Men

605
Colbert, Claudette

Selected Filmography
True Grit (2010); A Serious Man (2009); Burn after Reading (2008); No Country for Old Men
(2007); The Ladykillers (2004); Intolerable Cruelty (2003); The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001);
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000); The Big Lebowski (1998); Fargo (1996); The Hudsucker
Proxy (1994); Barton Fink (1991); Raising Arizona (1987); Blood Simple (1984)

References
Cheshire, Ellen, and John Ashbrook. Joel and Ethan Coen. Harpenden, UK: Pocket Essentials,
2005.
Coen, Joel and Ethan Coen. Blood Simple. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988.
The Internet Movie Database. “Ethan Coen.” http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001053/.
The Internet Movie Database. “Joel Coen.” http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001054/.
Luhr, William, ed. The Coen Brothers’ Fargo. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2004.
—Adam Dean

COLBERT, CLAUDETTE. Born in Paris on September 13, 1903, Claudette Colbert

was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actresses in the 1930s. She began her screen
career in 1927, playing Mary in Frank Capra’s For the Love of Mike, her only silent
film. She made 35 movies in the 1930s and 17 in the 1940s, winning an Oscar in
1935 for It Happened One Night. Between 1950 and 1990, she made twelve films
and appeared in numerous TV series, winning a Golden Globe in 1988 for The
Two Mrs. Grenvilles, her last film. In 1934, she stared in three films nominated for
Best Picture: Cleopatra, Imitation of Life, and It Happened One Night. In addition
to acting in film, Colbert also appeared on the stage between 1919 and 1985; she
was nominated for a Tony in 1958 for her role in The Marriage Go-Round.
Directed by Capra, It Happened One Night (1934) showcased Colbert’s comedic
talent. Paired with Clark Gable, Colbert plays Ellie Andrews, a rebellious socialite
who is engaged to be married to a fortune hunter her father cannot abide. She
escapes her father’s control by literally jumping ship (the family yacht) in Miami.
A madcap romance ensues between Ellie and Peter Warne (Gable), a reporter she
meets on the bus to New York, where she plans to reunite with her husband. The
risqué hitchhiking scene in which Colbert lifts the hem of her dress to attract a pass-
ing motorist after she and Gable are stranded by the side of the road would have
been impossible under MPAA scrutiny had that agency enforced 1930 production
codes. Indeed, Colbert herself protested the unladylike display of her lower extrem-
ity, but when confronted with the chorus girl brought in to double for her, she
reportedly said, “Get her out of here. I’ll do it. That’s not my leg!” At the time of
its release, a New York Times movie review touted It Happened One Night as offering
“a welter of improbable incidents” and claimed that “these hectic doings serve to
generate plenty of laughter.” According to the reviewer, “Colbert [gives] an engaging
and lively performance” (Hall, 1934).

606
 Coppola, Francis Ford

Nominated in 1945 for the Best Actress Oscar for Since You Went Away (1944),
Colbert lost to Ingrid Bergman, who won for her role in Gaslight; nevertheless, this is
arguably Colbert’s most memorable film. In a dramatic role, rather than the comedic
ones in which she was usually cast, Colbert plays Anne Hilton, a soldier’s wife who
keeps things together on the home front (overseeing two children, a maid, a taciturn
elderly colonel, a pseudo uncle, and a bulldog) while waiting for her husband’s return.
Confronting the harsh realities of war (Anne’s husband is reported missing and her
oldest daughter’s fiancé is killed in battle), Colbert offers audiences reassurance
through her strength and wisdom, passion and dignity. Originally reluctant to play
the role of the mother of teenage daughters, Colbert agreed after Hedda Hopper and
David O. Selznick persuaded her it was an important part. As it turned out, she was
so convincing in the role that in 2006, critics declared her to be the “perfect choice
to embody America’s homeland spirit during WWII” (Sarvady, 2006).
Returning to the screen after a 25-year absence, Colbert took on the role of Alice
Grenville, widowed mother-in-law of Ann (Ann-Margret), the social-climbing chorus girl
who marries (and murders) Alice’s son William, in the TV drama The Two Mrs. Grenvilles
(1987). “While much is lost” in this adaptation of Dominick Dunne’s 1985 novel, it is “an
intriguing portrait of the rich and powerful closing ranks to protect themselves from out-
siders. The well-connected Alice knows precisely which political and journalistic buttons
to push when favors are needed” (O’Connor). Like Alice Grenville, Colbert knew how
to push buttons, winning the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Sup-
porting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV at the age of 85.
After suffering a series of strokes, Colbert died in Speightstown, Barbados, on
July 30, 1996.

References
“Biography for Claudette Colbert.” Turner Classic Movies, 2009. Available at http://
www.tcm.com.
Hall, Mordaunt. “It Happened One Night (1934): Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in a
Merry Jaunt from Miami to New York.” New York Times, February 23, 1934: 23. Available
at http://movies.nytimes.com.
O’Connor, John. “ ‘The Two Mrs. Grenvilles’ on NBC.” February 6, 1987: 30. Available at
http://movies.nytimes.com.
Pace, Eric. “Claudette Colbert, Unflappable Heroine of Screwball Comedies, Is Dead at 92.”
New York Times, July 31, 1996: D 26. Available at http://movies.nytimes.com.
Sarvady, Andrea, et al. “Claudette Colbert.” In Leading Ladies: The 50 Most Unforgettable
Actresses of the Studio Era. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2006.
—Robin L. Cadwallader

COPPOLA, FRANCIS FORD. Francis Ford Coppola is one of the few Hollywood
directors to have earned auteur status. His reputation has largely been built on the
foundation of a number of films that he directed and wrote in the 1970s, particularly
the first two Godfather films and Apocalypse Now (1979).

607
Coppola, Francis Ford

Coppola was born in Detroit

on April 7, 1939, although he
grew up in Queens, New York.
He became interested in theater
while recovering from polio when
he was 10 and began writing plays
six years later. While attending
Hofstra University, he directed
and wrote scripts for stage pro-
ductions that were performed by
the institution’s student theater
group. After discovering the work
of Russian filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein, Coppola shifted his
focus to the cinema. Finishing
his BA in 1960, Coppola contin-
ued his studies at UCLA and soon
began working with the producer
and director Roger Corman.
Among Coppola’s responsibilities
while working with Corman was
helping to prepare the script for
the English version of the Russian
film Nebo zowet (1959), which
appeared in the United States as
Battle beyond the Sun (1963), and
serving as the sound engineer on
The Young Racers (1963). He was
Director Francis Ford Coppola arrives for the screening of the also given the chance to direct his
film Marie-Antoinette, in Cannes, on Wednesday, May 24, own film, the horror flick Demen-
2006. (AP/Wide World Photos) tia 13 (1963), while in Ireland
working on The Young Racers.
Coppola then entered the screenplay for Pilma, Pilma in the competition for the
UCLA Samuel Goldwyn Award and, upon winning, was hired to write for Seven Arts.
Leaving UCLA, he wrote a number of scripts over the next few years. None of them
made it to the screen, at least as he had conceived them, and he was fired, along with
Gore Vidal, for the disaster Is Paris Burning? (1966). Coppola’s big break came with
You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), a widely praised film that he wrote and directed and that
UCLA accepted as his master’s thesis in 1968. He would go on to direct Finian’s Rain-
bow (1968) and The Rain People (1969), which was sound-mixed at American Zoe-
trope, an independent production house that Coppola set up in San Francisco in
order to gain some freedom from the major studios. He also earned accolades at this
time for his studio work and won an Oscar for his part in crafting the script for Twen-
tieth Century-Fox’s Patton (1970).

608
 Coppola, Francis Ford

The first film entirely produced by Zoetrope was George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971), a
futuristic tale that nearly broke the company. The follow-up was Coppola’s masterpiece,
The Godfather (1972). Based on Mario Puzo’s best-selling Mafia novel of the same name,
The Godfather was co-scripted by Puzo and Coppola. The film turned Coppola into a
legend, stabilized Zoetrope, and won a slew of Oscars, including those for Best Picture,
Best Actor for Marlon Brando, and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another
Medium. Coppola went on to release The Conversation in 1974—a mystery that he pro-
duced, wrote, and directed, and that won the Grand Prix International prize at the
Cannes Film Festival—and The Godfather, Part II, once again writing the screenplay with
Puzo. Winning Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Screenplay Based on Material
from Another Medium, as its predecessor had, The Godfather, Part II also earned Coppola
the Oscar for Best Director. Significantly, he would not release another film for five years,
largely due to turmoil on the set of Apocalypse Now, the Vietnam War epic adapted from
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) that Coppola directed, produced, and
co-wrote, and for which he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Soon after finishing Apocalypse, Coppola produced the children’s movie The Black
Stallion (1979) and teamed up with George Lucas to serve as executive producer on
Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980). Over the following years, Coppola directed
and/or wrote a number of mostly unmemorable films, including One from the Heart
(1982), The Escape Artist (1982), Hammett (1983), The Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish
(1983), The Cotton Club (1984), and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985). He
seemed to get back on track with Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), a story about a house-
wife in her forties who travels back to the end of her high school senior year, but this
film was followed by another string of less-than-successful projects, including Gardens
of Stone (1987) and the biopic Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988).
By the end of the 1980s, Coppola, after having refused to do so for years, agreed to
make a third Godfather film, hoping to inject needed funds into his struggling produc-
tion company. He again co-wrote the screenplay with Puzo and directed, but
Godfather, Part III (1990) proved less successful than the previous two films, earning
only the disdain of the critics and an adequate audience. Coppola then directed Drac-
ula (1992), which received numerous negative reviews but found success at the box
office, as the public responded to the visually stunning retelling of the vampire story.
Although Coppola’s next directorial efforts—the comedy Jack (1996) and John
Grisham’s The Rainmaker (1997), for which he wrote the script—extended Dracula’s
success, his Youth without Youth (2007), another film that he wrote and directed,
proved to be his poorest-performing picture, grossing less than $250,000 domestically.
Even though his record as a director has been spotty since the halcyon days of the
1970s, the respect that Coppola has earned in the film industry has allowed him to
continue to make films with studio support.

Selected Filmography
Tetro (2009); Youth without Youth (2007); The Rainmaker (1997); Jack (1996); Dracula (1992);
The Godfather: Part III (1990); Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988); Gardens of Stone

609
Corman, Roger

(1987); Peggy Sue Got Married (1986); The Cotton Club (1984); Rumble Fish (1983); The Out-
siders (1983); One from the Heart (1982); Apocalypse Now (1979); The Godfather: Part II (1974);
The Conversation (1974); The Godfather (1972); The Rain People (1969); Finian’s Rainbow
(1968); You’re a Big Boy Now (1966); Dementia 13 (1963); The Bellboy and the Playgirls
(1962); Battle beyond the Sun (1960)

References
Cowie, Peter. Coppola: A Biography. New York: Da Capo, 1994.
Phillips, Gene D., and Walter Murch. Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
Phillips, Gene D., and Rodney Hill, eds. Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2004.

—Albert Rolls

CORMAN, ROGER. Known in the film industry as “King of the B-movie,” Roger
Corman has been working as a producer and director since the 1950s. His longevity is
the result of his ability to balance filmmaking’s creative aspects with the financial bot-
tom line. Although he has worked primarily in the straight-to-video/DVD market for
some time, his influence is as far-reaching and intensely felt as ever.
Corman was born in Detroit to Ann and William Corman, on April 5, 1926.
William, an engineer, was a frugal man who saved enough to retire at 43 and move
his family to California. Like his father, Roger also studied engineering (at Stanford),
but wanted a career in Hollywood. After graduating, he took several jobs until he
was able to parlay a position as a literary agent into film work (McGee, 1996).
His rise to prominence is inseparable from that of American International Pictures.
With the release of The Fast and the Furious (1954), for which he provided the story
and produced, Corman became one of the company’s in-house directors churning out
low-budget, teen-oriented genre pictures throughout the 1950s and ’60s. While most
major studios were struggling to bring in audiences after the advent of television,
Corman and AIP were able to attract young, drive-in theater audiences by feeding them
a steady diet of horror and science fiction fare (Palmer, Del Valle, and Biodrowski, 1998).
The traits of determination and frugality that Corman inherited from his father
made him an ideal fit for AIP, which was always interested in getting the most bang
for its buck—and no one was better at making “art” out of “schlock” than Roger
Corman. Working hyper-efficiently with eager young talent, he was almost always able
to bring his films in on time, and sometimes even under budget (Corman 1990).
One-week shoots, single takes, and even recycled sets and footage were all common-
place with Corman films. The overt social commentary, The Intruder (1962), was an
exception to his usual approach; he even put up his own money for lack of other
financing. The Twilight Zone–style parable about American racism starred a young
William Shatner and was shot on location in Missouri under threat of violence from
locals. Despite positive critical reception, the film failed at the box office. It remains
one of Corman’s most personal and palatable films.

610
 Corman, Roger

Although a progressive sensibility is evident in many of Corman’s films, he is still

most recognized for lowbrow pictures such as The Day the World Ended, Little Shop
of Horrors, and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations that featured Vincent Price. He did,
however, also direct two serious examinations of ’60s counterculture for AIP before
leaving the company over editorial conflicts. The Wild Angels (1966), a nihilistic depic-
tion of life among a motorcycle gang, displayed graphic violence and sexuality. The
film offered clear evidence of the loosening of the Production Code during the ’60s,
a phenomenon also signaled by the release of studio pictures such as Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf ? (1966) and The Graduate (1967) (Williams, 2008). Significantly,
The Wild Angels starred Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Corman’s The Trip (1967),
one of the first American films to address explicitly LSD use, was written by Jack
Nicholson and also featured Fonda and Dennis Hopper; all three counterculture icons
would appear in the cult classic Easy Rider (1967).
Corman directed the gangster film The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1971) for
Twentieth Century-Fox, but found his style incompatible with big-studio filmmaking.
He formed his own production company, New World Pictures, in 1971. Although he
did direct sporadically between the 1970s and the 1990s, most of his attention over the
past 40 years has been focused on the nearly 400 films he has produced. Despite this
prodigious achievement, Corman’s greatest legacy may still turn out to be how influen-
tial he was in launching the careers of such important American directors as Martin
Scorsese, Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, and
Peter Bogdanovich (Silver and Ursini, 2006).

Selected Filmography
Frankenstein Unbound (1990); Battle Beyond the Stars (1980); Deathsport (1978); Von Richthofen
and Brown (1971); Gas! . . . (1970); Bloody Mama (1970); The Trip (1967); The St. Valentine’s
Day Massacre (1967); The Wild Angels (1966); The Tomb of Ligeia (1964); The Secret Invasion
(1964); The Masque of the Red Death (1964); The Terror (1963); The Raven (1963); Tower of
London (1962); Tales of Terror (1962); Premature Burial (1962); Pit and the Pendulum (1961);
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960); House of Usher (1960); A Bucket of Blood (1959); Machine-
Gun Kelly (1958); Gunslinger (1956); Day the World Ended (1955); Apache Woman (1955); Five
Guns West (1955); Swamp Women (1955)

References
Corman, Roger. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. New York:
Random House, 1990.
McGee, Mark Thomas. Faster and Furiouser: The Revised and Fattened Fable of American
International Pictures. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996.
Palmer, Randy, David Del Valle, and Steve Biodrowski. “Invasion of the Monster Movie
Moguls: An Overview of American International Pictures—Part One.” Cinefantastique 30,
1998: 78–89.
Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. Roger Corman: Metaphysics on a Shoestring. Los Angeles: Silman-
James Press, 2006.

611
Costner, Kevin

Will, David, et al., eds. Roger Corman. Cambridge: Edinburgh Film Festival in Association with
Cinema magazine, 1970.
Williams, Linda. Screening Sex. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
—Mikal Gaines

COSTNER, KEVIN. Kevin Costner has appeared in over 40 movies, and, in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, became one of the film industry’s biggest box-office draws.
Interestingly, although he has been disparaged by film critics for his lack of talent as an
actor, he has remained widely popular with film audiences. Critics have been much
kinder in regard to his abilities as a director, however, and Costner is considered by
many to be an artist behind the camera.
Born in Lynwood, California, on January 18, 1955, Costner was not initially drawn
to a career in acting. A sports star in high school, he turned down a basketball scholar-
ship to play baseball at California State University, Fullerton, where he majored in
business. It was only on a chance meeting in an airplane with Richard Burton that
Costner decided to quit his job and move to Hollywood. He found a few bit parts in
the early 1980s, eventually winning the role of Alex in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill
(1983). Unfortunately for Costner, his scenes were left on the cutting-room floor (he
appears as the corpse at the beginning of the film). He made an impression on Kasdan,
however, and two years later the director cast him in his western Silverado (1985).
Costner played Jake, the wild and impulsive younger brother of the Scott Glenn char-
acter, Emmett. The film did well at the box office, and audiences liked the Costner
character; he also appeared in two other films released in 1985: American Flyers and
Fandango. The films that followed in the 1980s, The Untouchables (1987) and No
Way Out (1987), would solidify the actor’s popularity with audiences. In the former,
written by David Mamet, Costner was cast as federal agent Elliot Ness, opposite Sean
Connery and Robert De Niro; in the latter film, a military thriller, he stars as a young
naval officer wrongfully accused of murder.
As the 1980s came to a close, Costner went on to make two sports films that did
extremely well at the box office, eventually becoming cult classics. The first was Bull
Durham (1988), a romantic comedy, with Susan Sarandon, about an aging minor
league baseball player and his exploits with a pitching phenom, played by Tim
Robbins. (Sarandon and Robbins met and fell in love on the set of Bull Durham
although they never married, they lived together for years before finally ending their
romantic relationship). The second film was an adaptation of W. P. Kinsella’s novel
Shoeless Joe entitled Field of Dreams (1989). In this picture, Ray Kinsella, played by
Costner, hears voices that prompt him to build a baseball field on his Iowa farm in order
to resurrect the ghosts of the game’s past, including his own deceased father. Costner
played a baseball veteran twice more, in For Love of the Game (1999) and The Upside of
Anger (2005), and a golf-pro in Tin Cup (1996).
In 1990, Costner directed his masterpiece, the epic western Dances with Wolves, a
tale of a Civil War lieutenant who is stationed on the American frontier and encounters
a tribe of Sioux Indians. While it has been criticized as overly romantic, idealizing the

612
 Costner, Kevin

Sioux or perhaps even the land-

scape itself, the film, which
depicts the beauty of Native
American life and the tragedy of
white expansionism, served as an
important cinematic step toward
deconstructing traditional west-
erns and their Eurocentric sen-
sibilities. Dances with Wolves won
seven Academy Awards, includ-
ing Best Picture and Best Direc-
tor. Costner would go on to
work on two other epics, the
futuristic pictures Waterworld
(1995) and The Postman (1997),
the latter directed by Costner,
both of which were savaged by
critics and failed miserably at the
box office. Proving that he was
still popular with audiences,
though, Costner starred in such
films as JFK (1991), The Body-
guard (1992), Clint Eastwood’s
A Perfect World (1993), and Thir-
teen Days in October, all of which
A fan favorite, Kevin Costner has starred in such popular
did well commercially. Although
films as Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, and JFK. (AP/Wide
he seems to struggle with com- World Photos)
plex roles, such as those he was
required to play in JFK and Thirteen Days in October, Costner appears much better
suited to roles in which he plays laconic characters, such as those in The Bodyguard
and A Perfect World.
Despite some critical and commercial decline in recent years, Costner has contin-
ued to show bright spots, such as his portrayal of hired gun Charley Waite in the
western Open Range (2003), which he directed. He also scored with audiences playing
the terse, methodical, antihero serial killer in Mr. Brooks (2007).

Selected Filmography
Mr. Brooks (2007); The Guardian (2006); The Upside of Anger (2005); Open Range (2003); Dragon-
fly (2002); 3000 Miles to Graceland (2001); Thirteen Days (2000); For Love of the Game (1999); Mes-
sage in a Bottle (1999); The Postman (1997); Tin Cup (1996); Waterworld (1995); The War (1994);
Wyatt Earp (1994); A Perfect World (1993); The Bodyguard (1992); JFK (1991); Robin Hood: Prince
of Thieves (1991); Dances with Wolves (1990); Field of Dreams (1989); The Gunrunner (1989); Bull
Durham (1988); No Way Out (1987); The Untouchables (1987); Silverado (1985)

613
Cukor, George

References
Caddies, Kelvin. Kevin Costner: Prince of Hollywood. London: Plexus, 1995.
Castillo, Edward D. Review of Dances with Wolves by Kevin Costner and Jim Wilson. Film
Quarterly 44(4), Summer 1991: 14–23.
Klein, Edward. “Costner in Control.” Vanity Fair, January 1992: 72–77, 131–34.
Wright, Adrian. Kevin Costner: A Life on Film. London: Time Warner, 1992.
—K. A. Wisniewski

CUKOR, GEORGE. George Cukor was a Hollywood director from 1930 to 1981.
Considered Hollywood’s quintessential actor’s director, he was also known as
Hollywood’s quintessential “woman’s director,” a reference to the fact that he was
especially prized by many of Hollywood’s leading actresses and also to his open (at least
in Hollywood) homosexuality. With a remarkable number of classic pictures to his
credit—such as Dinner at Eight (1933), Camille (1936), The Women (1939), The
Philadelphia Story (1940), and My Fair Lady (1964)—Cukor earned his reputation as
a filmmaker who confronted American attitudes toward class and gender differences
while maintaining an air of sophistication, wit, and urbanity.
Of Hungarian extraction, George Dewey Cukor was born in New York City on
July 7, 1899. From 1920 to 1929, he worked extensively in the New York theater com-
munity, directing original productions of works such as The Great Gatsby (1925) and
Gypsy (1929) on Broadway. When sound technology took over the movies in the late
1920s, Hollywood looked to Broadway for artists to ease the transition, and in 1929,
Cukor was lured west to serve as a dialogue director. He soon began directing, and
beginning in 1932, released a series of films starring Constance Bennett: Rockabye,
What Price Hollywood?, and Our Betters (1933). In 1933, he adapted the George S.
Kaufman and Edna Ferber hit play Dinner at Eight, which became a classic for star Jean
Harlow. Many of Cukor’s future successes were based on theatrical material, such as
Romeo and Juliet (1936), Gaslight (1944), and A Double Life (1947).
From the early What Price Hollywood? to A Double Life, The Actress (1953), A Star is
Born (1954), and Les Girls (1957), Cukor focused much of his work on the lives of the-
atrical and cinematic performers. A Double Life is perhaps his darkest examination of
the difficulty of earning a living as a professional actor. Ronald Colman stars as an
actor unable to separate his offstage and onstage life, which results in tragedy.
Another consistent anxiety for characters in Cukor’s films results from the demands
placed on them to behave according to socially defined gender categories. In this light,
it is no coincidence that Cukor developed a close bond with star Katharine Hepburn.
He cast Hepburn in her first film role in A Bill of Divorcement (1932), about a woman
who relinquishes the possibility of marriage in favor of taking care of her father as he
descends into madness. The pair would make 10 films together over almost five deca-
des, including 1933’s huge box-office hit Little Women. Sylvia Scarlett (1936), a film
that was embraced by the Cahiers du cinéma critics in the late 1960s, tells the story
of a girl who poses as a boy. It features several scenes that suggest Sylvia’s ambiguous

614
 Cukor, George

attitude toward her gender iden-

tity, as well as the confusion that
results for the men who desire
her when she appears as “Sylves-
ter.” Adam’s Rib (1949) pits Hep-
burn against partner Spencer
Tracy in a tale of married lawyers
on opposing sides of a court case
that hinges on issues informing
the battle of the sexes. Another
Tracy/Hepburn vehicle, Pat and
Mike (1952), is a romantic
comedy about a pants-wearing
woman (Hepburn) who expertly
plays a multitude of sports. Other
Cukor films starring Hepburn
include Holiday (1938), The
Philadelphia Story, and The Corn
Is Green (1979), a made-for-
television movie about a Welsh
schoolteacher.
Cukor’s reputation for evoking
quality performances from his
actresses was not just a product
of his collaborations with Hep-
burn. He directed Greta Garbo
in one of her best films, Camille,
and worked for two years prepar-
ing (and directing a substantial Portrait of Oscar-winning film director George Cukor during
portion of ) the women-centered an interview on January 14, 1982, in Paris. (AP/Wide World
Gone with the Wind (1939); and Photos)
after being replaced on that pic-
ture by Victor Fleming (at the request of star Clark Gable), he chose to make a film
without a single male actor: The Women (1939). In the 1950s, Cukor made a succes-
sion of films starring comic talent Judy Holliday. In 1954, he drew out what is perhaps
Judy Garland’s best performance in A Star is Born. Ten years later, Cukor won an Oscar
for directing another musical, the classic My Fair Lady.
Cukor died on January 23, 1983, at his home in Los Angeles.

Selected Filmography
Rich and Famous (1981); The Blue Bird (1976); Travels with My Aunt (1972); Justine (1969); My
Fair Lady (1964); The Chapman Report (1962); Something’s Got to Give (1962); Let’s Make Love
(1960); Heller in Pink Tights (1960); Wild Is the Wind (1957); Les Girls (1957); Bhowani

615
Curtiz, Michael

Junction (1956); A Star Is Born (1954); It Should Happen to You (1954); The Actress (1953); Pat and
Mike (1952); The Marrying Kind (1952); The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951); Born Yester-
day (1950); A Life of Her Own (1950); Adam’s Rib (1949); Edward, My Son (1949); A Double Life
(1947); Winged Victory (1944); Gaslight (1944); Resistance and Ohm’s Law (1943); Keeper of the
Flame (1942); Her Cardboard Lover (1942); Two-Faced Woman (1941); A Woman’s Face (1941);
The Philadelphia Story (1940); Susan and God (1940); The Women (1939); Zaza (1938); Holiday
(1938); Camille (1936); Romeo and Juliet (1936); Sylvia Scarlett (1935); David Copperfield
(1935); Little Women (1933); Dinner at Eight (1933); Our Betters (1933); A Bill of Divorcement
(1932); What Price Hollywood? (1932); Tarnished Lady (1931); The Virtuous Sin (1930)

References
Long, Robert Emmet, ed. George Cukor: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,
2001.
McGilligan, Patrick. George Cukor: A Double Life. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1992.
Phillips, Gene. George Cukor. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

—Kyle Stevens

CURTIZ, MICHAEL. Michael Curtiz, born in Hungary on December 24, 1886, as

Manó Kertész Kaminer, immigrated to the United States in 1926, and would go on to
direct over 100 films in Hollywood. Like so many of his émigré colleagues, he brought
to Hollywood considerable experience from the European film industry. Curtiz had
worked sparingly in Hungary and Denmark in the 1910s, but spent the bulk of his
time working in Austria for Sascha Films, directing more than 20 films from 1919 to
1926. Moon of Israel (1924) was noticed by Jack Warner, who recruited Curtiz to
remake the film for Warner Bros. as Noah’s Ark (1928).
From 1926 to 1954, Curtiz directed 88 films for Warner Bros., “probably a record
for one man’s direction of features at a single studio” (Meyer 1978). Highlights of his
Warner Bros. work include a series of action-adventure films starring Errol Flynn
and Olivia de Havilland in the mid- to late 1930s, most notably The Adventures of
Robin Hood (1938); the George M. Cohan biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy (1941), which
netted James Cagney his only Academy Award; Joan Crawford’s comeback film Mil-
dred Pierce (1945); and Casablanca (1942), the Hollywood classic that many have
described as an “accidental masterpiece.”
Curtiz’s most popular pictures, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca, exploit a timely
connection to World War II. In both films, a struggle between the conflicting demands
of individual interest and national service is dramatized. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, a café
owner in the colonial city, claims no interest in politics—“I stick my neck out for nobody,”
he repeatedly declares. The selfishness and bravado of Yankee’s Cohan as a young prodigy
threatens to undermine his career. By the end, though, the star protagonists come down
firmly on the side of sacrifice for the country. Rick forgoes his personal interests for the
greater good when he helps his love interest, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), to flee safely with Resis-
tance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), while Cohan overcomes his self-aggrandizing
tendencies to pen patriotic songs that served the national morale in both World Wars.

616
 Curtiz, Michael

Curtiz was also the most prolific director of the musical biopic, popular studio fare
during the 1940s and ’50s. During his time with Warner Bros., in addition to Yankee
Doodle Dandy, Curtiz directed Cary Grant as a straight Cole Porter in Night and Day
(1946) and Kirk Douglas as a jazz prodigy resembling Bix Beiderbecke in Young
Man with a Horn (1950). He also remade The Jazz Singer in 1952 and directed The
Helen Morgan Story in 1957.
The fact that the musical biopic is considered more a producer’s than a director’s
genre fits Curtiz’s reputation as a cooperative studio-era director. As opposed to many
of his more difficult contemporaries, Curtiz welcomed the collaborative efficiency of
studio-era filmmaking, ceding creative control to producers and other technical staff
whenever necessary. After his relationship with Warner Bros. disintegrated in the
mid-1950s, Curtiz, characteristic of this phase of Hollywood history, worked accord-
ing to the “package-unit” system, by “short-term film-by-film arrangement” (Bordwell,
Staiger, and Thompson, 1985). He would make 15 more films for a variety of studios
before he died of cancer on April 10, 1962, but found the new, more star-driven Holly-
wood less conducive to quality filmmaking than the studio era. In an interview during
this period, Curtiz lamented the state of his industry, complaining that the greed of
“unions and stars” was “destroying the wonderful machine that was—and still is—
Hollywood” (Meyer, 1978, 101).

Selected Filmography
The Comancheros (1961); Francis of Assisi (1961); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960);
A Breath of Scandal (1960); The Man in the Net (1959); The Hangman (1959); King Creole
(1958); The Proud Rebel (1958); The Helen Morgan Story (1957); We’re No Angels (1955);
White Christmas (1954); The Egyptian (1954); The Boy from Oklahoma (1954); Trouble along
the Way (1953); The Jazz Singer (1952); The Story of Will Rogers (1952); I’ll See You in My
Dreams (1951); Jim Thorpe—All-American (1951); Force of Arms (1951); The Breaking Point
(1950); Bright Leaf (1950); Young Man with a Horn (1950); Flamingo Road (1949); The
Unsuspected (1947); Life with Father (1947); Night and Day (1946); Mildred Pierce (1945);
Roughly Speaking (1945); Janie (1944); Passage to Marseille (1944); This Is the Army (1943);
Mission to Moscow (1943); Casablanca (1942); Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942); Captains of the
Clouds (1942); Dive Bomber (1941); The Sea Wolf (1941); Santa Fe Trail (1940); The Sea
Hawk (1940); Virginia City (1940); Four Wives (1939); Essex and Elizabeth (1939); Daughters
Courageous (1939); Dodge City (1939); Angels with Dirty Faces (1938); Four Daughters (1938);
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); Kid Galahad (1937); The Charge of the Light Brigade
(1936); The Walking Dead (1936); Captain Blood (1935); The Case of the Curious Bride
(1935); Black Fury (1935); Mandalay (1934); Female (1933); The Kennel Murder Case
(1933); Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932); Doctor X
(1932); Noah’s Ark (1928)

References
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

617
Curtiz, Michael

Harmetz, Aljean. Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca. New York: Hyperion,
1992.
Kinnard, Roy. The American Films of Michael Curtiz. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986.
Meyer, William R. Warner Brothers Directors: The Hard-Boiled, the Comic, and the Weepies. New
Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1978.
Robertson, James C. The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz. London: Routledge,
1993.

—Jesse Schlotterbeck

618
 v
D
DEMILLE, CECIL B. Cecil B. DeMille’s films resonated with audiences wrestling
with contemporary changes in 1900s American society. As one of very few producer/
directors who used silent-film-era successes to transition into a new era of sound, he
made a total of 70 movies between 1913 and 1956. DeMille’s evolution from ano-
nymity to fame was in large part propelled by his ability both to express and to ques-
tion themes within American culture. These changes, occurring within a populace
rent by contending visions of society’s present and future are embedded in each of
DeMille’s films.
Born August 12, 1881, in Ashfield, Massachusetts, DeMille enrolled at New York
City’s Academy of Dramatic Arts, becoming a moderately successful playwright. In
1913, he and his friend Jesse L. Lasky formed the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Com-
pany, and DeMille began his career as a director and producer. After producing 24
films, the Lasky company merged with Famous Players in 1916, and created a prof-
itable nine-year association that resulted in the production of 28 additional silent
pictures. Successful films such as Lasky’s The Squaw Man (1914, 1931) and The
Virginian (1914) helped to propel moving pictures into the spotlight of American cul-
ture, creating a popular audience and spurring businessmen to invest in the industry.
Perhaps most significantly for DeMille, films like The Cheat (1915), Old Wives for
New (1918), The King of Kings (1927), and The Ten Commandments (1956) addressed
the growing tension between traditional religious values and the values of a new con-
sumer culture. Boldly using high budgets, new lighting techniques, and a blend of
the sexual and the religious, DeMille earned a reputation as the “Great Showman,”
or “Master of Spectacle,” even before the advent of sound and color in filmmaking.
Astute viewers began to recognize that beneath his showmanship, however, lurked a
cinematic critique of early twentieth-century consumer culture. In The Cheat (1915),
for example, DeMille explored the fall from grace of a society woman who gambles
away Red Cross money. In religious epics such as The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Sam-
son and Delilah (1949), DeMille emphasized Christian religious values in the same
moment that he titillated audiences with nude scenes and sexual situations. The inclu-
sion of unpredictable scenes that displayed nudity, wealth, and physical desires in

619
DeMille, Cecil B.

biblical films and in Cleopatra

presented to viewers modern
moral issues clearly exposed
against the backdrop of an ancient
setting. They also benefited, how-
ever, from DeMille’s strict atten-
tion to historical detail, as
evidenced in Cleopatra and The
Ten Commandments. He believed
historical accuracy to be of the
greatest importance to a film’s
integrity, and sought to create
innovative films that creatively fit
within a historical model rather
than existing outside of historical
truth.
Often considered a great
entertainer and remembered for
“bathtub” scenes awash with sex-
ual connotation, DeMille’s
strengths and skills as an influen-
tial, thought-provoking director
have at times been overlooked.
Having won only one Academy
Award throughout his long and
Cecil B. DeMille sits on his lawn at his home in Hollywood very successful career, for The
on June 19, 1956. (AP/Wide World Photos) Greatest Show on Earth, he was
awarded three Oscars in the
1950s, almost as an afterthought
for his achievements. In the end, though, his ability to blend the past and the present
in popular and thought-provoking films made DeMille one of the most significant fig-
ures in the history of American cinema. He died on January 21, 1959, in Hollywood.

Selected Filmography
The Ten Commandments (1956); The Greatest Show on Earth (1952); Samson and Delilah
(1949); Unconquered (1947); The Story of Dr. Wassell (1944); Reap the Wild Wind (1942); Union
Pacific (1939); The Buccaneer (1938); The Plainsman (1936); The Crusades (1935); Cleopatra
(1934); Four Frightened People (1934); This Day and Age (1933); The Sign of the Cross (1932);
The Squaw Man (1931); Madam Satan (1930); Dynamite (1929); The Godless Girl (1929);
Walking Back (1928); The King of Kings (1927); The Volga Boatman (1926); The Golden Bed
(1925); Feet of Clay (1924); The Ten Commandments (1923); Adam’s Rib (1923); Manslaughter
(1922); Fool’s Paradise (1921); Why Change Your Wife? (1920); Male and Female (1919); Don’t
Change Your Husband (1919); The Squaw Man (1918); The Devil-Stone (1917); The Woman

620
 De Niro, Robert

God Forgot (1917); Joan the Woman (1916); The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1916); Temptation
(1915); The Cheat (1915); Carmen (1915); The Arab (1915); The Girl of the Golden West
(1915); The Ghost Breaker (1914); The Virginian (1914); The Squaw Man (1914)

References
Bernardi, Daniel, ed. The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Birchard, Robert S. Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2004.
Essoe, Gabe, and Raymond Lee. DeMille: The Man and His Pictures. New York: Castle, 1970.
Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994.
Louvish, Simon. Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art. New York: St. Martin’s, 2007
Ringgold, Gene, and Bodeen, DeWitt. The Films of Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Citadel, 1969.

—Sarah Bischoff

DE NIRO, ROBERT. One of the most respected actors in the American cinema,
much of Robert De Niro’s success can be attributed to his collaborations with director
Martin Scorsese. Known for his shy and self-effacing manner, De Niro has never made
for an easy or particularly riveting interview. His on-screen intensity, however, helps
account for his psychologically complex and gripping portrayals of outsiders populat-
ing the fringes of society. At his most subtle, De Niro captures the spirit of youth,
rebellion, and alienation that figure prominently in New Hollywood cinema. At its
most extreme, De Niro’s embodiment of marginality has resulted in some of the
screen’s most violent and frightening outcasts.
Robert De Niro was born in New York City on August 17, 1943. The son of artists,
he quit high school, and settled on the idea of becoming an actor at the tender age of
17. In the early 1960s, he pursued his ambition by studying Method acting under
Stella Adler at the Conservatory of Acting at the New School. Several of his earliest
screen roles came in films by director Brian De Palma: Greetings (1968), The Wedding
Party (1969) and Hi, Mom! (1970). Much later, he would star as Al Capone in De
Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), well after they had both become famous.
Significantly, De Niro’s partnership with Scorsese has resulted in many of his most
iconic and enduring screen performances. Together, De Niro and Scorsese have contrib-
uted highly stylized images of the ethnic-American experience while exploring the com-
plex dynamics of urbanity, organized crime, and Catholic and Jewish guilt. In 1973, De
Niro starred as Johnny Boy in Scorsese’s Mean Streets, a film that would prefigure a com-
mitment to an examination of complex cultural themes in a number of the duo’s most
well-received films, including Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), and Casino
(1995). Interestingly, although directed by Francis Ford Coppola, his role in The
Godfather II (1974), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor,
was an important marker of his on-screen exploration of Italian American identity.

621
De Niro, Robert

It may be argued that it was De Niro’s realistic and nuanced portrayal of a delu-
sional Vietnam War veteran-turned-cab-driver in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) that
would make both of them household names. As Travis Bickle, De Niro gave audiences
both a highly disturbing glimpse of urban alienation, and one of Hollywood’s most
well-known and oft-repeated expressions: “Are you talkin’ to me?” Another important
film that De Niro starred in during this period was Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter
(1978). Playing Michael, an angst-ridden war veteran, De Niro captured the anguish
of post-Vietnam-era America.
Heavily influenced by Adler’s emphasis on physical transformation, De Niro
stunned audiences with his portrayal of Jake La Motta in Scorsese’s Raging Bull. In
order to shoot the scenes when La Motta is at his fighting best, De Niro first forced
his body into rock-hard physical condition; once those scenes were completed, Scors-
ese shut down production for four months so De Niro could eat his way across Europe
and gain the 60 pounds he needed to add to his frame in order to portray the older,
fallen La Motta. De Niro’s profoundly unsettling performance in Raging Bull ulti-
mately earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor.
De Niro’s great versatility as an actor is suggested by his willingness to accept roles
in films of divergent genres. He starred in Scorsese’s musical New York, New York
(1977), for example; in Terry Gilliam’s science-fiction adventure Brazil (1985); in
Roland Joffé’s period piece The Mission (1986); and in the partially animated The
Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000). De Niro also channeled his well-
established screen persona as a tough guy for parodic effect in the DreamWorks anima-
tion picture Shark Tale (2004), for which he provided the voice of Don Lino, a gang-
ster shark boss.
De Niro’s various turns at comedy also convey his range as an actor. In Scorsese’s
darkly humorous The King of Comedy (1982), De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin, an aspir-
ing stand-up comic who kidnaps a talk show host played by Jerry Lewis. Playing
straight man to other actors, De Niro also appeared in the road-show comedies Mid-
night Run (1988) and We’re No Angels (1989). More recently, he has appeared in
comedic films such as Analyze This (1999), in which he plays a gangster undergoing
psychoanalysis, and Meet the Parents (2000), in which he portrays an intimidating
and overprotective future father-in-law intent on tormenting his daughter’s fiancé.
Both films spawned sequels, Analyze That (2002) and Meet the Fockers (2004), respec-
tively, although these follow-ups were less successful than the original films.
In 1993, De Niro made his directorial debut with A Bronx Tale (1993). Written by
and co-starring newcomer Chazz Palminteri, the film revisited a number of the issues
concerning Italian American identity that De Niro and Scorsese had explored in some
of their earlier films. Like Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Palminteri’s Bronx Tale follows the
stories of neighborhood gangsters and the hardworking citizens who must share their
communal space with these despicable and violent men. The film focuses on Calogero
“C” Anello (played brilliantly by De Niro look-alike Lillo Brancato). The teenage son
of a hardworking and honest bus driver, Lorenzo Anello (De Niro), C is torn between
his loyalty to his father and what he imagines to be his respect for the neighborhood
crime boss, Sonny LoSpecchio (Palminteri).

622
 Deren, Maya

The Good Shepherd (2006), the only other film De Niro has directed, examines the
origins of the CIA. Intriguingly, the film takes the viewer back in history in order to
examine contemporary, post-9/11 issues regarding national intelligence. Although a
much darker film, The Good Shepherd is consistent with De Niro’s liberal politics,
which have playfully materialized on the screen in the satire Wag the Dog (1997), in
which De Niro plays a spinmeister who creates a fake war in order to divert the public’s
attention from a presidential sex scandal.
In 1988, De Niro branched out from acting and established Tribeca Films. He
would eventually go on to organize the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002. Despite the
commercial and critical failures of some of his more recent films, De Niro’s legacy as
a serious and gifted actor seems assured.

Selected Filmography
Machete (2010); Everybody’s Fine (2009); Righteous Kill (2008); Stardust (2007); Meet the Fockers
(2004); Analyze That (2002); City by the Sea (2002); Showtime (2002); The Score (2001)
15 Minutes (2001); Meet the Parents (2000); Men of Honor (2000); The Adventures of Rocky &
Bullwinkle (2000); Flawless (1999); Analyze This (1999); Ronin (1998); Jackie Brown (1997);
Cop Land (1997); Heat (1995); Casino (1995); Frankenstein (1994); Cape Fear (1991); Goodfel-
las (1990); The Untouchables (1987); The Mission (1986); Brazil (1985); Once Upon a Time in
America (1984); Raging Bull (1980); The Deer Hunter (1978); New York, New York (1977);
The Last Tycoon (1976); 1900 (1976); Taxi Driver (1976); The Godfather: Part II (1974); Mean
Streets (1973); Bang the Drum Slowly (1973); The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971)

References
Baxter, John. De Niro: A Biography. London: HarperCollins, 2003.
Dougan, Andy. Untouchable: A Biography of Robert De Niro. New York: Thunder’s Mouth,
2002.
Friedman, Lawrence S. The Cinema of Martin Scorsese. New York: Continuum, 1998.
Kolker, Robert P. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Smith, Greg M. “Choosing Silence: Robert De Niro and the Celebrity Interview.” Henry,
Charlotte, and Angela Ndalianis, eds. Stars in Our Eyes: The Star Phenomenon in the Contem-
porary Era. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
—Linda Mokdad

DEREN, MAYA. Maya Deren is a figure in the history of cinema referred to with
notable frequency as a “legend.” Deren’s life and work are the stuff of legend, as is well
documented by her biographers in their thousand-page (unfinished) work The Legend
of Maya Deren. At the root of this legend is Deren’s first film, Meshes of the Afternoon
(1943), which set the terms for postwar American avant-garde film and remains a
seminal work to this day. Indeed, in 1990, the Library of Congress acknowledged its

623
Deren, Maya

historical and aesthetic import, preserving it in the National Film Registry. Yet, Deren’s
significance extends far beyond a single film. In promoting her work, particular Meshes,
she not only innovatively modified practices of distribution and exhibition for inde-
pendent film; she also demanded that audiences and cultural institutions take film seri-
ously as an art form. In this way, her limited catalog—a handful of short films, poetry,
prose and theory, photographs and an extensive study of Vodoun culture—belie her
significance in American film. Deren’s aesthetic creativity in filmmaking, her writing
and lectures on film art and its place in modernity, and her tireless efforts as an advo-
cate for experimental filmmaking laid the foundation for the independent American
cinema. These accomplishments are indeed legendary, especially if one considers that
she died when she was only 44.
Born Eleanora Derenkowsky in Kiev, on April 29, 1917, Deren and her parents fled
the anti-Semitic pogroms of the Ukraine five years later. They ultimately immigrated
to the United States and shortened their name to Deren. Eleanora attended the League
of Nations’ International School, and then matriculated at Syracuse University. After
graduating, she became a key figure in the Trotskyist Young People’s Socialist League,
and embraced both political activism and the bohemian life of New York’s East Village
before continuing her education. Upon earning her master’s degree from Smith
College, she took a job as an assistant to noted choreographer Katherine Dunham
and traveled to Los Angeles with the road tour of Cabin in the Sky (1941). In Los
Angeles, Deren met and married Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid, who intro-
duced her to visual media by taking her to foreign films and by teaching her still pho-
tography and filmmaking. Deren was transformed by this relationship and embraced
her new life by changing her name, in 1943, to “Maya,” the word for the Hindu con-
cept of illusion as the expression of deeper truth. In that same year, she also bought a
16 mm Bolex camera—purchased with the inheritance money left to her after the
death of her father—and made her first film with Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon.
If Meshes of the Afternoon were the only film Deren ever made, it alone would mark
her place in American film history. The 14-minute silent film (later scored by her third
husband, Teijo Ito) won her a Guggenheim fellowship—Deren was the first filmmaker
to apply for and to win the prestigious award. Meshes would go on to win the Cannes
Festival’s 16mm “Grand Prix Internationale,” the first awarded to an American, or a
woman. Although it was made for only $275—“what Hollywood spends on lipstick,”
as Deren was known to say—Meshes heralded the postwar American avant-garde,
bringing a more narrative, or personal, style than earlier experimental films, which
tended to favor shapes and figures over human subjects. Lauded by East Coast film
critics such as Parker Tyler and P. Adams Sitney, the narrative focuses on the experien-
ces of the protagonist (played by Deren) and unfolds within a few circumscribed loca-
tions—mostly within the couple’s home. Meshes appropriates images from both film
noir and women’s melodrama, reworking them to convey the female protagonist’s
nightmarish experiences of domestic entrapment and alienation. The film articulates
these themes through the use of complex editing patterns and film speeds, techniques
that would mark Deren’s filmmaking for the rest of her career. Meshes’ formal experi-
mentation with personal narrative ushered in the “New American Cinema” of Stan

624
 Deren, Maya

Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, and Kenneth Anger, among others. Meshes, in fact, continues
to inspire filmmakers to this day: Barbara Hammer pays homage to it in her film I Was/
I Am (1973); David Lynch has also honored Deren in his visual and narrative citations
of Meshes, visible in both Inland Empire (2006) and, more strikingly, in Lost Highway
(1997); and Derek Jarman named it among his 10 favorite films.
What continues to intrigue both artists and audiences alike about Deren are her
original, highly aesthetic camerawork and editing, by which she attempts to manipu-
late filmic images from a specific subjective or “motivated” position. Deren’s fascina-
tion with the camera’s ability seemingly to transport bodies physically can be
understood as the filmic translation of her lifelong obsession with dance. Based on
her apprenticeship with Dunham, Deren published the article “Religious Possession
in Dancing” (1942); she would remain fascinated, both as a scholar and artist, with
the idea of ritualistic possession for the rest of her life. Indeed, several years later, Deren
received a grant to research Haitian Vodoun practice, which led to the publication of
her ethnographic book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953); the produc-
tion of the film Divine Horsemen (1985; edited posthumously); and the musical record
Voices of Haiti (1953). Previous to this project, many of her short films—such as A
Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945–46),
Meditation on Violence (1948), and The Very Eye of Night (1952–55)—included dance
and often featured accomplished dancers. Yet, rather than simply photographing dance
performances, she used her knowledge of choreography to emancipate the camera
from its theatrical moorings. Her camera did not follow a dancer but was itself made
to dance, freeing it from spatial and temporal laws of cinematic realism. The ability
of film to represent the changing laws of time and space in the twentieth century is a
theoretical insight Deren developed in great detail in An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form
and Film (1946). Deren’s philosophical treatise is a highly sophisticated theoretical
engagement with film art that foreshadows much poststructuralist film theory in its
examination of cinema’s new images of time and space.
Deren’s short film At Land (1944) exemplifies her ambition to experiment with
film’s spatiotemporal relations. One of the most famous edited sequences from Meshes
involves the elliptical cutting of shots of the protagonist walking from sea to sidewalk
to carpeted floor. At Land builds on these series of images, extending the metaphorical
connection of the sea to women’s social mobility. Deren, once again the protagonist, is
filmed at the beach and then in various enclosed spaces, either with individual men or
at a dinner party. The protagonist’s connection with nature and the sea is in stark con-
trast with her disruptive presence in social situations. This discord is expressed through
jump cuts and elliptical edits, creating jarring dislocations for the viewer and protago-
nist alike. Her films experiment with formal qualities to articulate pointed critiques of
sexual and gender power relations (and, at times, race and class as well). Meshes, At
Land, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), and the unfinished Witch’s Cradle (1943)
all deal with women’s spatial confinement, frequently symbolized as entanglements
with little potential for escape. For example, Meshes ends with the ambiguous death
of the protagonist, draped in seaweed, while Ritual concludes with the female African
American protagonist (played by dancer Rita Christiani) sinking into the depths of the

625
Disney, Walt

ocean, a stunning film image that turns from positive to negative print. That Deren
was able to convey such complex ideas in powerful images and emotionally compelling
narratives begins to explain the lasting influence of her films.
It should be noted that contemporary musicians and filmmakers who pay their
respects to Deren are indebted to feminists who spearheaded the women’s recovery proj-
ects that brought attention to Deren in the 1970s and ’80s. After her death in New York
City on October 13, 1961, Deren’s films fell out of favor and, for the most part, were no
longer screened. Fortunately, second-wave feminists introduced them to new audiences
at women’s film festivals. Although activists and scholars held showings of her films out
of the desire to reclaim women artists of the past, it was her tenacious work to organize
structures such as the Film Artists Society that especially drew the attention of second-
wave feminists, and feminist film collectives, like East London’s “Circles.” Tireless in
her efforts to build collective structures to support artists, she established the Creative
Film Foundation to underwrite grants for independent filmmakers as well as to organize
film screenings and symposia. She also lectured and published widely, developing a
public discourse about cinema in journals and magazines to help build an audience
for film art. Organizer, activist, film theorist, ethnographer, auteur—these titles may
not sum up Maya Deren, but taken together, they begin to explain why she is one of
the most influential and legendary figures of American cinema.

Selected Filmography
Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985); Maeva (1961); The Very Eye of Night (1958);
Meditation on Violence (1948); Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946); A Study in Choreography for
Camera (1945); At Land (1944); Witch’s Cradle (1944); Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

References
Clark, VèVè A., Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman. The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documen-
tary Biography and Collected Works. New York: Anthology Film Archives/ Film Culture, 1988.
Geller, Theresa L. “The Personal Cinema of Maya Deren: Meshes of the Afternoon and Its Criti-
cal Reception in the History of the Avant-Garde.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
29(1), Winter 2006: 140–58.
Nichols, Bill, ed. Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001.
Rabinovitz, Lauren. Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde
Cinema, 1943–1971. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

—Theresa L. Geller

DISNEY, WALT. Born into a poor Chicago family on December 5, 1901, Walt
Disney achieved the American Dream by becoming a popular filmmaker. He created a
number of the world’s most famous fictional characters and completely redefined the
nature of filmic animation. An admired family man, Disney was an iconic figure whose
films came to be understood as symbolic representations of the American way of life.

626
 Disney, Walt

When still very young, Disney

developed a passion for drawing.
In 1928, he created what would
become perhaps his best-known
cartoon character, Mickey Mouse.
Originally brought to the big
screen during the silent era,
Disney’s cartoon shorts were soon
accompanied by sound, and in
1929 he began to release his Silly
Symphonies. Although they were
not wildly successful, the Silly
Symphonies series did give rise to
Disney’s most successful cartoon
short The Three Little Pigs (1933).
By the end of the 1930s, Mickey
Mouse would be joined by two
steadfast friends: Donald Duck
and Goofy.
One of Disney’s most impor-
tant career moments came in
1937 when he released the first
full-length animated feature film,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The film was a box-office success Creator of Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney achieved pre-
and laid the groundwork for eminence in movies and television and revolutionized the lei-
future extremely popular film ani- sure industry with his theme park, Disneyland, which opened
in 1955. (Library of Congress)
mations, including Pinocchio
(1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo
(1941), Bambi (1942), and Cinderella (1950). The release of these animated films
made the Disney name synonymous with family entertainment. Building on the suc-
cess of his earlier animated films, Disney would go on to make his first feature film
combining live action and animation, Song of the South (1946); his first all-live-
action feature film, Treasure Island (1950); and his second feature combining live
action and animation, Mary Poppins (1964).
During the 1930s and 1940s, nearly every animated feature film was in some
way influenced by Disney. Expressing communal values such as hard work, the tri-
umph of the underdog, national self-definition, and the importance of religious free-
dom, Disney’s cartoons and films reassured Americans confronted with the threats
of the Great Depression, World War II, and the looming Cold War. Viewers related
to his innocent, defenseless protagonists, who were usually desperate, insecure fig-
ures faced with overwhelming challenges, but whose innate goodness and extraordi-
nary will to survive eventually allowed them to overcome evil and set things right in
their communities. By the 1950s, Disney had become such a well-known and

627
Disney, Walt

beloved figure that his face regularly graced the covers of the nation’s more popular
magazines.
Disney was a self-admitted moralist who saw himself as more than simply a film-
maker; he believed that he had a responsibility to act as an educator, child psycholo-
gist—child experts claimed that his films had a healthy impact on young viewers—
and even as a pastor. In 1954, the National Education Association actually rewarded
him with an American Education Award for his educational work. During the
1950s, millions of ordinary Americans welcomed “Uncle Walt” into their homes by
way of their television sets, where he amused children and gave advice to parents, as
well as inspiration and reassurance.
Beyond his contributions to film entertainment, Disney also changed the shape of
recreation in America. He brought his figures to life and turned amusement into an
imaginative experience by building his first Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in
1955, providing park-goers with rides, haunted houses, and jungle adventures. He also
planned on opening a Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, but did not live to see the
project completed in 1971.
Disney died on December 15, 1966, in Los Angeles, leaving behind a multibillion-
dollar business empire. Throughout his life he demonstrated how one could
be empowered by fantasy and proved, at least on a certain level, that dreams could
come true.

Selected Filmography
Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968); The Happiest Millionaire (1967); The Jungle Book
(1967); Scrooge McDuck and Money (1967); Monkeys, Go Home! (1967); The Fighting Prince of
Donegal (1966); Follow Me, Boys! (1966); Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. (1966); The Ugly Dachshund
(1966); Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966); That Darn Cat! (1965); The Monkey’s Uncle
(1965); Emil and the Detectives (1964); The Moon-Spinners (1964); The Three Lives of Thoma-
sina (1964); The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1964); The Sword in the Stone (1963); Dr.
Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (1963); The Incredible Journey (1963); Savage Sam (1963); Miracle of
the White Stallions (1963); Son of Flubber (1963); Babes in Toyland (1961); The Absent-
Minded Professor (1961); The Saga of Windwagon Smith (1961); One Hundred and One Dalma-
tians (1961); Swiss Family Robinson (1960); Ten Who Dared (1960); Pollyanna (1960); Kid-
napped (1960); Noah’s Ark (1959); Old Yeller (1957); Johnny Tremain (1957); The Great
Locomotive Chase (1956); Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955); Contrast in Rhythm
(1955); 20000 Leagues under the Sea (1954); Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue (1953); The Sword
and the Rose (1953); The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952); Alice in Wonderland
(1951); Treasure Island (1950); Cinderella (1950); The Wind in the Willows (1949); Johnny
Appleseed (1948); Song of the South (1946); Peter and the Wolf (1946); Bambi (1942); Der
Fuehrer’s Face (1942); Dumbo (1941); Fantasia (1940); Pinocchio (1940); Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs (1937); Three Blind Mouseketeers (1936); Three Little Pigs (1933); Babes in the
Woods (1932); Haunted House (1929); Hell’s Bells (1929); Jungle Rhythm (1929); Springtime
(1929); The Plowboy (1929); Mickey’s Follies (1929); Mickey’s Choo-Choo (1929); The Gallopin‘
Gaucho (1928); Steamboat Willie (1928)

628
 Donner, Richard

References
Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Biography. London: Aurum Press, 2008.
Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

—Daniela Ribitsch

DONNER, RICHARD. Richard Donner is a director and producer best known for
his work on films such as The Omen (1976), Superman (1978), and the Lethal Weapon
series of pictures released during the 1980s and 1990s. He has earned a reputation as a
director who brings a raw authenticity to his source material and as someone who gives
actors a lot of flexibility in their interpretations of roles. Although not as famous as
many of his contemporaries, Donner has left an indelible mark on American film,
and continues to be active in the industry.
Born in New York City on April 24, 1930, Donner dreamed of becoming an actor,
but his cinematic interests eventually shifted to directing. He began his career making
travelogues and commercials before moving into television in the late 1950s. Although
Donner directed his first feature film, X-15, in 1961, his greatest successes came on the
small screen. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, he directed episodes of series such
as The Rifleman, Combat, Get Smart, Twilight Zone, and Kojak. It was Donner who
directed the legendary Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which featured
William Shatner as an airline passenger convinced a monster is trying to crash the plane.
Donner continued working in television throughout the early 1970s, but also began
making inroads into feature films. His first feature film of that decade, Twinky (1970),
also known as Lola, was an intriguing yet somewhat derivative picture that failed to
generate much interest. It was not until 1976 that Donner made the film that brought
him mainstream attention. The Omen, the story of the young son of an American
ambassador who is actually the Antichrist, became one of the biggest films of that year,
earning excellent reviews for its finely crafted suspense. The movie remains one of the
best horror films of the decade, an intoxicating brew of social cynicism and apocalyptic
dread accentuated by Donner’s taut direction. The film mirrored the popular fascina-
tion with the supernatural and end-of-the-world scenarios popular in mid-1970s
America. The primary credit goes to Donner for taking what could have been a
B-movie and turning it into a believable, intelligent thriller.
Donner followed The Omen’s success by directing the 1978 hit adaptation of Super-
man. The defining feature of the film is that it took its subject matter seriously, mark-
ing a departure from the camp approach so prevalent since the 1960s. Superman
launched a successful franchise, although Donner never made another film in the
series. While making the original film, Donner shot scenes to be included in
the sequel, Superman 2, but disagreements with producers led to his dismissal from
the project in favor of Richard Lester. Donner always hoped to get his version of Super-
man 2 released, which became a reality in 2006 when his cut appeared on DVD.

629
Duras, Marguerite

The 1980s saw Donner more active than ever. He directed seven films, spanning the
genres of comedy, adventure, and action. Donner’s films included The Goonies, his
1985 collaboration with Steven Spielberg; his update of Dickens with Scrooged; and
the first two films of the Lethal Weapon series. Both The Goonies and Scrooged fared well
with filmgoers if not with critics, and both remain cult favorites. Yet it was Donner’s
contributions to the Lethal Weapon film series that earned him his greatest hits of the
decade. The series took the traditional “buddy film” scenario and applied it to the
action genre so prevalent in the 1980s, especially films such as Rambo and Dirty Harry.
What set Donner’s films apart was his ability to make the characters likeable and
believable. The formula worked so well that Donner directed two more Lethal Weapon
films in the 1990s, although neither performed as well as the first had at the box office.
Donner remains an active film director in the twenty-first century, although he has
yet to recapture his mainstream success of previous decades. Recent years have seen
him turn his attention to film production as well as directing. Donner has served as
producer or executive producer on numerous projects, including the HBO series Tales
from the Crypt and the highly popular X-Men film series. He is also involved in the
writing of graphic novels, serving with Geoff Johns and Adam Kubert as the new team
behind Action Comics. After four decades of success, Richard Donner shows no signs of
slowing down.

Selected Filmography
16 Blocks (2006); Timeline (2003); Lethal Weapon 4 (1998); Conspiracy Theory (1997); Assassins
(1995); Maverick (1994); Lethal Weapon 3 (1992); Radio Flyer (1992); Lethal Weapon 2 (1989);
Scrooged (1988); Lethal Weapon (1987); The Goonies (1985); Ladyhawke (1985); The Toy
(1982); Inside Moves (1980); Superman (1978); The Omen (1976); Lola (1970); Salt and Pepper
(1968); X-15 (1961)

References
Muir, John Kenneth. Horror Films of the 1970s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.
Rossen, Jake. Superman vs. Hollywood: How Fiendish Producers, Devious Directors, and Warring
Writers Grounded an American Icon. Chicago: Cappella, 2008.
—Brad L. Duren

DURAS, MARGUERITE. Marguerite Duras is widely known in France as a prolific

screenwriter, director, novelist, and playwright. In the United States, however, despite
an interested critical reception for her novels among feminist academics, the numerous
films that she both wrote and directed are not well known. Instead, her cinematic rep-
utation rests primarily on two films: Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), for which she
wrote the screenplay, and The Lover (1992), directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, which
is based on her “autobiographical” novel L’Amant.
Duras’s early life experiences in the colonial world of French Indochina serve as the
raw material for much of her literary and cinematic work. She was born Marguerite

630
 Duras, Marguerite

Donnadieu on April 4, 1914, in Gia-Dinh, a suburb of Saigon. Her parents, Henri

and Marie Donnadieu, had immigrated as part of France’s “Colonial Army,” and were
employed there as schoolteachers; following Marguerite’s father’s death in 1918, her
mother raised Duras and her two older brothers alone. Apart from a short trip to
France during her childhood, she lived in or near Saigon until she was 18. In her teens,
she had an affair with an older, married Chinese man, an experience she would return
to in many variations in her work. At 18, she left Indochina to travel with her family to
France, where she studied philosophy, law, mathematics, and political science at the
École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris. In 1937, while working as a secretary at
the Ministry of Colonies, she began to read extensively in French and American liter-
ature and to attend performances at the Théatre des Mathurins, seeing this as a kind
of apprenticeship in the theater. During this time she also joined the Resistance, and
formed a friendship with François Mitterand that lasted until his death. Her first novel,
Les impudents, was published in 1943, and it was at this time that she took the surname
Duras, after the district in France were her father had owned a house. She began writ-
ing for the screen in1959, when she authored the classic film treatment for Hiroshima,
mon amour, directed by Alain Resnais.
Hiroshima, mon amour immediately established Duras’s international reputation as
a screenwriter, and has remained widely popular with both critics and moviegoers.
Her script for the film, which has been published in book form, is seen by many as a
work of art in its own right. In this film, which tells the story of a brief affair between
a French actress and a Japanese man, both married, both nameless, Duras explores
many of the themes that have characterized her body of work as a whole. These include
the role of memory and forgetting; the links between violence and sexuality, domina-
tion and desire; and the process of mourning as a way of working through but never
completely healing from the traumas of the past. Duras’s commitment to the primacy
of the literary over the visual can be seen in this film in the form of a discontinuity
between the soundtrack and the images, a technique that serves to disrupt narrative
coherence, leaving the viewer out of sync with the moment of the film in much the
same way that the protagonists seem caught between past and present. Duras would
later use this technique to great effect in her own films, most notably India Song
(1975). In addition to this auditory discontinuity, Hiroshima, mon amour undermines
its own narrative development by means of jump cutting to and from multiple flash-
backs—some brief, some longer—thereby foregrounding the significance of memories
that insist upon erupting into the present.
During the years from 1959 to 1984, Duras wrote numerous novels, including sev-
eral that were adapted to the screen by directors such as Peter Brooks (Moderato canta-
bile, 1960), Jules Dassin (10:30 PM Summer, 1963), and Tony Richardson (Le marin
de Gibraltar, 1966). She also wrote and directed 19 films of her own. Nevertheless, it
was not until the 1984 publication of her novel L’Amant—almost immediately pub-
lished in English translation as The Lover—that she found a wide readership in the
United States. This novel, which won the 1984 Prix Goncourt, served as the basis for
the 1992 film by the same title, directed in English by Jean-Jacques Annaud. It is this
film that has secured Duras’s reputation among English-speaking audiences, in spite of

631
Duras, Marguerite

the fact that she was so outraged by Annaud’s treatment of her story that she broke
with him during production and subsequently wrote L’Amant du Chine du nord (trans-
lated into English as The North China Lover) as a literary attempt to reclaim her own
story from Annaud’s filmic version. The Lover tells the story of Duras’s teenage rela-
tionship with her older Chinese lover, and has received a mixed critical response, owing
in part to its strange blend of eroticism and emotional distance. Reviewers have com-
mented on the dynamics of colonialism that haunt the film (between a young woman,
who nevertheless represents the colonial power of Europe, and an older man, who
nevertheless represents the oppressed, colonized Other) and on the undercurrents of
masochism that characterize the girl’s sexuality—themes that are prominent in many
of Duras’s films and novels. The Lover was nominated in 1993 for an Academy Award
for cinematography.
Duras died in her Left Bank apartment in Paris on March 3, 1996.

Selected Filmography
The Children (1984); Il dialogo di Roma (1982); L’homme atlantique (1981); Agatha et les lectures
illimitées (1981); Le navire Night (1979); Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) (1979); Cesarée (1978);
Les mains négatives (1978); Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977); Le camion (1977); Entire Days in the Trees
(1976); India Song (1975); Woman of the Ganges (1974); Nathalie Granger (1972); Jaune le soleil
(1972); Détruire dit-elle (1969); La musica (1967); Mademoiselle (1966); Hiroshima mon amour
(1959)

References
Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras: A Life. Trans. by Anne-Marie Glasheen. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000.
Glassman, Deborah. Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and Narrative Cure. Rutherford, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991.
Harvey, Robert, and Hélène Volat. Marguerite Duras: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1997.
Hofmann, Carol. Forgetting and Marguerite Duras. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1991.
—Judith Poxon

632
 v
E
EASTWOOD, CLINT. With a career in motion pictures that has spanned five-and-
a-half decades, Clint Eastwood is one of Hollywood’s living legends. A talented actor,
an Oscar-winning director and producer, and an accomplished composer of scores and
soundtracks, Eastwood’s versatility has been the key to his enduring success.
Born on May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, Clinton Eastwood Jr. grew up in the
Oakland/Piedmont area of Northern California. He served as a swimming instructor
in the army from 1950 to 1953, and after a brief stint at Los Angeles City College,
signed a bit player contract with Universal Studios in 1954. During his time at Univer-
sal, Eastwood landed small roles in B-movies, such as Tarantula (1955), then studied
acting with Jack Kosslyn, whose maxim—“Don’t just do something, stand there”—
formed the cornerstone of Eastwood’s acting philosophy. Seething stillness and brood-
ing intensity became his trademarks, and in time the tall, lean, soft-spoken actor began
to attract attention.
Eastwood’s first starring role came from the CBS television series, Rawhide, where
he played the boyish cowhand Rowdy Yates from 1959 to 1965. Occasionally called
upon to sing in the show, Eastwood recorded an album, “Cowboy Favorites,” in
1962, and made guest appearances on many TV shows, including Mr. Ed, in the early
part of the decade. In 1964, Eastwood left Hollywood for a long-shot opportunity that
would ultimately establish his international stardom. A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was the
first in Sergio Leone’s trio of “spaghetti westerns” featuring “the man with no name.” In
this Italian remake of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo (1961), Eastwood plays
a lone killer who rides into a Mexican border town where two rival gangs hire him for
his gunfighting prowess. By the end of the film, the gangs have killed each other off,
and Eastwood, the lone survivor, rides out of town.
The European success of A Fistful of Dollars led to two sequels, For a Few Dollars
More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). These three Italian films
would redefine the American western by introducing sadistic violence, unorthodox
scores by Ennio Morricone, and a new kind of amoral hero driven by self-interest
rather than an embedded code of ethics. Draped in a poncho, and clenching a cigarillo
between impassive lips, Eastwood gave this enigmatic killer a nonchalant style that had

633
Eastwood, Clint

great appeal throughout Europe.

Likewise, the American release of
the trilogy in the late 1960s
launched Eastwood’s career as a
Hollywood superstar.
Shortly after forging this iconic
image for the Old West, Eastwood
created what may be his signature
character, the renegade San
Francisco police detective “Dirty
Harry” Callahan. In Dirty Harry
(1971), which Eastwood’s mentor
Don Siegel directed, Eastwood
plays a volatile cop with a distrust
of authority and a penchant for
phrases like, “Do you feel lucky,
punk?” A box-office smash, Dirty
Harry spawned four sequels:
Magnum Force (1973), The
Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact
(1983), and The Dead Pool
(1988). Harry’s intolerance for
bureaucracy, lack of sympathy for
criminals, and accuracy with his
.44 magnum revolver popularized
an image of vigilante justice that
Best-known as a tough, quiet action hero from many westerns would peak in the Reagan era. Rea-
and police dramas, Clint Eastwood is one of Hollywood’s top gan himself made reference to a
film stars. He began a career as a movie director in the 1970s line from Sudden Impact while
and won wide acclaim for his 1992 film Unforgiven. threatening to veto a proposed tax
Eastwood also served as mayor of Carmel, California, from increase. Mimicking Harry, Reagan
1986 to 1988, declining to run for reelection after his first told his congressional opposition,
term. (AP/Wide World Photos)
“Go ahead, make my day.”
Eastwood has played the avenging stranger role in numerous westerns, such as Hang
’Em High (1968) and Pale Rider (1985). He has replayed the streetwise cop role in The
Gauntlet (1977) and The Rookie (1990). Laconic action heroes may be Eastwood’s spe-
cialty, but he has also enjoyed box-office success with comic roles such as Philo Beddoe,
the best friend of an orangutan in Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and its sequel,
Any Which Way You Can (1980). He sang show tunes in the musical Paint Your Wagon
(1969), and played the sensitive romantic lead to Meryl Streep’s Oscar-nominated per-
formance in The Bridges of Madison County (1995). Streep is just one of many actors to
receive Oscar attention in a film that Eastwood directed.
As a director, Clint Eastwood has a reputation for finishing on time and under
budget, but he is also increasingly known for his artistry. Eastwood has twice won

634
 Eastwood, Clint

the Academy Award for directing. Making his debut with the suspense thriller Play
Misty for Me (1971), Eastwood showed daring in both his subject and his style. As star
and director of High Plains Drifter (1973), he took an allegorical approach, using a
small western town to comment on the cultural malaise surrounding Vietnam. Many
of his westerns, such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), transcend generic boundaries
by expressing ambivalence toward violence. Such was the case with Unforgiven
(1992), which won Eastwood his first Oscar for directing. He was nominated again
for Mystic River (2003), a murder mystery that deflates the notion that revenge is satis-
fying, and won a second Oscar for Million Dollar Baby (2004), a boxing film with a
complex treatment of euthanasia. Eastwood is also a self-taught jazz pianist and has fre-
quently composed the scores for his films. He received two Golden Globe nominations
for music in the same year with Gran Torino (2008) and Changeling (2008).
Eastwood’s recent movies have challenged accepted notions about his right-wing
political views. Although he has often supported Republican presidential candidates,
and even served as Republican mayor of Carmel, California, from 1986 to 1988,
Eastwood characterizes himself as a libertarian. His later films have done as much to
deconstruct the image of the right-wing reactionary as his early films did to construct
it. He has completed eight films since 2000. He has starred in four of those films, and
won many prestigious awards in the process. Now 80, Eastwood shows no signs of slow-
ing down. He continues to make movies that remake his own Hollywood legend.
See also: Flags of Our Fathers; Letters from Iwo Jima

Selected Filmography
Hereafter (2010); Invictus (2009); Gran Torino (2008); Changeling (2008); Letters from Iwo
Jima (2006); Flags of Our Fathers (2006); Million Dollar Baby (2004); Mystic River (2003);
Blood Work (2002); Space Cowboys (2000); True Crime (1999); Midnight in the Garden of Good
and Evil (1997); Absolute Power (1997); The Bridges of Madison County (1995); A Perfect World
(1993); Unforgiven (1992); The Rookie (1990); White Hunter Black Heart (1990); Bird (1988);
Heartbreak Ridge (1986); Pale Rider (1985); Sudden Impact (1983); Honkytonk Man (1982);
Firefox (1982); Bronco Billy (1980); The Gauntlet (1977); The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976); The
Eiger Sanction (1975); Breezy (1973); Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974); Magnum Force
(1973); High Plains Drifter (1973); Joe Kidd (1972); Dirty Harry (1971); Play Misty for Me
(1971); The Beguiled (1971); Kelly’s Heroes (1970); Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970); Paint Your
Wagon (1969); Where Eagles Dare (1968); Coogan’s Bluff (1968); Hang ’Em High (1968); The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966); For a Few Dollars More (1965); A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

References
Engel, Leonard, ed. Clint Eastwood: Actor and Director. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,
2007.
McGilligan, Patrick. Clint: The Life and Legend. New York: St. Martin’s, 2002.
—Joseph Christopher Schaub

635
Ebert, Roger

EBERT, ROGER. Award-winning film critic Roger Ebert is the most prolific voice
in American film review today. At an amazing rate of six reviews a week for over four
decades, he has critiqued over 10,000 films. Showing a nearly unparalleled love of
movies and using his keen eye for exceptional films, Ebert has consistently provided
his audience with straightforward and honest critiques.
Ebert was born in Urbana, Illinois on June 18, 1942. An only child, Ebert filled his
early years devouring science fiction books and magazines. While in high school, Ebert
became a reporter for Champaign-Urbana’s News Gazette and explored the theatrical
world-even making a contemporary version of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds with
classmate Dave Stiers (David Ogden Stiers of M*A*S*H fame). During his college
years at the University of Illinois, Ebert gained notoriety and awards with his column
in the campus newspaper.
Following college, Ebert took a post at the Chicago Sun-Times as their new film
critic. His reviews brought a fresh and youthful spirit to the stodgy and often cantan-
kerous film critics from Chicago’s other three newspapers. Early in his career, Ebert
showed a knack for sharp wit and a keen eye for talent when he praised an unknown
Martin Scorsese’s film Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) when it premiered at
the Chicago Film Festival (Kelly, 1991).
Roger Ebert had a banner year in 1975, starting with winning a Pulitzer Prize for his
film criticisms, the first ever in that category. This was also the year that he joined with
Gene Siskel reviewing movies on television. Over the next six years, Siskel and Ebert
would hone their craft in the Chicago area and on public broadcasting.
In 1981, Ebert, along with Siskel, signed a syndication deal with Tribune Entertain-
ment that brought their show, “At the Movies,” to a national audience. Three years
later in 1984, the pair received an Emmy Award nomination in the category of Out-
standing Informational Series. This would be their first of six nominations.
In 1986, Siskel & Ebert debuted as a weekly syndicated series with Buena Vista Tele-
vision. Ebert gave the show its future trademark by introducing the thumb’s-up/down
method of completing each film review. With continued reviews in the Chicago Sun-
Times and a nationally syndicated show, Ebert was solidifying his status as one of
America’s premier film critics.
The success and influence of Siskel & Ebert came full circle when their glowing
review of One False Move (1992) transformed this film, planned for video release, to
theatrical distribution and box-office success (Hill, 2005). Sparks also flew in 1992
when Ebert chided Siskel for giving out essential plot details while they reviewed The
Crying Game (1992). The openness and candor of their reviews made Siskel & Ebert
a program the national audience often used to decide whether or not to see a film.
Gene Siskel died of brain cancer in 1999, ending a remarkable partnership with
Ebert that had lasted nearly 25 years. While still mourning the loss, Ebert honored his
friend and colleague by continuing the show with guest critics and then permanently
teaming with Chicago Sun-Times reporter Richard Roeper in 2000. The newly minted
Ebert & Roeper continued in syndication at the outset of the twenty-first century.
In 2004, Roger Ebert was diagnosed with a form of throat cancer that required
debilitating radiation and chemotherapy. During this ordeal, he continued to write

636
 Edison, Thomas Alva

over 250 film reviews for the

Chicago Sun-Times, as well as for
other publications (Scott, 2008).
This was a staggering number for
anyone, especially someone bat-
tling cancer. In his absence,
Richard Roeper continued the
television program with guest
stars and occasional contributions
from Ebert himself.
During the summer of 2006,
Roger Ebert experienced a recur-
rence of cancer in his salivary
gland. An attempt at corrective sur-
gery failed, leaving him without the
ability to speak. Undeterred, Ebert
continued to be influential through
his multifaceted presence as a
reviewer. Using his column with
the Chicago Sun-Times and multi-
ple Internet sites, Ebert employed
his sharp wit, ability to put himself
in the audience’s place, and
keen eye for exceptional films to
maintain his position as one of
America’s leading film critics.
See also: Film Criticism
Newspaper columnists and film critics Roger Ebert (left) and
Gene Siskel (right). (AP/Wide World Photos)
References
Ebert, Roger. Your Movie Sucks. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Universal, 2007.
Hill, Lee Alan. “30 Years at the Movies with Roger Ebert.” Television Week, January 24, 2005.
Kelly, Mary Pat. Martin Scorsese: A Journey. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1991.
Scott, A. O. “Roger Ebert: The Critic Behind the Thumb.” New York Times, April 13,
2008.
—Lucas Calhoun

EDISON, THOMAS ALVA. Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and
entrepreneur. Filing over 1,000 patents during his lifetime, he influenced several com-
ponents of the movie industry. He conducted experimental research in lighting, teleg-
raphy, sound recording, and moving photography, and established industry standards,
such as 35mm film and sprockets.

637
Edison, Thomas Alva

Born February 11, 1847, in

Milan, Ohio, Edison attended
both public and private schools
in Port Huron, Michigan. He
held various jobs in the telegraph
industry during the 1860s, and
in 1868 the journal Telegrapher
published his design for a duplex
telegraph, a system that allowed
messages to be sent in opposite
directions on one wire simulta-
neously. He soon gained a repu-
tation as an innovator in the
field of telegraphy; he would go
on to use his expertise in this area
to help him develop landmark
technological products.
The filmmaking pioneer
Eadweard Muybridge, who had
been on the lecture circuit tout-
ing his short moving picture
Animal Locomotion, visited
Edison’s lab in February 1888.
Realizing that Muybridge was
American inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931). on to something with his “zoo-
(Chaiba Media) praxiscope,” a device for projec-
ting filmic images, Edison
initially suggested a partnership. Although the partnership never materialized, Edison
did adapt Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, turning it into a much more efficient projecting
device that came to be called the Kinetoscope. On August 24, 1891, Edison filed pat-
ents for the kinetograph (camera) and the kinetoscope (the viewing implement), and
Muybridge was largely forgotten.
Edison founded the Edison Manufacturing Company in 1887, building its first stu-
dio, which he called the “Black Maria,” in 1892. Scientific American covered the first
public demonstration of the Kinetoscope on May 9, 1893. For the event, Edison cre-
ated a one reel melodrama, Dashed to Death (1909); ever utilitarian in his approach,
the inventor recorded a car being driven over a cliff at Palisades, New Jersey, not merely
as an aesthetic phenomenon, but to discover a formula for a steel axle that could with-
stand the fiery crash when the vehicle hit bottom.
Edison used the Black Maria to promote Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, before that
troupe toured Europe, including producing film images of Annie Oakley demonstrating
her skills as a sharp-shooter. Edison also shot scenes of boxing at his studio; interestingly,
while live boxing was prohibited by law, viewing images of the brutal sport in a kineto-
scope was not. In 1894 or 1895, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (1860–1935) and

638
 Eisenstein, Sergei

William Heise produced the earliest synchronized sound motion picture, the “Dickson
Experimental Sound Film,” depicting Dickson playing the violin.
A shrewd businessman, Edison wisely secured patents or copyrights where appli-
cable. Significantly, copyright law did not recognize motion pictures as a separate entity
until 1912; before this time, Edison sent what were known as positive paper prints—a
technique developed by Dickson—to the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress.
Derived from short films, these prints were copyrighted as a series of still photographs
gathered together in sequence; they provide us with a record of early twentieth-
century life, including the attire, popular buildings, and technologies of the time.
Edison and the co-inventors in his employ created films based on popular subject
matter that had been captured by still photographers during the post-Civil War period.
Of particular note, they produced short scenic and travel films, with images of
buildings and natural wonders—Coney Island and Niagara Falls, for example—and
new-era modes of transportation. Edison’s cameras even recorded significant events
of the day, such as President William McKinley’s inauguration and assassination, the
Galveston hurricane (1900), and the San Francisco earthquake (1906).
Although he was not always the one who invented many of the gadgets on which he
worked, Edison had a keen technological eye and improved on several mechanical
devices designed by others. This was the case in regard to his work in the burgeoning
film industry, as he was able to apply his previously acquired knowledge of telegraphy
and sound production in phonographs to the development of other forms of presenta-
tion. In essence, then, it may be said that Edison functioned more as what we would
understand today as an executive producer of films, rather than as their creator.
Remarkably entrepreneurial, Edison realized that he could use the popular
new medium of film to advertise his Kinetoscope, which he did in Moving Picture News
(1913), and elsewhere. After an extraordinarily productive life, Edison died on
October 18, 1931.

References
Israel, Paul. Edison: A Life of Invention. New York: John Wiley, 1998.
Phillips, Ray. Edison’s Kinetoscope and Its Films: A History to 1896. Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1997.
Wood, Bret, prod. Edison: The Invention of the Movies. DVD. New York: Kino on Video, 2005.
—Ralph Hartsock

EISENSTEIN, SERGEI. Sergei Eisenstein was the most famous Soviet filmmaker of
the first half of the twentieth century. Today, he is best remembered for his film Battle-
ship Potemkin (1925), and for his revolutionary theory of film montage, which is still
taught today as one of the few alternatives to traditional Hollywood continuity editing.
Born on January 23, 1898, in Riga, Latvia, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein grew up
in a prosperous middle-class Russian family. At an early age he learned French and

639
Eisenstein, Sergei

German and developed a lifelong passion for the arts. He entered the Institute for Civil
Engineers in St. Petersburg in 1915, but was called to military service during World
War I. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, he sided with the Red Army and served
in the corps of engineers as an explosives technician.
Eisenstein began his artistic career as a cartoonist, publishing his first cartoon in the
St. Petersburg Gazette in 1917. He soon became fascinated by theater, however, doing set
design, costuming, and acting while still a soldier. In 1920, he secured a position as
scenic designer of the First Proletkult Workers Theater. During his time at Proletkult,
he began his study of stage direction with Vsevelod Meyerhold, whose theory of biome-
chanics and stagecraft would have lasting impact on him. Eisenstein quickly advanced
as a director, and in 1923, he published his first article in Lef, the journal of the artistic
left front. Entitled “The Montage of Attractions,” the piece explained his theory for
using all the elements of the dramatic arts to produce specific reactions in the audience.
Through his theatrical work, Eisenstein gradually developed an interest in film.
After viewing the films of D. W. Griffith, particularly Intolerance (1916), and studying
the basics of film editing with Lev Kuleshov and Esther Shub, he created a short film
component, entitled Glumov’s Diary (1923), for one of his stage productions. By the
end of 1924, Eisenstein had completed his first feature-length film. Strike, which pre-
miered in Moscow early in 1925, told the story of workers who strike to protest labor
conditions at a locomotive factory and are brutally crushed by Tsarist forces. In making
the film, he had dispensed with the notion of stars playing main characters, which, by
the 1920s, had already become an established policy in Hollywood. Instead, he used
“typage” (choosing actors with particular looks), and treated the assembled masses as
characters. The film had mixed reception, but it was clear that Eisenstein was begin-
ning to revolutionize cinema to further the aims of socialism.
In his next film, Battleship Potemkin (1925), he fully realized his desire to express
revolutionary ideas through film. Battleship Potemkin was originally intended as part
of a twentieth-anniversary celebration of the anti-Tsarist uprisings of 1905. Eisenstein,
however, reduced the many protests of that year to a single representative episode, the
mutiny of a crew of sailors who were being mistreated by the officers on their ship.
Told in five acts, Battleship Potemkin has a precise dialectical structure specifically
designed to foment revolutionary action. Through film editing, Eisenstein was devel-
oping a theory of dialectical montage based on Marx’s notion of dialectical materialism
in which the movement of history is determined by the clashing of economic forces.
Using the formula—thesis plus antithesis yields synthesis—Eisenstein proposed that
meaning, or synthesis, in film was derived from the collision between two contrasting
shots. His technique was profoundly different from the Hollywood style of continuity
editing, which strove to combine shots in a seamless, fluid manner so that the audience
could be fully absorbed in the story. Unlike his Hollywood counterparts, Eisenstein
was not interested in entertaining, but in inspiring revolutionary action.
In each of Battleship Potemkin’s sections, an act of injustice is followed by an act of
rebellion, with the rebellious acts escalating as the film progresses. In the first act, sai-
lors who are fed rotten meat protest by staging a hunger strike. In the second act,
marines who are ordered to shoot the sailors refuse and join the sailors in a mutiny.

640
 Eisenstein, Sergei

In the third act, the battleship pulls into the Odessa harbor displaying a dead sailor
before the people of Odessa with a placard indicating he died “for a bowl of soup.” Res-
idents of Odessa then support the sailors with gifts of food. In the fourth, and most
famous act, “The Odessa Steps,” the Tsar’s soldiers massacre the supporters on a mon-
umental white staircase, after which the battleship fires on the Tsarist buildings at the
top of the stairs. The Odessa Steps sequence features all of Eisenstein’s various forms
of montage (metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual) to create powerful
emotional effects in the viewer. In the final act, a squadron of the Tsar’s navy is called
in to destroy the mutinous battleship, but instead, all the ships join the Potemkin in a
revolutionary show of solidarity.
Battleship Potemkin made Eisenstein an international celebrity. The film was exhib-
ited around the world, and although it was banned in some countries for its
revolutionary content, it was generally seen as heralding the arrival of a new movement
in film history, known as Soviet Montage. Following Potemkin, Eisenstein made October
(known in the West as Ten Days That Shook the World, 1928), which tells, in compressed
form, the story of the Russian Revolution. In October, Eisenstein further developed his
theories, particularly stressing the intellectual montage that had been the least developed
form in Battleship Potemkin. Following October, Eisenstein completed Old and New (The
General Line, 1929), a film that dealt with the collectivization of a dairy farm. For the
first time in this film Eisenstein used a main character, Marfa Lapkina, as the agent driv-
ing the process of modernization that brings change to the farming village.
After Old and New, Eisenstein traveled, first throughout Europe, then to the United
States, where he was contracted by Paramount to direct a number of films, including
an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, but, predictably, the deal fell
through as Eisenstein’s complex scenario emphasized the failures of American capital-
ism rather than the culpability of the main character. Following this disappointment,
he went to Mexico in 1930 to make a film that was to be financed by Upton Sinclair.
Eisenstein traveled throughout Mexico with Edouard Tisse, his cameraman, and his
collaborator, Grigori Alexandrov, but after a year of filming, battling opposition, over-
staying his leave from the Soviet Union, and finally losing the support of Sinclair,
Eisenstein was forced to leave Mexico without the negatives for Que Viva Mexico. Fol-
lowing nearly three years of international travel, Eisenstein returned to Moscow in
1932, shattered by his experiences, and suffered a nervous breakdown.
When he recovered, Eisenstein resumed teaching at GIK (Gerasimov Institute of
Cinematography) in Moscow, and chaired the Directing department. He married film-
maker Vera Atasheva, and made his first sound film, Bezhin Meadow (1935), based on
a Turgenev novel about a father who murders his revolutionary son. Misfortune con-
tinued to plague Eisenstein as Bezhin Meadow was rejected by the head of Soviet
Cinema, Boris Shumyatsky. His attempts to continue making films were often
thwarted by Stalinists in the Soviet film industry, who advocated socialist realism over
what they saw as his formalist exercises.
Despite constant criticism and threats throughout the Stalinist 1930s and ’40s,
Eisenstein would make two more film masterpieces. Alexander Nevsky (1938) told
the story of a Russian prince who repelled a thirteenth-century Teutonic invasion at a

641
Ephron, Nora

time when the threat of Nazi Germany loomed. The film’s famous score was composed
by Sergei Prokofiev, and its unqualified critical and popular success helped earn Eisen-
stein the Order of Lenin prize in 1939. Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1944) was also a
popular and critical success, telling the story of the sixteenth-century grand prince of
Moscow who crowned himself Tsar of Russia, and set about reclaiming lost territory.
Part Two, however, angered Stalin with its critical portrayal of the powerful Tsar’s trans-
formation into a cruel dictator, and was not released in the United States until 1959.
In addition to his films, Eisenstein wrote several books and published many articles
on various aspects of film theory. Two of his books, The Film Sense (1942) and Film
Form: Essays on Film Theory (1949), still rank as required reading for film students
who hope to understand Soviet Montage.
Sergei Eisenstein died of heart failure in Moscow on February 11, 1948, but his
impact on successive generations of filmmakers has been vast. His theories of montage
proved inspirational for many of the new wave movements that flourished around the
world in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite critiques that have painted Eisenstein’s theory
of montage as propagandistic manipulation, his reputation as a cinematic genius con-
tinues to grow with time.
See also: Intellectual Montage.

Selected Filmography
Ivan Groznyy III (1988); Que Viva Mexico (1979); Eisenstein’s Mexican Project (1958); Ivan the
Terrible, Part Two (1958); Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1944); Seeds of Freedom (1943); Conquer-
ing Cross (1941); Idol of Hope (1941); Land and Freedom (1941); Mexican Symphony (1941);
Mexico Marches (1941); Spaniard and Indian (1941); Zapotecan Village (1941); Time in the
Sun (1940); The Fergana Canal (1939); Alexander Nevsky (1938); Bezhin lug (1937); Death
Day (1934); Eisenstein in Mexico (1933); Thunder over Mexico (1933); ¡Que viva Mexico!
(1932); La destrucción de Oaxaca (1931); Sentimental Romance (1930); Old and New (1929);
The Storming of La Sarraz (1929); Ten Days That Shook the World (1928); Battleship Potemkin
(1925); Strike (1925)

References
Barna, Yon. Eisenstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.
Eisenstein, Sergei. Trans. by Herbert Marshall. Immoral Memories: An Autobiography by Sergei
M. Eisenstein. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.
—Joseph Christopher Schaub

EPHRON, NORA. Nora Ephron is among the increasing number of women who
are working as writers and directors in Hollywood. Ephron was born on May 19,
1941, the first daughter of the playwrights and screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron
and grew up in Beverly Hills. After graduating from Wellesley College, Ephron was
a reporter at the New York Post from 1962 to 1968 and then worked as a freelancer

642
 Ephron, Nora

for four years. She served as a contributing editor for New York magazine from 1973 to
1974, the year she moved to Esquire to write a column and serve as a senior editor. She
also published collections of her magazine articles—personal observations on feminist
interests and pop culture—in books such as Wallflower at the Orgy (1970) and Scribble
Scribble (1978).
Interestingly, Ephron emerged as a playwright after her parents turned the letters
she sent them from Wellesley into a script for the play Take Her, She’s Mine. Deciding
to try her hand at script-writing in the 1970s, she worked on the short-lived series
Adam’s Rib in 1973 and wrote the screenplay for the TV movie Perfect Gentlemen in
1978. She turned her attention to the big screen in the early 1980s, writing, with Alice
Arlen, the screenplay for the box-office hit Silkwood (1983). The film dramatized the
harrowing story of Karen Silkwood, a disgruntled employee at a Crescent, Oklahoma,
nuclear power plant who died in a mysterious car crash. That same year her novel
Heartburn appeared. Based on her marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein, her sec-
ond husband, the book was eventually turned into a movie, also called Heartburn
(1986). Although the picture boasted a star-studded cast, including Meryl Streep and
Jack Nicholson, it did poorly at the box-office.
Ephron found the filmic success for which she was looking with When Harry Met
Sally (1989), a delightful romantic comedy starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as
longtime friends who find love with each other after years of failed relationships with
others. Heralded as the next great writer of romantic comedies, Ephron surprised
many people in the industry when she followed When Harry Met Sally with Cookie
(1989)—co-written with Arlen—and My Blue Heaven (1990), two crime comedies,
and her directorial debut, the drama This Is My Life (1992). The latter film, which
Ephron co-wrote with her sister Delia, follows a single mother (Julie Kavner) who pur-
sues her dream of becoming a stand-up comic while her children languish at home.
Finally returning to the romantic comedy, Ephron co-wrote the script for Sleepless in
Seattle (1993) with David S. Ward and Jeff Arch. Drawing on Leo McCarey’s An Affair
to Remember (1957) for inspiration, Sleepless stars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as star-
crossed lovers who finally find each other at the top of the Empire State Building. The
film charmed audiences, and although her next project, Mixed Nuts (1994), was rejected
by viewers, Ephron would go on to pen romantic comedy hits such as Michael (1996)
and the updated version of The Shop around the Comer (1940), You’ve Got Mail (1998),
which Ephron directed and co-write with her sister Delia, and which again starred Hanks
and Ryan as lovers who must find each other by way of a most circuitous route.
The sisters then adapted Delia’s novel Hanging Up (2000) into a film of the same
name, and Nora directed another crime comedy, the box-office flop Lucky Numbers
(2000). After that failure, Ephron wrote Imaginary Friends, a play that opened at San
Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2002. She returned to Hollywood three years later to
co-write—again with Delia—and direct the big-screen adaptation of the 1960s sitcom
Bewitched (2005). Although it featured Nicole Kidman as the spirited witch Samantha,
the film was a critical and box-office failure. Ephron would wait another four years
before making her next film, Julie & Julia (2009), adapted from the memoirs of Julie
Powell and Julia Child.

643
Ephron, Nora

Turning her writing skills to another medium, Ephron has developed her own blog;
in 2006 she gathered her Internet musings into a collection of essays: I Feel Bad about
My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.

Selected Filmography
Julie & Julia (2009); Bewitched (2005); Hanging Up (2000); You’ve Got Mail (1998); Michael
(1996); Mixed Nuts (1994); Sleepless in Seattle (1993); This Is My Life (1992); My Blue Heaven
(1990); When Harry Met Sally (1989); Cookie (1989); Heartburn (1986); Silkwood (1983)

References
Bellafante, Ginia. “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.” Time, December 21, 1998.
Levy, Barbara. “Nora Ephron: All You Ever Wanted to Know about Control.” Ladies Laughing:
Wit as Control in Contemporary American Women Writers. New York: Routledge, 1997: 35–50.
McCreadie, Marsha. The Women Who Write the Movies: From Frances Marion to Nora Ephron.
Secaucus: Carol Publishing Group, 1994.
—Albert Rolls

644
 v
F
FAIRBANKS, DOUGLAS, SR. Referred to by some as “The King of Hollywood,”
Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was one of the dominant figures of the early film industry. His
dashing good looks made him the quintessential leading man of the silent era, and
his business acumen and vision helped create United Artists and the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. During the 1920s he and his wife, fellow screen star
Mary Pickford, reigned as Hollywood’s first great “power couple.”
Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman Fairbanks Sr. was born May 23, 1883, in Denver,
the son of an attorney who abandoned the family when Douglas was five years old.
As a child Fairbanks showed an interest in the stage and at the age of 11 began per-
forming in local theater productions in Denver. He won rave reviews for his work
and established a reputation in the Denver area as a natural talent. He dropped out
of high school during his senior year and in 1900 moved to New York City to pursue
acting as a profession. He worked a series of odd jobs before making his Broadway
debut in 1902 in a play titled The Duke’s Jester. In 1907, he married Anna Beth Sully,
and the couple had one child, Douglas Elton Fairbanks, who the world would later
know as the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
Seeing the potential in the emerging film industry, the ambitious Fairbanks moved
to Hollywood in 1915, where he signed a contract with the Triangle Film Corporation
and began working with famed director D. W. Griffith. That year he made his first
film, The Lamb, and within a very short time established himself as one of Hollywood’s
most popular actors. Fairbanks eventually signed with Paramount, where much of his
early work consisted of light-hearted romantic comedies that the public loved. In
1916, he met Mary Pickford, the most popular actress in the country at the time,
and the two soon began an affair. In 1917, when the United States entered World
War I, Pickford, Fairbanks and their friend Charlie Chaplin toured the country selling
war bonds. By 1918, Fairbanks was one of the biggest box-office draws in the movie
industry and a keen businessman who continually sought more control over the busi-
ness end of the motion pictures in which he appeared. Together with Pickford, Chaplin,
D. W. Griffith, and attorney William G. McAdoo, he founded United Artists in an

645
Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr.

effort to give the stars complete

artistic control over their films and
establish a distribution network that
would give them a greater share of
the profits from their movies.
After beginning his relation-
ship with Pickford, Fairbanks
divorced his first wife and mar-
ried the actress in 1922. Holly-
wood’s first great celebrity union
generated a mass of publicity,
and huge crowds greeted the cou-
ple during a honeymoon tour of
Europe. In California their Bev-
erly Hills estate, called “Pickfair,”
was the social center of Holly-
wood. During the 1920s, Fair-
banks began making the high-
energy action pictures for which
he would be best remembered.
These included pictures such as
The Mark of Zorro (1920), The
Three Musketeers (1921), Robin
Hood (1922), The Thief of Bagdad
(1924), and The Black Pirate
(1926). The decade also saw Fair-
banks establish a number of
In the post–World War I film industry, Douglas Fairbanks
Hollywood institutions and tradi-
found his niche as an action hero and made the transition to
sound through roles in The Mark of Zorro, Three Musketeers, tions that remain an integral part
and Robin Hood, although age began to make swashbuckling of the film industry. In 1927, he
more difficult. (Library of Congress) was a founding partner of Grau-
man’s Chinese Theater and, in
the first ceremony of its type, Fairbanks and Pickford placed their hand- and footprints
in wet cement for the theater’s grand opening. The same year Fairbanks won election as
the first president of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the first
Academy Awards were presented in his office.
The end of the silent movie era marked a rapid downturn in Fairbanks’s fortunes,
and by the early 1930s the aging star had lost interest in the industry that he helped
create. No longer up to the physical challenge that some of his earlier roles required,
the chain-smoking Fairbanks watched as the American public embraced a new, youn-
ger generation of action stars. His personal life also began to deteriorate during the
period. After more than a decade as Hollywood’s most famous couple, he and Mary
Pickford separated in 1933 and divorced three years later. He retired from acting after
appearing in The Private Life of Don Juan (1934). Fairbanks married his third wife,

646
 Fleming, Victor

Sylvia Ashley, in 1936, and spent much of the remainder of his life travelling. He died of a
heart attack at his home in Santa Monica, California, on December 12, 1939.

References
Balio, Tino T. United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2008.
Herndon, Booton. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks: The Most Popular Couple the World Has Ever
Known. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
Tibbetts, John C., and James M. Welsh. His Majesty the American: The Cinema of Douglas Fairbanks,
Sr. South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1977.
Vance, Jeffrey, and Tony Maietta. Douglas Fairbanks. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
—Ben Wynne

FLEMING, VICTOR. One of the most notable directors of the early film industry,
Victor Fleming directed dozens of feature films during a career that spanned more
than 30 years. While he worked with most of the notable actors and actresses of
Hollywood’s golden era, he is probably best known for directing the film classics The
Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939).
Victor Fleming was born on February 23, 1883 (though some sources say 1889), in
Pasadena, California. As a young man he worked as a mechanic and racecar driver. In an
era when reliable automobile pilots were at a premium, he found work in 1910 as a stunt
driver in films, which eventually led to work behind the camera. He served as an assistant
cameraman under director Allan Dwan and worked on a number of early films starring
Douglas Fairbanks Sr. By 1915, Fleming was director of photography for director D. W.
Griffith and well on his way to a successful career in the film industry. During World
War I, Fleming served in the army and was the chief cameraman for Woodrow Wilson as
Wilson negotiated the Treaty of Versailles in France in 1919. Following the war, Fleming
directed his first feature films, When Clouds Go By (1919) and The Mollycoddle (1920),
both of which starred Fairbanks. Working for United Artists and Paramount during the
1920s, he established a reputation as a talented, tough director capable of delivering aggres-
sive dramas that today would be characterized as “action pictures.” He also set the standard
for directors of the period who were making the transition from silent films to “talkies.”
Fleming’s career reached a turning point in 1927 when he directed one of the land-
mark films of early Hollywood, The Virginian, an adaptation of the popular Owen
Wister western novel. In the film Fleming worked with a young actor named Gary
Cooper, and under Fleming’s direction Cooper emerged as a star destined to become
an American film icon. During the 1930s, Fleming signed with MGM and directed
a number of successful films including Red Dust (1932), Treasure Island (1934), Reck-
less (1935), and The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935). As was the case with Cooper, Fleming
was credited with helping guide the early career of Spencer Tracy, who starred for the
director in Captains Courageous (1937) and won an Oscar for Best Actor for his perfor-
mance.

647
Fleming, Victor

The late 1930s represented the

high-water mark in Fleming’s
career, as he directed two of the
most beloved motion pictures of
all time, The Wizard of Oz and
Gone with the Wind (both 1939),
which were both nominated for
the Best Picture Academy Award
during the same year, with the latter
winning the Oscar. Though known
as a rough-and-tumble “man’s
director,” he was able to coax stellar
performances from a young Judy
Garland and from the tempera-
mental Vivien Leigh. Under Flem-
ing’s direction Leigh won the Best
Actress Oscar for her performance
in Gone with the Wind and Hattie
McDaniel won the Academy
Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Fleming himself won the 1939
Academy Award as Best Director
for his successful efforts in bringing
Margaret Mitchell’s epic novel
about the Old South to the screen.
Director Victor Fleming and actress Jean Harlow stand on a Fleming was also Clark Gable’s
staircase, looking over the railing. Fleming directed Harlow favorite director, and the two good
in the films Red Dust and Bombshell. (Hulton Archive/Getty friends worked together on a num-
Images) ber of projects. Fleming continued
to direct successful films into the 1940s, but none would match Gone with the Wind or
The Wizard of Oz in long-term appeal. Some of his later works included Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde (1941), Tortilla Flat (1942), A Guy Named Joe (1943), and Adventure (1946).
In 1948, he directed Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc, his final film. Fleming died suddenly
on January 6, 1949, while vacationing near Cottonwood, Arizona.
Victor Fleming left a rich legacy as a filmmaker, although he has traditionally been
underrated. One of the most respected directors in the early period of Hollywood, he
deftly navigated the waters from silent pictures to “talkies,” and from black-and-
white film to color. He also established a cinematic style that many successful directors
who followed him sought to emulate.

Selected Filmography
Joan of Arc (1948); Adventure (1945); A Guy Named Joe (1943); Tortilla Flat (1942); Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde (1941); Gone with the Wind (1939); The Wizard of Oz (1939); Test Pilot

648
 Flynn, Errol

(1938); Captains Courageous (1937); The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935); Reckless (1935); Treasure
Island (1934); The Wet Parade (1932); Around the World with Douglas Fairbanks (1931); Rene-
gades (1930); Common Clay (1930); The Virginian (1929); The Wolf Song (1929); The Awaken-
ing (1928); Abie’s Irish Rose (1928); The Rough Riders (1927)

References
Hakell, Molly. Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2009.
Harmetz, Aljean. The Making of The Wizard of Oz: Movie Magic and Studio Power in the Prime
of MGM. New York: Hyperion, 1998.
Sragow, Michael. Victor Fleming: The Life and Work of an American Movie Master. New York:
Pantheon, 2009.
Vieira, Mark A. Hollywood Dreams Made Real: Irving Thalberg and the Rise of MGM. New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 2009.

—Ben Wynne

FLYNN, ERROL. Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn was born in the British Common-
wealth seaport of Hobart, Tasmania, on June 20, 1909. He was an Australian film
actor descended from an old Antrim Catholic family from Ireland. Famous for his
romantic, swashbuckler roles, he became a Hollywood star during the 1930s and
1940s. A compelling screen figure and notorious womanizer, Flynn took roles in cos-
tume action-adventures that seemed to match his flamboyant lifestyle perfectly. He
was married three times: to Lili Damita, Nora Eddington, and Patrice Wymore. He
had four children: a son, Sean, and three daughters, Deirdre, Rory (who wrote The
Baron of Mulholland. A Daughter Remembers Errol Flynn in 2006), and Arnella Roma.
After becoming an American citizen in 1942, Flynn sought to join the American army.
To his great disappointment, he was rejected due to having been exposed to several dif-
ferent diseases. Flynn died on October 14, 1959, of a heart attack in Vancouver, Canada,
and is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California.
Flynn attended fine schools in Australia and England, but was expelled from most; his
rebellious, adventurous nature made him change jobs several times when he was in his
late teens and early twenties. In 1933, an Australian film producer saw the tall, athletic,
good-looking Flynn and offered him a part in In the Wake of the Bounty. After his debut
in the role of Fletcher Christian, he passionately embraced acting, which he maintained
came quite naturally to him. That same year he went to England, where he gained acting
experience with the Northampton Repertory Company. A role in Murder at Monte Carlo
(1934), a low-budget mystery film made by Warner Bros.-Teddington Studios, UK, led
to his first Hollywood contract: Flynn was the last minute replacement for Robert Donat
in Warner Brother’s pirate epic Captain Blood (1935). The role as the dashing swash-
buckler Blood brought him instant success and worldwide popularity.
Nicknamed the Tasmanian devil, Flynn despised mediocrity above all things. In
They Died with Their Boots On (1942), Flynn as General George Armstrong Custer

649
Ford, John

described his artistic credo when asked where he was going: “To hell or glory. It
depends upon your point of view.” Embodying characters such as Captain Blood,
Miles Hendon in The Prince and The Pauper (1937), Sir Robin Hood of Locksley in
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), the Earl of Essex in The Private Lives of Elizabeth
and Essex (1939), Captain Geoffrey Thorpe in The Sea Hawk, (1940), James J. Corbett
in Gentleman Jim (1942), and Don Juan in the Adventures of Don Juan (1949), Flynn
became a prodigal figure within the motion picture world. He defined the unique male
archetype of the noble, dashing hero of the silver screen, creating a constellation of
manly virtues that made him, in Jack L. Warner’s words, “all the heroes in one magnifi-
cent, sexy, animal package.” Indeed, Flynn’s characterization of the roguish antihero
would influence the way other action-movie roles were conceived.
Flynn was notorious for his high-spirited bacchanalias, hedonistic lifestyle, and
amorous escapades. His freewheeling life took a serious turn in 1942, when two under-
age girls accused him of statutory rape. Although he was cleared of the charges a year
later, the rape trial had a strong impact on his career. As a result of this experience,
Flynn left Hollywood in 1952. After a detour in Europe, he came back in 1956 and
played roles of embittered men in The Sun Also Rises (1957), Too Much Too Soon
(1958), and The Roots of Heaven (1958).
Flynn was interested in politics, co-authored several screenplays, and wrote three
books. He authored Beam Ends (1937) and Showdown (1946), as well as a post-
humously published autobiography entitled My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1959). A leftist,
he narrated the documentary film Cuban Story (1959) and wrote, narrated, and co-
produced Cuban Rebel Girls (1959), a semidocumentary tribute to Fidel Castro. These
last films made him persona non grata in 1950s Hollywood. Sadly, despite his numer-
ous notable roles, Flynn was never nominated for any awards.
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The

References
Bawden, Liz-Anne, ed. The Oxford Companion to Film. New York: Oxford University Press,
1976: 257.
“Biography of Errol Flynn.” The Official Errol Flynn Estate Site authorized by Patrice Wymore;
retrieved January 31, 2009. http://errolflynnestates.com/bio/index.htm.
“In Like Flynn.” Official Web Site of Errol Flynn, from Rory Flynn; retrieved January 3, 2009.
http://www.inlikeflynn.com.
Katz, Ephraim. The International Film Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1982:
428–29.
—Réka M. Cristian

FORD, JOHN. One of the most renowned directors in the history of Hollywood,
John Ford will always be associated with making movies that captured enduring images
of the mythic American landscape. He made over 130 films that spanned from the
early silent era to the late 1960s; and while his work encompassed many genres and

650
 Ford, John

was set in diverse periods of his-

tory, he is best remembered for a
cycle of westerns, often filmed in
Utah’s rugged iconic Monument
Valley, in which he explored the
myths, archetypes, and jarring
contradictions inherent in stories
of American exceptionalism.
Ford is still Hollywood’s most
honored director, having won
more Oscars (four) than any
other director in history. Oddly
enough, however, none of his
Oscars was awarded for his west-
erns, an indication of the man’s
breadth of accomplishment, his
complex artistic sensibility, and
Hollywood’s uncomfortable rela-
tionship to the genre.
Born John Martin Aloysius
Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine,
on February 1, 1894, to Irish
immigrant parents, he wandered
to Hollywood at the age of 19,
John Ford (seen here in 1934) is the only Hollywood director
following his brother Francis,
to win five Academy Awards. Ford is known for films such as
who was directing and acting in his 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of
silent films. In later life, Ford Wrath. (AP/Wide World Photos)
maintained he never wanted to
have anything to do with the movies, but was simply broke and did what he could to
eat. He rode as a clansman in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), but hurt himself
when he ran into a branch on the first day of shooting; he spent several days after the
accident observing the master Griffith at his craft. The experience proved significant if
not immediately life altering; after years of working for his brother and various other
directors as a laborer, actor, stuntman, property man, and general assistant, he got his
first chance to direct at the age of 23 when the man assigned to the job he eventually
took did not show up. By then John Feeney had changed his name to Jack Ford, altering
it again to the more formal-sounding John Ford when he began to be assigned A-
pictures.
In 1924, he directed his 50th and most ambitious picture to date, Iron Horse, an epic
about the building of the transatlantic railroad. Filmed on location in Nevada, often in
extreme conditions of cold and snow, the mammoth production traced themes that
would emerge throughout Ford’s work: the interplay and conflict of ethnic and racial
communities during the expansion of the American continent; the effect of landscape
on the way Americans imagine their destiny; and the conflict embedded in the

651
Ford, John

American psyche between community and the individual. The film was also marked by
Ford’s technique of blending raucous and crude humor into otherwise serious dramatic
material, a practice critics never failed to abhor and Ford never stopped practicing.
By the early sound era he had developed into one of Hollywood’s most trusted and
eclectic directors, making movies ranging from high-toned melodrama (Arrowsmith
1931), to adventure (The Lost Patrol 1933), to romantic comedy (The Whole Town’s
Talking 1935), to biography (Mary of Scotland 1936). But the most representative Ford
pictures of this era—ones in which the subject matter began to evolve toward themes
he would pursue in the bulk of his career—were those that made up an informal tril-
ogy starring American humorist Will Rogers: Doctor Bull (1933) Judge Priest (1934),
and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935). If these films veer toward nostalgia and folksy
paternalism—a tendency throughout Ford’s work—they nonetheless confront the
ugliness of racial prejudice and intolerance in otherwise idealized rural communities.
In 1935, Ford won his first Best Director Oscar for The Informer, a dark and shad-
owy adaptation of the Liam O’Flaherty novel of betrayal and redemption in Ireland
during “the troubles.” Although stylistically the film owed a great deal to German
Expressionist directors like F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, it marked the enduring per-
sonal interest Ford had in making films set in his often idealized ancestral homeland.
Ford remained a self-conscious Irish American, and while it sometimes broadly passed
into uncomfortable clichés—the heavy-drinking, brawling, and sentimental Irish brag-
gart is a character that appears even in many of his westerns—the strong Irish ethnic
flavor in his work was indicative of the rough-hewn son-of-an-immigrant American
identity of which Ford was proud, and that he had no interest in obscuring even after
he became a Hollywood legend. Indeed, one of the most personal films of his late
career, The Quiet Man (1952), filmed on location in County Mayo, Ireland, although
invested with a rather sentimental charm and lyricism, did not shy away from explor-
ing the troubling issues of sectarian division, betrayal, sexism, and alcoholism.
In the late 1930s, Ford began to work with two American actors who in their own
very powerful ways would develop into iconic presences in the American cultural land-
scape: Henry Fonda and John Wayne. Indeed, the Ford films that star these two actors
form the basis of his most enduring and resonant accomplishment. These films seem to
speak to each other, counteract each other, and even debate each other, as Ford cri-
tiques and glorifies aspects of the American expansionist past.
In 1939, Ford cast Fonda as a settler caught up in fighting during the Revolutionary
War in Drums along the Mohawk, an epic in which the director examines the uncertain
national affiliation and nascent patriotism of people struggling to survive in the wilder-
ness. In the same year, Ford gave Fonda the career-changing lead role in Young
Mr. Lincoln. Admired by Sergei Eisenstein for its subtle visual dialectic, the film was
in essence a courtroom melodrama in which the young Abraham Lincoln defends a
man unjustly accused of murder. Ford coaxed the reluctant Fonda to take the part, help-
ing him understand that the Lincoln he was playing was merely a backwoods hick law-
yer with no particular mark of greatness about him; Ford knew the audience would
project Lincoln’s future greatness onto the actor’s every step and word. In these films,
and in the documentary-flavored The Grapes of Wrath (1940)—a powerful adaptation

652
 Ford, John

of the John Steinbeck novel about the migration of sharecroppers from Oklahoma’s
dust bowl to California’s fertile valleys that presented a surprisingly sharp critique of
capitalism—Ford helped to shape Henry Fonda’s persona as a strong man of quiet
integrity in whom the greatest hopes of the common citizen stirred.
If, in Ford’s films, Fonda largely came to represent the American individual quietly
standing for collective justice and operating within the somewhat porous boundaries of
constitutional law (themes Ford exploited beautifully in the poetic 1946 western My
Darling Clementine, in which Fonda played the awkward lawman Wyatt Earp), John
Wayne came to represent the country’s conflicted relationship with an ideology of
romantic individualism that threatened civil society. Ford made Wayne a star by casting
him as the gentle outlaw the Ringo Kid in the classic western Stagecoach (1939), a pop-
ulist saga that suggests that civilization, represented by the microcosmic space of the
stagecoach, requires the instinctual abilities and innate morality of an outlaw to save it.
Stagecoach became the first in a series of Ford’s westerns in which Wayne was used
simultaneously to reflect and to disrupt the audience’s attraction to such characters.
Notable among these films is the so-called Cavalry Trilogy, beginning with 1948’s Fort
Apache (which co-starred Fonda, cast against his screen image as a Custer-like martinet
who leads his regiment to slaughter), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande
(1950), three films that together form a complex examination of how military duty
and ritual served the purposes of American projects of conquest and expansion even
while calling them into question. It may be that Wayne and Ford’s most famous col-
laboration came with The Searchers (1955), in which Wayne played the racist former
Confederate soldier Ethan Edwards, who leads a search to avenge the murder of his
brother’s family and the abduction of his niece by Comanche Indians. In that film,
the code of individualism seems demonic, and comes close to disrupting the potential
for society to heal the wounds inflicted by its racist past.
Ford’s work distinguished itself throughout his career by the array of character
actors who repeatedly appeared in his movies over the decades. He called them his
trademark “John Ford Stock Company,” a fluid group that helped deepen his explora-
tion of the nature of community. Part of the pleasure in watching Ford’s movies is in
seeing these actors continue to play similar roles, to age, and to carry with them the leg-
acies of their past performances.
It may be argued that Ford was an artist of his time, and as such, his films do not
always age well. A selective compilation of his western battle scenes would suggest he
didn’t shy away from the visual cliché of anonymous marauding Indians dying anony-
mous deaths. Did his films contribute to simplistic and perhaps racist stereotypes of
Native Americans? Ford was troubled enough with the question that late in his career
he made the epic Cheyenne Autumn (1964), which tells the story of conquest from
the Native American point of view. The elegiac film was deemed leaden by many crit-
ics, and its casting of non–Native American actors in major Native American roles
would be more troubling if had not been so typical of Hollywood’s casting practices
during that period.
Ford served in the Navy during WWII, and he made a series of battle documentaries
for the American military that earned him the rank of Admiral. But by the mid-1960s,

653
Ford, John

the director’s increasingly nostalgic view of military service, his hardening right-wing
politics (he produced for the military in 1971 the prowar documentary Vietnam!
Vietnam!), and his increasingly positive view of what many perceived of as the problem-
atic American past made him seem reactionary and out of touch with the changing poli-
tics of the New Hollywood. Approached by many critics and writers who valued his
wisdom and knowledge of the industry, when he did grant interviews he often came
off as cynical and disagreeable. Nevertheless, his influence on directors coming of age
during the 1960s and ’70s was immense. Just as Orson Welles watched Stagecoach over
40 times before he filmed Citizen Kane, a host of later directors of the New American
Cinema studied Ford’s work, including Martin Scorsese, whose Taxi Driver (1974)
reads as a nightmarish urban updating of Ford’s The Searchers in its relentless explora-
tion of America’s violently conflicted attitude toward homicidal heroes.
In 1973 Ford was chosen as the first recipient of the American Film Institute’s Life-
time Achievement Award. He died on August 31, 1973, widely acclaimed by his sur-
viving colleagues in the industry as America’s greatest film director.

Selected Filmography
7 Women (1966); Cheyenne Autumn (1964); Donovan’s Reef (1963); How the West Was Won
(1962); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); Two Rode Together (1961); Sergeant Rutledge
(1960); The Horse Soldiers (1959); Korea (1959); The Last Hurrah (1958); Gideon of Scotland
Yard (1958); The Wings of Eagles (1957); The Searchers (1956); Mister Roberts (1955); The Long
Gray Line (1955); Mogambo (1953); The Sun Shines Bright (1953); What Price Glory (1952);
The Quiet Man (1952); This Is Korea! (1951); Rio Grande (1950); Wagon Master (1950); She
Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); 3 Godfathers (1948); Fort Apache (1948); The Fugitive (1947);
My Darling Clementine (1946); They Were Expendable (1945); How to Operate Behind Enemy
Lines (1943); German Industrial Manpower (1943); December 7th (1943); The Battle of Midway
(1942); Sex Hygiene (1942); Torpedo Squadron (1942); How Green Was My Valley (1941);
Tobacco Road (1941); The Long Voyage Home (1940); The Grapes of Wrath (1940); Drums along
the Mohawk (1939); Young Mr. Lincoln (1939); Stagecoach (1939); Submarine Patrol (1938);
Four Men and a Prayer (1938); The Hurricane (1937); Wee Willie Winkie (1937); The Plough
and the Stars (1936); Mary of Scotland (1936); The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936); Steamboat
Round the Bend (1935); The Informer (1935); Judge Priest (1934); The Lost Patrol (1934); Arrow-
smith (1931); Men without Women (1930); The Black Watch (1929); Strong Boy (1929); Riley the
Cop (1928); Napoleon’s Barber (1928); Hangman’s House (1928); Four Sons (1928); Upstream
(1927); The Blue Eagle (1926); 3 Bad Men (1926); The Iron Horse (1924)

References
Ford, Dan. Pappy: The Life of John Ford. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979.
McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001.
McBride, Joseph, and Michael Wilmington. John Ford. New York: Da Capo, 1975.
Place, J. A. The Non-Western Films of John Ford. New York: Citadel, 1979.
Sinclair, Andrew. John Ford: A Biography. New York: Dial, 1979.
—Robert Cowgill

654
 Foster, Jodie

FOSTER, JODIE. An award-winning American actress, producer, and director,

Jodie Foster catapulted to superstardom during the 1990s. Her enormous talents as
an actress have earned her worldwide respect. Considered to be one of the most power-
ful actresses in Hollywood today, it is widely believed in the movie industry that having
Foster star in a movie guarantees that it will become a box-office success.
Alicia Christian “Jodie” Foster was born on November 19, 1962, in Los Angeles,
California, to parents Evelyn “Brandy” Foster, a film producer, and Lucius Fisher
Foster III, a real estate broker. Her first experience with acting came at age three when
she was featured in a Coppertone suntan lotion commercial. By age eight, the young
actress had performed in more than 45 commercials. Foster made her television acting
debut in 1969 on the CBS television show Mayberry, R.F.D. In 1972, the young star
made her motion picture debut in the Walt Disney film, Napoleon and Samantha.
Throughout the early 1970s, Foster performed in several additional movies, including
Menace on the Mountain (1973), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1975), Bugsy Malone
(1976), and Freaky Friday (1976). A pivotal role in her career came in 1976 when
Foster co-starred with Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Her portrayal of Iris, a 12-year-
old prostitute, earned her Best Supporting Actress Awards from the New York Film
Critics, the National Film Critics, and the Los Angeles Film Critics as well as an Academy
Award nomination.
In 1980, Foster graduated valedictorian from the French-speaking prep school the
Lycée Francais de Los Angeles. She then took a break from her acting career to attend
Yale University. In 1985, she graduated magna cum laude with a BA in literature.
While attending the university as a freshman, Foster became a media sensation when
John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30,
1981. Hinckley claimed that his actions were an expression of his love for Foster.
In 1988, Foster’s portrayal of Sarah Tobias, a working-class rape survivor, in the
critically acclaimed The Accused earned her both a Golden Globe Award and an Acad-
emy Award for Best Actress. In 1991, Foster won a second Academy Award for Best
Actress for her portrayal of FBI agent Clarice Starling in the blockbuster hit The Silence
of the Lambs. That same year, Foster also starred in and directed her first movie, Little
Man Tate. In 1992, she founded her own production company, Egg Pictures, which
specialized in the production of independent films. In 1994, Foster co-produced and
starred in Nell, which told the story of a young girl living in total isolation in the back
hills of North Carolina. By now an established actress in Hollywood, Foster continued
to obtain highly sought-after roles in numerous movies. In 1997, she starred alongside
Matthew McConaughey in the science fiction movie Contact. Panic Room (2002), in
which she played the lead, was also a box-office success. In 2004, Foster expanded
her acting repertoire when she took on a role in the French-speaking film Un long
dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement). The movie gave her the opportunity
to showcase her fluency in the French language. In 2005, she starred in the action
thriller Flightplan, which reached number one at the box office. In 2006, she
co-starred with Denzel Washington in the Spike Lee movie Inside Man. Finally, in
2007, Foster starred in and produced The Brave One, which also reached number
one at the box office.

655
Frankenheimer, John

An enormously talented actress and well-educated woman, Foster has achieved

superstar status. Her acting, as both a child star and then as an adult actress, has always
been consistently strong. On the movie set, she has proven herself to be dependable,
professional, and adaptable to a broad range of movie genres, including comedy,
drama, science fiction, and the action thriller. Today, Foster continues to be a much
sought after actress by movie producers as well as an enormous box-office draw. Her
acting has already earned her an important place in American cinema history.
See also: Silence of the Lambs, The; Women in Film

Selected Filmography (Director)

The Beaver (2010); Home for the Holidays (1994); Little Man Tate (1991)

References
Foster, Buddy, and Leon Wagener. Foster Child: A Biography of Jodie Foster. New York: Dutton,
1997.
Hollinger, Karen. The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star. New York: Routledge,
2006.
Lumme, Helena, and Mika Manninen. Great Women of Film. New York: Billboard Books,
2002.

—Bernadette Zbicki Heiney

FRANKENHEIMER, JOHN. An innovative American television and film director

known for his distinctive use of dialogue and unconventional camera angles, John
Frankenheimer was born on February 19, 1930, in New York City. A 1951 graduate
of Williams College, Massachusetts, Frankenheimer had his first experience in film-
making while a member of the U.S. Air Force Motion Picture Squadron. Following
his discharge in 1953, Frankenheimer obtained a position as an assistant director and
later as a director of live television with CBS. He worked on a number of shows,
including You Are There, Playhouse 90, Climax!, and Danger. Frankenheimer’s work
earned him 14 Emmy Award nominations, and he was twice awarded the Television
Critics Award for Best Director.
Frankenheimer’s first foray into film was The Young Stranger (1957). As in many of
his later pictures, Frankenheimer sought to address important social issues in this film.
Based on an episode of Climax!, The Young Stranger explores coming-of-age issues and
tensions between a son and his father. Unhappy with the process of making the film, he
returned to television. It was not until 1961, when he made The Young Savages, that he
began exclusively to make films for the big screen. The Young Savages also marked
Frankenheimer’s first collaboration with Burt Lancaster; the director and popular actor
would go on to make three more pictures together: The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962),
Seven Days in May (1964), and The Train (1964).

656
 Frankenheimer, John

Frankenheimer’s most contro-

versial and disturbing film may
have been The Manchurian Can-
didate, released in 1962. Starring
Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey,
and Angela Lansbury, The Man-
churian Candidate addressed
issues of paranoia and political
extremism in Cold War America.
The film was well received by
critics and audiences alike, receiv-
ing 1963 Oscar nominations for
Best Supporting Actress for
Angela Lansbury and Best Film
Editing for Ferris Webster; Frank-
enheimer was nominated for the
Best Director Golden Globe
Award.
In 1964, Frankenheimer fol-
lowed up The Manchurian Can-
didate with Seven Days in May,
which dealt with the political
intrigue swirling around a right-
wing plot to overthrow the U.S.
Director John Frankenheimer (center) on the set of his film
government. In 1966, he made
Young Savages. To the right are actors Burt Lancaster and
Seconds, starring Rock Hudson, Telly Savalas. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
which, along with The Manchu-
rian Candidate and Seven Days in
May, is considered part of Frank-
enheimer’s “paranoia trilogy.” Seconds centers on a secretive organization that provides
its clients with new identities and lives for the right price. Themes such as the pursuit
of youth, perfection, and materialism are addressed. The unusual camera angles, dis-
tortions, and the grim narrative, however, did not appeal to audiences, and the film
proved to be a disappointment at the box office.
By 1968, Frankenheimer’s career faltered. A close friend of Robert Kennedy,
Frankenheimer was traumatized by the presidential candidate’s assassination. Suffering
from depression and alcoholism, he relocated to Europe. Returning to the United States
in 1973, Frankenheimer released a number of mediocre thrillers, including The Iceman
Cometh (1973), Impossible Object (1973), 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974), French
Connection II (1975), and Black Sunday (1977). His alcoholism became an issue while
he was filming The Challenge in Kyoto, Japan, in 1982.
Struggling with his addiction, Frankenheimer continued to make films of varying qual-
ity: while 52 Pick-Up (1986) was successful, The Holcroft Covenant (1985), Dead Bang
(1989), The Fourth War (1990), and Year of the Gun 1991) were all box-office failures.

657
Friedkin, William

In 1993, Frankenheimer returned to television, directing HBO’s Against the Wall

and The Burning Season (both released in 1994). For the two films, Frankenheimer
received two Emmy Awards (including Best Director for The Burning Season) and
three Golden Globe awards. In 1996, Frankenheimer directed the TNT film Anderson-
ville, for which he received another Emmy award. He continued his work for TNT
with 1997s George Wallace, which earned him his fourth Emmy and the Golden Globe
Award for Best Motion Picture Made for Television.
While working in television, Frankenheimer also remained active in feature films.
Following the removal of director Richard Stanley, Frankenheimer took over The
Island of Dr. Moreau (1996). Starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, the film was
hampered by script and casting problems, and proved to be yet another box-office fail-
ure. Frankenheimer’s last theatrical releases were Ronin (1998) and Reindeer Games
(2000); his last television movie was HBO’s Paths to War (2002).
John Frankenheimer died on July 8, 2002, following complications from surgery in
Los Angeles.

Selected Filmography
Reindeer Games (2000); Ronin (1998); The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996); Year of the Gun (1991);
The Fourth War (1990); Dead Bang (1989); 52 Pick-Up (1986); The Holcroft Covenant (1985);
The Challenge (1982); Prophecy (1979); Black Sunday (1977); French Connection II (1975); 99
and 44/100% Dead (1974); The Iceman Cometh (1973); Story of a Love Story (1973); The Horse-
men (1971); I Walk the Line (1970); The Extraordinary Seaman (1969); The Gypsy Moths (1969);
The Fixer (1968); Grand Prix (1966); Seconds (1966); The Train (1964); Seven Days in May
(1964); The Manchurian Candidate (1962); Birdman of Alcatraz (1962); All Fall Down
(1962); The Young Savages (1961); The Young Stranger (1957)

References
Armstrong, Stephan B. Pictures About Extremes: The Films of John Frankenheimer. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2007.
Higham, Charles, and Joel Greenberg. The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak. Chicago:
Regnery, 1969.
Pratley, Gerald. The Films of Frankenheimer: Forty Years in Film. Cranbury, NJ: Lehigh Univer-
sity Press, 1998.

—Robert W. Malick

FRIEDKIN, WILLIAM. Unevenness characterizes the career of American director

William Friedkin. He is best known for the highly influential films The French Connec-
tion (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), which revolutionized the respective genres of
action and horror. Although the success of these films positioned Friedkin as one of
Hollywood’s elite directors, his career since their release has been plagued by critical
and commercial disappointments.

658
 Friedkin, William

Friedkin was born in Chicago on August 29, 1935, and grew up in a lower-middle-
class neighborhood. As an adolescent, he had brushes with the law; growing concerned,
his hardworking mother intervened and helped turn him in the right direction.
Although his father was multitalented, he lacked ambition, a trait that seems to have
motivated young William to make something of himself (Biskind, 1998). Moved by
the work of Orson Welles and others, he began working his way up from the mailroom
at a local television station. He went on to direct several documentary projects, most
notably, The People Versus Paul Crump (1962). A taut film about a black man on death
row, the documentary won top prize at the 1962 San Francisco Film Festival.
Friedkin continued making documentaries in Chicago, using the experience to
hone his trademark visual style (Clagett, 1990). He eventually made his way to Holly-
wood, but his first feature did not draw on his skills as a documentarian. Good Times
(1967) was a musical comedy starring Sonny and Cher that sought to capitalize on
the success of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, but which was largely ignored. He fol-
lowed with more ambitious projects: the period musical The Night They Raided
Minsky’s; a film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party; and an adapta-
tion of Mart Crowley’s Off-Broadway play The Boys in the Band (Katz, 2001).
The gritty crime drama The French Connection (1971) was an aesthetic departure
from his earlier films and signaled his turn toward hyperkinetic, sensory experience
at the expense of narrative and character development (Saeli, 1997). Remembered
for its landmark car chase and morally ambiguous cop protagonists, the film brought
Friedkin an Oscar for Best Director. Its $26 million domestic gross (on a $1.8 million
budget) afforded Friedkin a certain industry clout, of which he took full advantage in
1973 while making The Exorcist (Biskind, 1998). The now notorious horror film,
about a pubescent girl possessed by the devil, became a runaway box-office hit; rumors
about the long and bloated production, mixed reviews from critics, and a limited ini-
tial release, it seems, could not halt the film’s word-of-mouth (Klemesrud, 1974).
Friedkin’s next film, Sorcerer (1977), was a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s
Wages of Fear. Unfortunately for Friedkin, its release coincided with that of another
blockbuster, George Lucas’s Star Wars. Sorcerer flopped at the box office, and it
marked the beginning of a string of unsuccessful films directed by Friedkin: The
Brink’s Job, Cruising, and Deal of the Century. Cruising (1980), an erotic thriller star-
ring Al Pacino, drew attention from several groups that protested its negative depic-
tion of homosexuality, and Friedkin was forced to cut a good number of scenes in
order to secure an R-rating (Williams, 2005). While one might expect that Friedkin’s
brand of gut-reaction filmmaking would be perfect for the erotic thriller, his attempt
to replicate the “sexy violence” formula popularized by Brian De Palma (Dressed to
Kill ) and perfected by Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct) in his film Jade (1995) failed
miserably.
There have been some bright spots in Friedkin’s career since his halcyon days in the
1970s—To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Blue Chips (1994), 12 Angry Men (1997), and
Bug (2006), for example—but he has struggled to regain the status he enjoyed after he
released The French Connection and The Exorcist.

659
Friedkin, William

Selected Filmography
Bug (2006); Hunted, The (2003); Rules of Engagement (2000); Jade (1995); Blue Chips (1994);
The Guardian (1990); Rampage (1987); To Live and Die in L.A. (1985); Deal of the Century
(1983); Cruising (1980); The Exorcist (1973); The French Connection (1971)

References
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-‘n’-Roll Generation Saved
Hollywood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Clagett, Thomas D. William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession, and Reality. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1990.
Gross, Larry. “What Ever Happened to William Friedkin?” Sight & Sound, December 1995.
Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia, 4th ed. New York: Harper Resource, 2001.
Klemesrud, Judy. “They Wait Hours to Be Shocked.” New York Times, January 27, 1974: 97.
Saeli, Marie. “William Friedkin.” International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Vol. 2,
3rd ed. Hillstrom, Laurie Collier, ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1997.
Weinraub, Bernard. “Friedkin Tries Again for the A-List.” New York Times, April 2, 2000:
AR29.
Williams, Linda Ruth. The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 2005.

—Mikal Gaines

660
 v
G
GABLE, CLARK. Between 1930 and 1960, Clark Gable was Hollywood’s most
popular leading man. Women were drawn to his masculine good looks, while men
considered him to be the consummate “man’s man.” Indeed, in the opinion of many,
Gable was the sexiest and most talented leading man of all time.
William Clark Gable was born on February 1, 1901, in Cadiz, Ohio, to parents
William H. Gable, an oil driller and farmer, and Adeline Hershelman. After Gable’s
mother died when he was seven months old, he was placed with his uncle Charles
Hershelman, who lived in Vernon, Pennsylvania. In 1903, after his father married his
second wife, Jennie Dunlap, Gable returned home and the family settled in Hopedale,
Ohio. At the age of 14, he was forced to quit high school in order to help support the
family. By the time he was 21, he had worked on the family farm, been employed by
the B. F. Goodrich Tire factory and had worked with his father in the oil-drilling busi-
ness. When he was 17, he decided that he wanted to pursue a career in acting after he
saw the play The Bird of Paradise. In 1922, Gable joined a traveling troupe, the Jewell
Players. In 1924, he joined a Portland, Oregon, theater group that was directed by
Josephine Dillon, whom Gable married on December 13, 1924. The couple relocated
to Hollywood, where Gable secured work as a movie extra. In 1928, he won the lead in
the New York City theater production, Machinal. By 1930, his marriage to Dillon had
ended, and he had returned to Hollywood to perform in the play The Last Mile.
Shortly thereafter, he signed a contract with MGM that paid him $350 a week
Gable’s first movie with MGM was the western The Painted Desert (1931). That
same year he also made his Hollywood debut as a leading man in the film, Dance,
Fools, Dance, co-starring Joan Crawford. His sex appeal and magnetism quickly made
him popular with American movie audiences. Throughout the early 1930s he co-
starred in several movies with some of Hollywood’s most popular leading ladies,
including Marion Davies, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, and Helen Hayes. In 1934,
he won an Academy Award for his leading role in It Happened One Night. By the
mid-1930s, Gable was considered Hollywood’s most popular leading man. His name
alone guaranteed that a movie would become a box-office success. True to form,
throughout the latter part of the 1930s Gable starred in several commercial hits,

661
Gable, Clark

including Call of the Wild (1935),

San Francisco (1936), Too Hot to
Handle (1938), and Idiot’s Delight
(1939). In 1939, Gable took on
the role of a lifetime when he por-
trayed Rhett Butler in Gone with
the Wind. The movie catapulted
Gable to superstar status. On
March 29, 1939, Gable married
his third wife, Carole Lombard.
Three years later she was killed
in a plane crash. Distraught,
Gable enlisted in the U.S. Army
Air Corps in 1942. After he was
discharged in June 1945, he
returned to acting and resumed
his role as Hollywood’s favorite
leading man. Throughout the late
1940s and early 1950s, Gable
starred in several popular movies,
including Adventure (1945), The
Hucksters (1947), Lone Star
(1952), and Never Let Me Go
(1953). In 1954, he left MGM
This movie still shows Clark Gable in the Civil War epic and became a freelance actor. In
Gone with the Wind. Gable left his acting career to join the 1955, he was hired by Twentieth
Army Air Corps during World War II. He served as a tail Century-Fox for the movies Sol-
gunner on raids over Nazi Germany. (Library of Congress) dier of Fortune and The Tall Men.
He also starred in Teacher’s Pet
(1958), But Not for Me (1959), and It Started in Naples (1960) for Paramount Pictures.
Gable died of a heart attack in 1960, shortly after finishing The Misfits.
For three decades, Gable entertained American movie audiences with his masculine
good looks and acting skills. In total, he starred in 67 movies, many of which became
box-office successes simply because Gable appeared in them. During his long reign as
Hollywood’s leading “leading man,” Gable embodied what many thought was the ideal
of the American male. Women dreamed of being with him, while men dreamed of
being him. He died on November 16, 1960, in Los Angeles.

References
Bret, David. Clark Gable: Tormented Star. New York: Da Capo, 2007.
Harris, Warren G. Clark Gable: A Biography. New York: Harmony, 2002.
Wayne, Jane Ellen. The Leading Men of MGM. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005.
—Bernadette Zbicki Heiney

662
 Garbo, Greta

GARBO, GRETA. Greta Garbo is considered by many to have been the most glam-
orous actress in Hollywood during the 1920s and 1930s. Her enormous talents as an
actress combined with her distinctively husky voice made her one of the few actresses
to transition successfully from silent films to talking movies.
Greta Garbo was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson on September 18, 1905, in Stock-
holm, Sweden, to parents Anna Lovisa Karlsson, a homemaker, and Karl Alfred
Gustafsson, a landscaper. She was the youngest of the family’s three children. When
she was 14 years old, her father died of tuberculosis. She was forced to quit school
and get a job in order to help support her family. Following her first job as a soap lath-
erer in a barbershop, she was hired as a salesperson at the Paul U. Bergstrom Depart-
ment Store, where she eventually was asked to appear in short promotional films for
the store. In 1922, Garbo was one of seven students admitted to Stockholm’s Royal
Dramatic Theatre School. That same year, she also appeared as a bathing beauty in
E. A. Petschler’s film The Vagabond Baron. While attending the school, Garbo met
director Mauritz Stiller, who in 1924 hired Garbo to portray Countess Elizabeth
Dohna in her first silent movie, The Atonement of Gosta Berling. In 1925, she moved
to the United States with Stiller to work at MGM. She arrived in New York City on
July 6, 1925, and, shortly thereafter, posed for a series of photographs taken by Arnold
Genthe that appeared in the magazine Vanity Fair. She arrived in Hollywood on
September 10, 1925, and soon became one of MGM’s most popular and lucrative silent
movie stars. In 1926, her first American film, The Torrent, was released, followed by The
Temptress in 1927. In both films she was cast in extremely “sexy” parts. In 1927, she
co-starred with John Gilbert in the popular movie Flesh and the Devil. The actors’ on-
screen chemistry led to a very public offscreen romantic relationship. The publicity
surrounding their relationship was in harsh contrast to Garbo’s normally very private
personal life. Throughout the remaining years of the 1920s, she continued to star in
box-office successes, including Love (1927), The Divine Woman (1928), The Mysterious
Lady (1928), A Woman of Affairs (1928), Wild Orchids (1929), A Man’s Man (1929) and
The Single Standard (1929). In 1929, she portrayed Madame Irene Guarry in her last
silent movie, The Kiss. This was also the last silent movie produced by MGM.
In 1930, MGM released Garbo’s first sound movie, Anna Christie. Its success
inspired MGM to release a second, German-language version. Garbo had demon-
strated that she could successfully transition from silent films to talking movies.
Throughout the 1930s, she maintained her status as one of Hollywood’s most glamor-
ous movie stars. In 1931, she starred with Clark Gable in the box-office hit Susan
Lennox: Her Fall and Rise. In 1932, she starred in three commercially successful mov-
ies: Mata Hari, Grand Hotel, and As You Desire Me. During the latter part of the de-
cade, Garbo starred in several additional popular movies including Queen Christina
(1933), The Painted Veil (1934), Anna Karenina (1935), Camille (1937), Conquest
(1937), and Ninotchka (1939). In 1941, she starred in what would be her last movie
role, Two-Faced Woman. Unfortunately, this film would be her only box-office failure.
During her career, Garbo appeared in 11 silent movies and 15 talking movies. She
also became the highest-paid actress in Hollywood during the 1930s. Today, Garbo

663
Gibson, Mel

remains a legend in American

cinematic history. She died in a
New York hospital on April 15,
1990.

References
Paris, Barry. Garbo. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press,
2002.
Vieira, Mark A. Greta Garbo: A Cin-
ematic Legacy. New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 2005.
Wayne, Jane Ellen. The Golden Girls
of MGM: Greta Garbo, Joan
Crawford, Lana Turner, Judy Gar-
land, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly,
and Others. New York: Carroll &
Graf, 2003.
—Bernadette Zbicki Heiney

GIBSON, MEL. With his

leading-man good looks, Mel
Gibson enjoyed a meteoric rise
to fame. Throughout the years,
he has proven himself a master
Greta Garbo embodied romance and mystery in the silent era of multiple genres ranging from
and the 1930s, playing tragic heroines such as Anna Karenina
romantic comedy to action to
and Camille. (The Illustrated London News Picture Library)
Shakespeare. Gibson has also
forged a strong, albeit sometimes
controversial, career as a director and writer. Although he starred in Braveheart
(1995), he proved he was much more than an actor by directing the film, which won
both Best Picture and Best Director Academy Awards. He later wrote and directed
The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Apocalypto (2006), both of which were extremely
violent and steeped in themes of religion and redemption, and which met with contro-
versy upon their release.
Catholicism has always played a strong role in Gibson’s life. In fact, Mel Columcille
Gerard Gibson, born in Peekskill, New York, on January 3, 1956, was named after
three Catholic saints. His parents moved their large family to Sydney, Australia, when
Gibson was 12 years old, apparently to save their older sons from being drafted into
the Vietnam War. Gibson attended a Catholic high school prior to studying at the
National Institute of Dramatic Art at the University of New South Wales. For many
years it appeared that he and his wife, Robyn, were a rarity, bucking the trend of the

664
 Gibson, Mel

high Hollywood divorce rate. In a

departure from his strong Catholic
convictions, the couple—who
wed in 1980 and have seven
children together—separated in
2006 and divorced in 2009.
That same year, Gibson also
had a daughter with his girl-
friend, Oksana Grigorieva, a
singer.
Although he made his film
debut in the low-budget surfer
flick Summer City (1977), Gibson
quickly received recognition for
Tim (1979), a coming-of-age
story for which he received the
Australian Film Institute Award
for Best Actor as the mentally
challenged protagonist. Gibson
also landed the lead role in Mad
Max (1979), the first of three
films about Max Rockatansky
and his fight for survival in a bar-
ren, postapocalyptic world. The
critically acclaimed sequel, Mad
Max 2: The Road Warrior (1982),
catapulted Gibson to stardom in
the United States. A third install-
ment, Mad Max: Beyond Thun-
derdome (1985), was a box-office A scene still of actor and director Mel Gibson from Brave-
smash and featured music legend heart. (Icon/Ladd Co/Paramount/The Kobal Collection)
Tina Turner.
Gibson won his second Australian Film Institute best actor award for Peter Weir’s
Gallipoli (1981), a World War I drama that follows its young protagonists in the
Gallipoli campaign in Turkey. He teamed up again with Weir for The Year of Living
Dangerously (1982). Set in Indonesia during a coup d’etat in 1965, this was the first
Australian film to be fully financed by an American studio, MGM. Gibson continued
to tackle dramatic roles throughout the 1980s, starring in films such as The Bounty
(1984), a remake of Mutiny on the Bounty; The River (1984), which depicted the strug-
gles of a Tennessee farming family; and, Mrs. Soffel (1984), a romantic thriller about
inmate brothers who escape prison with help from the warden’s wife. He became a
household name with Lethal Weapon (1987), a buddy film featuring Gibson as the
impulsive, self-destructive detective Martin Riggs, and Danny Glover as his partner
Roger Murtaugh, the voice of reason. The box-office success of the first film—more

665
Gibson, Mel

than $65 million in U.S. ticket sales—led to three more installments: Lethal Weapon 2
(1989), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), each of which was
wildly successful. Other Gibson action films include Tequila Sunrise (1988), in which
he played a drug dealer trying to go straight, and Payback (1999), a crime thriller that
once again found his character on the wrong side of the law. In the Ron Howard
thriller Ransom (1996), Gibson portrayed a father desperate to find his young son,
who was abducted in Central Park; he went on to play a paranoid New York City cab-
bie in the thriller Conspiracy Theory (1997).
Gibson has tackled comedy in a number of films, including Bird on a Wire (1990), Air
America (1990), Forever Young (1992), and the western Maverick (1994). He also voiced
Captain John Smith in the family-friendly Disney animated feature Pocahontas (1995).
His humorous turn as a chauvinistic, womanizing advertising executive who suddenly
can hear the innermost thoughts and desires of women in What Women Want (2000)
came on the heels of a $25 million paycheck for The Patriot (2000). That same year, he
voiced the rooster Rocky Rhodes in Chicken Run, a claymation feature. Each of his three
2000 releases earned more than $100 million. In 2002, Gibson starred in two films: We
Were Soldiers, based on the true story of the first major battle of the Vietnam War; and,
Signs, a sci-fi blockbuster directed by M. Night Shyamalan that featured Gibson as a for-
mer minister who has lost his faith and must help his family deal with an alien invasion.
Gibson made his directorial debut with the touching drama The Man without a Face
(1993), in which he also starred. His directing prowess was acknowledged with Brave-
heart (1995), an epic period piece about William Wallace and the thirteenth-century
Scottish fight for freedom from England. Braveheart received a total of 10 Academy
Award nominations, was named Best Picture, and walked away with Oscars for cin-
ematography, makeup and sound effects editing. Gibson took home the Oscar for Best
Director. His devout faith came to the forefront in his next foray into directing, The
Passion of the Christ (2004). Filmed in Latin and Aramaic, this labor of love depicting
the final 12 hours of the life of Jesus Christ proved extremely controversial due to its
incredibly graphic, and extra-canonical portrayal of the Passion and what some took
to be Gibson’s racist representations of Jews—it also did not help that Gibson implied
that, like his father, he was sympathetic with the cause of Holocaust deniers. Charges
of anti-Semitism were further fueled by remarks that Gibson made following
his 2006 arrest for drunk driving—he has intermittently battled alcohol issues for
years—for which he subsequently apologized. His next undertaking as a writer/director
was the similarly controversial Apocalypto (2006), a bloody account of the downfall of
Mayan civilization filmed in the dialect of Yucatec, which drove home the theme
of redemption. The action movie Edge of Darkness (2010) marked Gibson’s return to
acting following an eight-year hiatus from the big screen.

Selected Filmography
Edge of Darkness (2010); Paparazzi (2004); The Singing Detective (2003); Signs (2002); We
Were Soldiers (2002); What Women Want (2000); The Patriot (2000); Chicken Run (2000);
Payback (1999/I); Lethal Weapon 4 (1998); Conspiracy Theory (1997); Fathers’ Day (1997);

666
 Gish, Lillian

Ransom (1996); Pocahontas (1995); Braveheart (1995); Maverick (1994); The Man without a Face
(1993); Lethal Weapon 3 (1992); Hamlet (1990); Air America (1990); Bird on a Wire (1990);
Lethal Weapon 2 (1989); Tequila Sunrise (1988); Lethal Weapon (1987); Mad Max Beyond
Thunderdome (1985); Mrs. Soffel (1984); The River (1984); The Bounty (1984); The Year of
Living Dangerously (1982); Attack Force Z (1982); Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981);
Gallipoli (1981); Tim (1979); Mad Max (1979); Summer City (1977); I Never Promised You a
Rose Garden (1977)

References
Cagle, Jess. “A Softer Side of Mel.” Time, December 11, 2000.
Corliss, Richard, Jeff Israely, and Jeffrey Ressner. “The Passion of Mel Gibson.” Time,
January 27, 2003.
Current Biography. H. W. Wilson, 2003. http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com.rlib.pace.edu/hww/
results/getResults.jhtml?_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.33.
Garber, Zev. Mel Gibson’s Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications. West Lafayette,
IN: Purdue University Press, 2006.
Levy, Emanuel. “A Fresh Start in the Rainforest.” Financial Times, December 18, 2006.
Vincent, Mal. “Don’t Call It a Comeback, but Mel Gibson Returns to the Big Screen.”
McClatchy-Tribune News, January 30, 2010.

—Michele Camardella

GISH, LILLIAN. The career of Lillian Gish spanned 75 years, during which she
made 105 films. As “the first lady of the silent screen,” Gish is credited with inventing
modern film acting. Her restrained style completely differed from the exaggerated style
typical of stage actors at the time. Born in Springfield, Ohio, on October 14, 1893,
film and Gish came into the world at approximately the same time. Her father aban-
doned the family, leaving them destitute. Lillian, her sister Dorothy, and her mother
resorted to acting, enduring the social stigma associated with the profession. Lillian’s
stage career began at age eight in touring companies. Hers was a lonely youth often
living separated from her family, in squalid conditions, undernourished, with little
opportunity for schooling.
Childhood friend Mary Pickford introduced the Gish sisters to D. W. Griffith. The
sisters’ film debut came in Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912). Film acting kept the
family together and brought a modicum of economic stability. Together, Griffith and
Lillian made over two dozen films, including the infamous Birth of a Nation (1915)
and Intolerance (1916). Devoted to Griffith from the time they began working
together, Gish ardently defended him against claims of racism over Birth of a Nation.
Despite this controversy, she and Griffith dedicated their careers to making film a
respected art.
Typecast as the fragile, ethereal beauty at the mercy of men and nature, Gish starred
primarily in melodramas. Her virginal, childlike beauty represented the American ideal
of femininity at the time. While Gish resented the victim typecast, according to biog-
rapher Charles Affron, “Lillian’s success had been and would continue to be predicated

667
Gish, Lillian

on her illusory subservience to

strong men, a posture that fur-
thered her own ambitions” (138).
Withstanding WWI air raids,
the Gishes and Griffith made
films in Europe including the
war-mongering Hearts of the
World (1918). Later, regretting
making this film, she committed
herself to pacifism.
After the war, notable films of
this “Biograph girl” included Bro-
ken Blossoms (1919); Way Down
East (1919); and Orphans of the
Storm (1922). Gish’s directorial
debut was Remodeling Her Hus-
band (1920). After its release, she
insisted that directing was men’s
work, so instead she invested her
own money in Inspiration Pic-
tures, making two successful films
overseas, The White Sister (1923)
and Romola (1924). In 1925, she
left Griffith, accepting a contract
from MGM for $800,000. Along
with this astounding sum, Gish
earned unprecedented power,
especially for a woman, to choose
projects, directors, and co-stars.
In 1915 Gish rose to stardom as Elsie Stoneman in the contro- Her most notable MGM films
versial film The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith. were La Boheme (1926), The
(Library of Congress) Scarlet Letter (1926), and The
Wind (1928).
Unlike many actors, Gish successfully transitioned from silent cinema to “talkies” in
One Romantic Night (1930). Yet, with her youth fading, she left Hollywood, resuming
a stage career. In 1948, she transitioned to television. She continued to work in theatre,
film, radio, and television throughout her life. Her later film career included Duel in
the Sun (1946), for which she received an Academy Award nomination; The Night of
the Hunter (1955); The Unforgiven (1960); The Comedians (1967), for which she
received a Golden Globe nomination; and her final film, The Whales of August (1987).
Insisting she was not a feminist, Gish nevertheless offered a nontraditional example
of femininity as a single career woman. Much was made of her choice not to marry or
have children. She rejected several proposals, insisting marriage and career did not
mix—and she preferred her career. Gish was a social and political conservative known

668
 Grant, Cary

for her work ethic, social propriety, and devotion to family. In 1941, she preached iso-
lationism at antiwar rallies and on radio as a member of the America First Committee.
Some considered her antiwar stance unpatriotic; realizing her career was in jeopardy,
she resigned her membership. Although not involved in the House Un-American
Activities Committee, Gish feared communism’s threat and the role of film in
spreading this ideology. She saw films as dangerous instruments of propaganda and
spoke of the moral responsibility of the arts to all who would listen. A lifelong
Republican, she lobbied government to create a cabinet-level post for the arts and
for film preservation funding.
Gish received an honorary Academy Award in 1971, Kennedy Center Honors in 1982,
and a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 1984. She died a film
legend, on February 27, 1993, bequeathing millions in continued support of the arts.
See also: Birth of a Nation, The; Griffith, D. W.

References
Affron, Charles. Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002.
American Film Institute, Lillian Gish. NY: Worldvision, 1989.
Gish, Lillian. Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1969.
Oderman, Stuart. Lillian Gish: Life on Stage and Screen. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.
Sanders, Terry. Lillian Gish: An Actor’s Life for Me. New York: Thirteen/WNET.

—Jamie Capuzza

GRANT, CARY. For more than four decades, Cary Grant was one of Hollywood’s
most popular leading men. His self-created persona defined the sophisticated leading
man for generations. Most popular in the genre of the romantic comedy, Grant
obtained a level of superstardom that remains intact today.
Cary Grant was born Alexander Archibald Leach on January 18, 1904, in Bristol,
Great Britain. He was raised as an only child by his parents Elias J. Leach, a factory
worker, and Elsie Kingdom Leach. His parents had previously lost their first child,
John, in 1899; and his mother, who never fully recovered from the loss, was institu-
tionalized when Grant was nine years old. He spent his teenage years being raised by
his father. Grant attended the Bishop Road Boys School in Bristol until he won a
scholarship to the Fairfield Secondary School in Somerset in 1915. Three years later,
when he was 14 years old, he quit school and joined the John Pender Comedy Troupe.
In 1920, he traveled to the United States with the troupe to perform in New York City
at the Globe Theater. When the troupe returned to Great Britain, Grant remained in
New York City and took a job with the Steeplechase Amusement Park on Coney Island
as a stilt walker. In 1927, he was hired for a role in the play Golden Dawn, on Broad-
way. Although the play was only a marginal success, it afforded him the opportunity
to acquire other acting jobs on Broadway.

669
Grant, Cary

In 1931, Grant signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. That same year, he
made his acting debut in the movie Singapore Sue and also began to use exclusively
Cary Grant as his professional name. An instant Hollywood success, Grant quickly
rose to superstar status. His on-screen persona epitomized America’s image of what a
handsome and sophisticated Hollywood movie star should be. Throughout the
1930s, he co-starred in several pictures alongside some of Hollywood’s most famous
leading ladies. In 1933, he starred in two movies with Mae West, She Done Him Wrong
and I’m No Angel. In 1936, he co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in the film Sylvia
Scarlett, and in 1937 with Irene Dunne in the box-office hit The Awful Truth. Grant
co-starred with Hepburn in several other popular movies during the latter part of the
1930s, including Bringing Up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story
(1940). He also starred in numerous romantic comedies, including the hits Thirty-Day
Princess (1934), Kiss and Make-Up (1935), and Wedding Present (1936). By the end of
the decade, Grant had found his niche in romantic comedy feature films.
In 1942, he became a U.S. citizen and legally changed his name to Cary Grant.
During the 1940s, some of his most successful comedies included His Girl Friday
(1940), The Talk of the Town (1942), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and Mr. Blandings
Builds a Dream House (1948). Surprisingly, it was his performance in the drama Penny
Serenade (1941) that earned him his first Academy Award nomination. He earned a
second nomination in 1944 for his role in the drama None but the Lonely Heart.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he continued to excel in the romantic comedy
genre. Some of the more notable pictures in which he starred during this period
included Monkey Business (1952), An Affair to Remember (1957), That Touch of Mink
(1962), and Father Goose (1964).
Although the romantic comedy had become his specialty, Grant had the opportu-
nity to explore more dramatic roles in four Alfred Hitchcock films. In 1941, he was
cast as Johnnie, a husband who appeared to be trying to murder his wife, in Suspi-
cion. His success in Suspicion led to roles in three additional Hitchcock films: Notori-
ous (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955) and North by Northwest (1959). In 1966, Grant
took on his last movie role before retiring, starring in the romantic comedy Walk,
Don’t Run.
For more than 40 years, the name Cary Grant was synonymous with the Hollywood
romantic comedy. He entertained American movie audiences with both his acting
skills and his sophisticated charm. This sophistication ultimately became America’s
definition of an elegant gentleman. He died on November 29, 1986, but is still consid-
ered one of Hollywood’s most popular leading men.

References
Duncan, Paul. Cary Grant. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008.
Eliot, Marc. Cary Grant: The Biography. New York: Harmony, 2004.
McCann, Graham. Cary Grant: A Class Apart. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
—Bernadette Zbicki Heiney

670
 Grier, Pam

GRIER, PAM. Pam Grier, the “Queen of Blaxploitation,” not only revolutionized
the way women in general are portrayed on-screen but, more specifically, how African
American women are portrayed. In the 1970s she became one of the first African
American female superheroes, garnering fame, fans, and of course, critics.
Born Pamela Suzette Grier on May 26, 1949, in North Carolina, Grier spent most
of her early years living on multiple Air Force bases with her family. Her father and
mother, an Air Force mechanic and a nurse respectively, were the parents to four chil-
dren. When Grier was nine years old, her family finally settled in Denver. Having
become accustomed to the middle-class lifestyle she experienced on military bases,
Grier later stated that she felt ostracized in the primarily black and working-class
neighborhood in which she found herself in Colorado.
Grier’s film career began when Roger Corman cast her in The Big Doll House in
1971. The small role led to several other supporting appearances in The Arena
(1971), Black Mama/White Mama (1972), and The Big Bird Cage (1972), and ulti-
mately led to her signing a five-year contract with the production company American
International Pictures.
In the 1970s, a new genre of film, dubbed “blaxploitation” because it featured
African American actors in exploitative roles, became popular among urban African
American audiences. These films featured mostly African American male protagonists
living out urban action-adventure narratives supported by the hippest clothes and
music of the times. These male-centered narratives were expanded when Pam Grier
was cast in Coffy.
Directed by Jack Hill, Coffy was released in 1973. The stunning, sexy Grier starred
as a seemingly demure nurse who, after her sister is put into a comma from a drug
overdose, dons skin-tight clothing and holstered guns and proceeds to wreck uber-
violent revenge on the neighborhood drug dealers. The film earned $8 million for
the studio and fame for Grier.
As a result of her performance in Coffy, Grier was cast in several more blaxploitation
films. In 1974, she starred in Foxy Brown as a woman who poses as a prostitute in order
to avenge her boyfriend’s death; in 1975, she starred in Friday Foster as a fashion pho-
tographer trying to stop an assassination attempt on African American politicians; and
in what turned out to be her final film for AIP, 1975’s Sheba Baby, Grier portrayed a
private eye who protects her father, whose business is being threatened by the mob.
In all of these films, Grier’s beauty—and body—was highlighted as much as her acting
and action skills. While this intentionally exploitative formula attracted millions of
moviegoers, it also made her the target of a great deal of criticism.
Her fans and a good number of film critics applauded Grier for bringing a new kind
of African American woman to the screen. They contended that, first and foremost,
Grier broke down barriers for actresses, and more specifically for African American
actresses. Not only did she earn starring roles and huge salaries (she was one of the
highest-paid actresses in the 1970s), but ultimately the power to shape what kind of
characters she would play. Supporters of Grier argued that her performances—with
their expression of overt sexuality, beauty, and physical and emotional strength—acted
to break down negative stereotypes of African American women (especially that of the

671
Griffith, D. W.

“mammy,” the desexualized mother figure). This appealed not only to white feminists
in the 1970s, who featured her on the cover of Ms. magazine, but also to the growing
Black Power movement, which stressed race pride. Grier, they proclaimed, had rede-
fined the public image of black female beauty, bringing Afros and black skin to posters
all over America.
Blaxploitation films, however, were unpopular with many leaders in the black com-
munity because they portrayed African Americans as violent, oversexed criminals.
These leaders also criticized the films for what they believed was their lack of positive
social messages. Grier’s roles, especially, were attacked by many black feminists as
merely filmic depictions of African American women as sexual objects.
Ultimately Grier’s career stalled with the demise of blaxploitation films. In the 1970s
and 1980s, she made a number of unmemorable films—Greased Lightning (1977), Fort
Apache: the Bronx (1981), Above the Law (1988), and The Package (1989), for example.
Her career was revived in 1995, however, when Quentin Tarantino cast the still
stunning, 45-year-old Grier in his homage to blaxploitation films, Jackie Brown.
In Jackie Brown, Grier was cast as a beautiful, strong, self-possessed woman—
who happens to be African American—who faces down drug dealers and manipulators.
After making this film, and attracting a whole new generation of film fans, Grier went
on to play numerous television roles and to star in the hit Showtime cable series The
L Word (2004).

References
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in
American Films. New York: Viking, 1994.
Dunn, Stephane. “Baad Bitches” & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films. Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 2008.
Howard, Josiah. Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide. Guildford, UK: FAB
Press, 2008.
Sims, Yvonne D. Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American
Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
—Katharine Bausch

GRIFFITH, D. W. Born on January 22, 1875, David Wark Griffith has long been
considered the founder of American cinema as a serious art form. His extraordinarily
controversial 1915 Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation, was shown in theatres for
the amazing price of two dollars a ticket, with musical accompaniment by a full orches-
tra; it was also the first moving picture screened in the White House. On a commercial
level, he was a pioneer of the feature film—as opposed to the mass-market two-reelers
that were standard fare at the time—and helped to create some of the first movie stars,
including Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and Mae Marsh.
Born in Kentucky a decade after the end of the Civil War, Griffith was the son of
Jacob Wark Griffith, a Confederate Army veteran. Although Jacob died when Griffith

672
 Griffith, D. W.

was only 10 years old, it seems

that he had already passed
along to his son a taste for Vic-
torian Age romanticism and
fierce pride in his Southern
identity. Jacob’s death left his
widow, the former Mary
Perkins Oglesby, to care for
their two children by herself.
Unable to keep their farm afloat
and overwhelmed by debt,
Mary moved the family to
Louisville, where she opened a
boardinghouse, which also
failed. The family’s misfortunes
eventually forced Griffith to
drop out of school and take a
job in a dry goods store; later,
he took a job in a bookstore,
where he embarked on a course
of interdisciplinary self-study.
Griffith was nearly 25 years
old when the cinema began to
emerge and 30 when it was still
in its primitive, nickelodeon
Film director D. W. Griffith. (Library of Congress)
stage. Thus, it was the theatre
and stage plays that formed him, in particular the Victorian melodrama, which supplied
him with the narrative archetypes for his films. Griffith eventually began selling scripts to
the Biograph Company, a major studio of the silent era, and began to act in early films.
He soon started directing—making numerous one- and two-reelers—and gathering
together a company of actors and technicians, most notably the pioneering cameraman
Billy Bitzer. Making his many film shorts allowed Griffith to experiment with diverse
source material, locations, techniques, and methods of storytelling. The prolific director
ultimately made more than 450 short films with Biograph, which constituted an impor-
tant part of the work of his early career. He concentrated on making domestic melodra-
mas (The Painted Lady, 1912); urban dramas (The Lily of the Tenement, 1911); and
adaptations of the literary works of authors such as Jack London and Frank Norris (A
Corner in Wheat, 1909). One of his best known two-reelers, The Musketeers of Pig Alley
(1912)—now celebrated for its brilliant technique—is considered the first crime movie.
The success of an Italian adaptation of the Roman epic Quo Vadis? demonstrated
both the artistic and commercial potential of longer motion pictures. Griffith’s first
attempt at the new form was a Biblical epic, Judith of Bethulia (1913), an adaptation
of a play written by the popular writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The film starred
Blanche Sweet, and featured the actresses who would later become stars while working

673
Griffith, D. W.

with Griffith, Mae Marsh and the Gish sisters. The film combined two elements that
Griffith would use again in his other great epics, spectacular battle scenes and the
depiction of more intimate expressions of pathos, especially from vulnerable, virtuous
women. Resistant to long features, Biograph delayed the release of the film, perhaps for
budgetary reasons—the picture reputedly cost an unprecedented $50,000—or because
of doubts about the public’s patience for multireel films. Nevertheless, the film was well
received when it was released. Angry at the studio’s lack of support, Griffith decided to
leave Biograph, taking with him his stock company; he soon began working on what
would become his most important and most controversial film, The Birth of a Nation.
Technically brilliant, The Birth of a Nation was an adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s
novel The Clansman. A paean to the eighteenth-century Ku Klux Klan, Griffith’s film
at least seemed to suggest that the latter-day formation of such a group was the last best
hope for saving white America. Despite its controversial subject matter, the picture was
initially well received when it premiered in New York City; Dixon even talked then-
president Woodrow Wilson into screening Birth of a Nation in the White House.
Many Americans, though, felt that the film was racist, a charge with which Griffith
would have to contend for the remainder of his career.
Perhaps in response to these accusations of racism following the release of Birth of a
Nation, Griffith produced the monumental Intolerance in 1916. Made up of four
narrative threads—stories concerning the Passion of the Christ, ancient Babylon,
the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and then-contemporary issues of injustice
and redemption—Intolerance sought to explore “love’s struggle through the ages.”
As the title implies, the separate narratives are linked by the theme of intolerance,
and they progressively converge to form a masterful mosaic. While Intolerance was
the most expensive movie made to that point in time, it did not match the success
of Birth of a Nation. Griffith’s insistence, it seems, on building up a complex filmic
structure supported by four narrative strands, coupled with his decision to crosscut
among these narratives with little if any explanation, made the film too intricately
demanding for almost all audiences.
At this point, Griffith’s career entered another major phase, as he made a series of
films focusing on characters played by Lillian Gish: True Heart Susie (1919), Broken
Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921)—which also
starred Gish’s sister, Dorothy. Although these films were not as materially ambitious as
pictures like Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, they had a dramatic sensibility that the
earlier, epic films lacked. The latter three films are all domestic melodramas played
out against evocative backdrops (slum, nature, historical turbulence), with visually
arresting images that are romantic and genuinely poetic. Although there is typically a
male romantic lead who may or may not be successful in rescuing an endangered
woman, the female protagonists in these films are clearly the dominant figures. Much
of this is no doubt a result of Gish’s strong characterization; but some of it must also
be attributed to Griffith’s skills as a “woman’s director,” one who was able consistently
to draw powerful performances from the actresses with whom he worked.
More than just an extraordinarily talented director, Griffith also contributed to
organizing American cinema as an industry. Along with Mary Pickford, Douglas

674
 Griffith, D. W.

Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin, Griffith was one of the founding partners of United
Artists, which ultimately became a major studio. As was his habit, though, Griffith
quickly grew restless, and he chose to leave UA; his professional relationship with
Lillian Gish also began to deteriorate at this time, and the two finally stopped work-
ing with each other altogether. After his break with Gish, Griffith’s work went into
artistic and commercial decline. Trying to rekindle the magic he had developed with
Gish, he turned to another leading lady, Carol Dempster, but she proved to be a far
from satisfactory replacement for the ethereal Gish. Experimenting with story for-
mulas in films like America and Isn’t Life Wonderful? (both 1924) did not help mat-
ters, either, and Griffith closed his career with an uninspired biographical picture
about Abraham Lincoln. Never having accumulated the wealth that others in the
industry had been able to gather, Griffith lived out his life in Hollywood, a man
of modest means. He died on July 23, 1948, at the age of 73, and was buried near
his birthplace in Kentucky.

Selected Filmography
The Struggle (1931); Lady of the Pavements (1929); The Battle of the Sexes (1928); Drums of Love
(1928); The Sorrows of Satan (1926); That Royle Girl (1925); Sally of the Sawdust (1925); Isn’t
Life Wonderful (1924); America (1924); The White Rose (1923); Mammy’s Boy (1923); One Excit-
ing Night (1922); Orphans of the Storm (1921); The Mother and the Law (1919); The Fall of Bab-
ylon (1919); True Heart Susie (1919); Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919);
The Girl Who Stayed at Home (1919); A Romance of Happy Valley (1919); The World of Colum-
bus (1919); The Greatest Thing in Life (1918); The Great Love (1918); Hearts of the World
(1918); Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916); The Birth of a Nation (1915);
The Avenging Conscience: or “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (1914); The Escape (1914); Home, Sweet
Home (1914); The Primitive Man (1914); The Battle of the Sexes (1914); Judith of Bethulia
(1914); The Massacre (1914); The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913)

References
Drew, William M. D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Its Genesis and Its Vision. Jefferson, NC: McFar-
land, 2002.
Everson, William K. American Silent Film. New York: Da Capo, 1998.
Gordon, Andrew, and Vera Hernan. Screen Saviours: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc, 2003.
Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Lang, Robert, ed. The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1993.
Schickel, Richard. D. W. Griffith: An American Life. New York: Limelight, 2004.
Simmon, Scott. The Films of D. W. Griffith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Stokes, Melvyn. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion
Picture of All Time. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
—Dimitri Keramitas

675
This page intentionally left blank
 v
H
HAWKS, HOWARD. Since the 1960s, Howard Hawks has been recognized as a
great artist, a true auteur of international cinema. By his own admission, however, he
was a diverse and unabashedly commercial director, with a gift for discerning what film
audiences liked. He worked in all major American film genres, most notably gangster,
screwball comedy, film noir, and westerns. Of the 47 films he is officially credited with
having directed, his reputation rests on 10, a number that could readily be expanded
by scholars and critics who continue to reevaluate his work, believing that additional
films deserve further scrutiny. The films for which he is best known and which con-
tinue to garner critical attention are Scarface (1932), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only
Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Sergeant York (1941), To Have
And Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948), Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes (1953), and Rio Bravo (1959).
A distinctive characteristic of a Howard Hawks film is overlapping dialogue, in
which one or more persons speak before another has completely finished. It was a
device that became a sort of trademark, giving pace, energy, and forward movement
to dialogue sequences. It often enhanced comedy, as in the three person “trialogue”
in His Girl Friday, in which Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and Ralph Bellamy conduct
a decidedly hectic but completely comprehensible conversation. The overlapping dia-
logue could also further the sense of tension in an action film, evident in the conversa-
tions that take place among scientists and military men in The Thing from Another
World (1951). (It should be noted that the credited director of this science-fiction
thriller is Christian Nyby, but Nyby had never directed before, and the directorial hand
of the producer, Hawks, is readily apparent throughout.) Another characteristic was his
avoidance of complex camera work, such as sweeping panoramas, dolly or crane shots,
and other forms of cinematography that he felt distracted from or at least did not add
to his story. He favored eye-level camera placement, and his films, more often than not,
took place indoors.
Born in Goshen, Indiana, on May 30, 1896, Hawks was a child of wealth and privi-
lege who readily availed himself of all the advantages of such good fortune. He was
schooled at exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and later at Cornell,

677
Hawks, Howard

where he studied engineering. In the early 1920s, he became intrigued with Holly-
wood. Following the whim of the dilettante rather than any calculated career plan,
he worked college summers at Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount Studios), start-
ing out as an assistant prop man, and quickly rising to associate producer and writer,
turning out silent screen scenarios, and editing those of others.
The story of his rise in the industry, particularly the early part of his career, is open
to interpretation. Hawks was known as an unremitting teller of tall tales, and seemed
to take a certain perverse delight in “rewriting” his life story. His version of his experi-
ences over the years, related in numerous interviews, often varies in detail. His account
of his life and his film industry successes is consistent, however, in that it presents
Hawks as a man who won all the arguments with studio executives and triumphed in
all significant conflicts. Undoubtedly there is some exaggeration, but to his credit, little
contradictory evidence to the facts as he presented them. He was admired by those who
worked with him, and his many talents were recognized and appreciated from the
beginning. He was a true independent, a director who early in his career served as his
own producer, and never hesitated to rewrite a script or change a set if he deemed it
necessary. Allowing directors such latitude was highly unusual in the days of the studio
system; Hawks, though, resisted attempts by producers to control the filmmaking pro-
cess. Indeed, he usually signed contracts to direct only one or two pictures for any sin-
gle studio at a time.
Hawks was particularly adept at recognizing and seizing opportunities. When an art
director at Famous Players was unavailable to create a modern set requested by Douglas
Fairbanks, the studio’s biggest star of the silent era, Hawks volunteered to design and
build it. He had had some training in architecture at Cornell, and his success with this
venture led to the development of a strong friendship with Fairbanks. By his own
account, Hawks was an excellent golfer and a skilled tennis player, attributes that
impressed Fairbanks, Hollywood’s reigning hero of swashbuckling adventure films
and a man who took great pride in doing his own film stunts. The friendship with
Fairbanks led the latter to recommend Hawks to Mary Pickford, one of the most
prominent stars of the silent screen, and, at the time, Fairbanks’s fiancée. Hawks
seized another opportunity when one day the director of one of Pickford’s films
did not appear on the set as scheduled. The supremely confident Hawks volunteered
to step in and direct the scenes scheduled to be shot that day, allowing the studio to
avoid costly delays. Building on this first foray into directing, he moved into pro-
ducing and writing stories and scenarios for films that he would go on to direct.
During World War I, Hawks served in the Signal Corps, gaining extensive experi-
ence with airplanes. He developed a lifelong interest in aviation, an enthusiasm that
informed his direction of action-adventure films with aviation themes, including The
Air Circus (1928), The Dawn Patrol (1930), Ceiling Zero (1936), Only Angels Have
Wings (1939), and Air Force (1943). Inherently fond of risk, he had a similar passion
for auto racing; in fact, for a time he designed racing cars and drove professionally.
These experiences found their way into films such as The Crowd Roars (1932) and
Red Line 7000 (1965). In the years between 1926 and 1929, Hawks directed eight
full-length motion pictures: The Road to Glory (1926), Fig Leaves (1926), The Cradle

678
 Hawks, Howard

Snatcher (1927), Paid to Love (1927), A Girl in Every Port (1928), Fazil (1928) The Air
Circus (1928), and Trent’s Last Case (1929). Of these eight films directed prior to the
advent of sound, only A Girl in Every Port has merited any critical attention, largely
because of the engaging performances by Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong,
who played career sailors living in a Hawksian man’s world, unencumbered by domes-
ticity and doing what a man’s got to do—in this case, getting drunk and pursuing
women.
In A Girl in Every Port, McLaglen’s character, Spike, momentarily succumbs to the
allure of domesticity but quickly recovers his senses, forsaking an impending marriage
with Marie (Louise Brooks). Interestingly, in His Girl Friday, the formidable Hildy
Johnson (Rosalind Russell) sidesteps her impending marriage so that she might con-
tinue unfettered in her career in journalism as the ace reporter working for her less-
than-scrupulous editor, former husband Walter Burns (Cary Grant). In the original
play, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, Hildy (“Hildebrand”) Johnson
was a male role, which was also the case in the 1931 film version of the play directed
by Lewis Milestone. In his remake, however, Hawks changed the title, and, in an
inspired moment, changed the role of Hildy to a woman. In the end, she becomes a
Hawksian woman, talented, strong-willed, but one who discovers that what she really
wants in life is to follow her man—the right man—please him, and ask few, if any
questions.
Hawks had a very distinct idea of how he wanted to portray women in his films.
The female protagonists in Hawks’s action films were largely devoid of the attributes
of conventional femininity—they were also completely comfortable in a man’s world.
Sophisticated, confident, and self-possessed, they were complementary figures able to
engage and hold their own in exchanges with their male counterparts. Once they rec-
ognized that certain men were worthy of them, however, they quietly and uncondi-
tionally surrendered themselves to these men. Hawks, it seems, began to develop this
idea of the strong/compliant filmic woman during the 1930s, giving inchoate expres-
sion to it in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), where Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur) discovers,
after tears, confusion, and a great deal of frustration, precisely what she has to do to
snare Geoff Carter (Cary Grant): “I’m hard to get, Geoff,” she says, “all you have to
do is ask me.” Seemingly quite pleased with this terse expression of surrender, Hawks
has Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) utter the same words to Philip Marlowe
(Humphrey Bogart) in The Big Sleep, and Feathers (Angie Dickinson) speaks a variant
of the declaration to Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) in Rio Bravo. It may be
argued, though, that the Hawksian woman achieves her fullest expression in Hawks’s
adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. Casting 19-year-old model
Lauren Bacall in her first screen role as Marie Browning, Hawks fashioned her charac-
ter after his current wife, socialite Nancy Gross, whom the tall, slightly gaunt, beauti-
ful, and seductively clever Bacall resembled somewhat. Hawks even gave the Bacall
character the nickname “Slim,” his term of endearment for his wife. Playing opposite
her future husband Humphrey Bogart—the pair absolutely sizzled on the screen—
Bacall embodied the Hawks woman: dangerously attractive, mouthy, and, in the end,
totally devoted to her man.

679
Hawks, Howard

Not surprisingly, the men in Hawks’s action films are bulwarks of conventional
masculinity, idealized and mythic. Hawks stressed the theme of “professionalism” in
these action pictures: men—real men—recognized that they had jobs to do, and they
set out in single-minded fashion to do them. Fear, doubt, or any other emotion that
might undermine a man’s confidence and determination had no place in the makeup
of the Hawksian hero. If you were a professional, if you were good enough, you did
the job or died honorably in the attempt. Nowhere is this ideal more powerfully
expressed than in Rio Bravo, a picture that Hawks admitted was a response to Fred
Zinnemann’s 1952 film High Noon. Hawks—and star John Wayne—could not abide
the Zinnemann characterization of Sheriff Will Kane (Gary Cooper) as a figure who
is not good enough to deal with crazed killers by himself or wise enough to hire profes-
sionals to help him with the job. When Wayne’s Sheriff John T. Chance is asked if
wants to deputize some ranch hands, he brusquely rejects the idea: “Well-meaning
amateurs,” he says, “most of them worried about their wives and kids.”
Significantly, Hawks is the only notable director in American cinema to have given
audiences an acknowledged classic motion picture in four of the primary film genres
that define American cinema. Scarface would certainly be in the top five of any film
scholar’s list of significant American films in the gangster genre. Bringing Up Baby and
His Girl Friday are Hawks’s definitive contributions to screwball comedy, pairing
Katharine Hepburn in the first and Rosalind Russell in the second with the redoubtable
Cary Grant. The Big Sleep is quintessential noir, while Red River rivals the films of the
man many consider to be the undisputed master of the American western, John Ford.
In his last two films, El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970), Hawks once again gave
expression to his ideas concerning heroic men, “professionals” acting out their predes-
tined roles as communal saviors. These pictures, though, proved to be little more than
thinly veiled remakes of Rio Bravo, none of which, most would agree, compared to Red
River, perhaps his best film in the western genre and one of his best films generally. An
iconic figure in the cinematic world, Howard Hawks died on December 26, 1977, at
the age of 81 in Palm Springs, California.

Selected Filmography
Rio Lobo (1970); El Dorado (1966); Red Line 7000 (1965); Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964); Hatari!
(1962); Rio Bravo (1959); Land of the Pharaohs (1955); Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953); Mon-
key Business (1952); The Big Sky (1952); The Thing from Another World (1951); I Was a Male
War Bride (1949); A Song Is Born (1948); Red River (1948); The Big Sleep (1946); To Have
and Have Not (1944); Air Force (1943); Ball of Fire (1941); Sergeant York (1941); His Girl Fri-
day (1940); Only Angels Have Wings (1939); Bringing Up Baby (1938); Come and Get It (1936);
The Road to Glory (1936); Ceiling Zero (1936); Barbary Coast (1935); Twentieth Century (1934);
The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933); Today We Live (1933); Tiger Shark (1932); The Crowd
Roars (1932); Scarface (1932); The Criminal Code (1931); The Dawn Patrol (1930)

References
Bogdanovich, Peter. The Cinema of Howard Hawks. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962.

680
 Heckerling, Amy

Hawks, Howard, with Joseph McBride, ed. Hawks on Hawks. London: Faber & Faber, 1996.
Hillier, Jim, and Peter Wollen, eds. Howard Hawks: American Artist. London: British Film Insti-
tute, 1997.
Pippin, Robert B. Hollywood Westerns and American Myths: The Importance of Howard Hawks
and John Ford for Political Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
—Richard C. Keenan

HECKERLING, AMY. Amy Heckerling, one of the few female movie directors to
achieve both commercial and critical success, is perhaps best known for films that pro-
vide audiences with sharp insights into teen life.
Heckerling was born May 7, 1954, in the New York City borough of the Bronx. She
attended the High School of Art and Design, a public school in Manhattan. She graduated
from New York University in 1975 and immediately enrolled in the prestigious American
Film Institute (AFI) in California. A film she completed at AFI caught the attention of
producers who were creating a movie about teenagers at a California high school. They
tapped Heckerling to direct the film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Released in the fall
of 1982, the picture became the sleeper hit of the year. It also launched Heckerling’s career,
along with those of its young stars, Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Nicolas Cage.
Fast Times vaulted Heckerling into an exclusive club: female directors who were
sought after by Hollywood studios. Significantly, she became known as a filmmaker
who paid special attention to female characters. In Fast Times, for example, young
women contemplate sex, relationships, and even difficult issues such as abortion. In
1984, Heckerling made Johnny Dangerously. Featuring Michael Keaton and Marilu
Henner, the picture was a spoof of traditional gangster movies. Unfortunately for
Heckerling, it was a critical and box-office flop. She bounced back in 1985 with
National Lampoon’s European Vacation, which featured Chevy Chase and Beverly
D’Angelo. Heckerling’s next big hit was 1989’s Look Who’s Talking, starring Kirstie
Alley and John Travolta as friends, and potential romantic mates, Mollie and James.
The story is told from the perspective of Mollie’s baby (brilliantly voiced by Bruce
Willis), who desperately wants his mother and James to get together. Heckerling has
said that the birth of her own daughter, Mollie, in 1985 prompted her to write a
screenplay that focused on the thoughts of an infant (Sjursen, 1999).
In the early 1990s, Heckerling hit a rough patch. Seeking to capitalize on the suc-
cess of the first film, she quickly wrote and directed Look Who’s Talking Too (1990),
but the sequel failed miserably at the box office. Then in 1991, Heckerling and her
husband were divorced. That same year, she settled a lawsuit with two women who
claimed that Heckerling had really based Look Who’s Talking on a student film they
had shown her in 1986 (Horowitz, 1991).
Undaunted, Heckerling went back to work, crafting a movie script inspired by Jane
Austen’s novel Emma. Her efforts paid off, and Clueless hit the big screen in 1995. An
endearing exposé of teen angst, the coming-of-age comedy centers around a rich
Beverly Hills High School student named Cher Horowitz. Cher, delightfully played
by Alicia Silverstone, although eager to correct the faults and weaknesses of others,

681
Hepburn, Katharine

doesn’t seem to realize that she has many of her own. Adored by both fans and critics,
Clueless earned Heckerling a National Society of Film Critics Award for best screenplay.
While studio executives initially balked at making a film that featured female characters,
Heckerling stood her ground, resisting the suggestion that more male characters be
added to the film and insisting that the story be told from Cher’s point of view (Heck-
erling and Firstenberg, 1995).
Heckerling has produced two television series: Fast Times, a short-lived 1986 series
based on Fast Times at Ridgemont High; and Clueless, a sitcom inspired by the 1995
film that had a three-year run. Her next two films, 1998’s A Night at the Roxbury, based
on a Saturday Night Live skit, and Loser (2000), which tells the story of two young col-
lege students, were coolly received, both by audiences and critics. In 2005, seeking to
address a movie studio culture that consistently denies film leads to older women,
Heckerling made I Could Never Be Your Woman, which featured Michelle Pfeiffer,
who, interestingly, is one of the few actresses who can still carry a Hollywood picture
despite being in her fifties. Plagued by postproduction problems, the film made little
impact, going straight to DVD.
Independence and passion may very well be Heckerling’s most enduring qualities.
She has said that she’s been offered formulaic movies to direct, but would rather write
and direct her own projects (Schwartz, 2008). She continues to be a director who res-
olutely refuses to step behind the camera until the right project comes along.

Selected Filmography
I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007); Loser (2000); Clueless (1995); Look Who’s Talking Too
(1990); Look Who’s Talking (1989); European Vacation (1985); Johnny Dangerously (1984); Fast
Times at Ridgemont High (1982); Getting It Over With (1977)

References
Heckerling, Amy, with Jean Picker Firstenberg. Edited transcript of Harold Lloyd Master Semi-
nar at American Film Institute, September 14, 1995. Available at www.fathom.com.
Horowitz, Joy. “ ‘Look Who’s Talking’ Suit on Plagiarism Is Settled.” New York Times, June 14,
1991.
Schwartz, Missy, et al. “Would You Dump This Woman?” Entertainment Weekly, February 8,
2008: 30–33.
Sjursen, Katrin. “Amy Heckerling.” Current Biography 60, July 1999: 27–29.
—Rachael Hanel

HEPBURN, KATHARINE. Katharine Hepburn was one of America’s most suc-

cessful and influential performers. She presented audiences with strong female charac-
ters in over 50 films and across a seven-decade career. Her offscreen persona
heightened her legacy as an outspoken and determined woman who challenged—and
changed—the nation’s attitudes toward sexual difference.

682
 Hepburn, Katharine

Katharine Houghton Hepburn

was born on May 12, 1907, to
upper-middle class and politically
progressive parents in Hartford,
Connecticut. When she was 14,
Hepburn’s beloved older brother,
Tom, hanged himself. Hepburn
discovered the body, a traumatic
experience that caused her to
withdraw from her peers. She
attended Bryn Mawr College,
graduating in 1928 with a
degree in philosophy and his-
tory. Hepburn pursued a career
in acting after graduating col-
lege, and performed in a variety
of small roles until her athletic
performance in The Warrior’s
Husband on Broadway in 1932
drew attention. A screen test for
RKO Studios in Hollywood
(which was regularly recruiting
Broadway stars as talking movies
began to be made) landed her a
leading role opposite John Bar-
rymore in A Bill of Divorcement
(1932), the first of 10 films she Studio portrait of actress Katharine Hepburn in 1957. (Getty
would make with director Images)
George Cukor. Indeed, much of
Cukor’s reputation as a “woman’s director” may be due to his collaborations with
Hepburn, most of which demonstrated atypical sensitivity to gender issues.
Hepburn made her second film, Christopher Strong (1933), with director Dorothy
Arzner, Hollywood’s sole female director during its classical period. That same year,
Hepburn earned her first Academy Award for playing Eva Lovelace, an ambitious stage
actress, in Morning Glory. She also starred as Jo in Cukor’s 1933 adaptation of Little
Women, which was a huge hit. Hepburn did not fare as well in pictures such as Spitfire
(1934) and A Woman Rebels (1936). Audiences even steered clear of her respectable
efforts in director John Ford’s admittedly rather maudlin Mary of Scotland (1936),
and the underappreciated Quality Street (1937). However, during the latter 1930s,
Hepburn had some of her best roles, in films that are now considered classics: Alice
Adams (1935), Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Stage Door (1937), Holiday (1938), and Bringing
Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938). Giving expression to her own feminist views, Hep-
burn chose to play strong female characters who made—and owned—their choices.
She bestowed her characters with an intelligence and articulateness all too rare for

683
Hepburn, Katharine

the time. This, coupled with Hepburn’s reluctance to give interviews and her penchant
for being photographed wearing slacks (a remarkable behavior for a female public figure
at the time), created a persona that mass audiences rejected as haughty and unsympa-
thetic.
Hepburn’s attitude, both on the screen and off, may have had much to do with her
lack of commercial success in the second half of the 1930s. Audiences turned away
from her films in such numbers that she was pronounced “box-office poison” in
1938. This decree drove her back to Broadway, where she appeared in The Philadelphia
Story (1939), a play written specifically for her by playwright Philip Barry. Hepburn
received stellar reviews for her performance as Tracy Lord, an arrogant socialite who
must learn to temper her expectations of others with a “regard for human frailty.” Hav-
ing bought the rights to the play, Hepburn was able to cast herself in the film version,
which she made with Cukor. The story, in which a series of men chastise Tracy for her
proud manner, addressed viewer’s objections to what they perceived as Hepburn’s arro-
gance, and the film once again made her an audience darling.
Following The Philadelphia Story in 1940, she appeared as renowned journalist Tess
Harding in George Stevens’s Woman of the Year (1942). This film also starred Spencer
Tracy, with whom she would make nine films (and share a romantic relationship until
his death in 1967). Hepburn and Tracy became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated
couples; their films confronted the changing dynamics between men and women in
America during and following World War II. The best-known among them are With-
out Love (1945), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952), the latter two both
Cukor films, and Desk Set (1957). Their last film together was Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner (1967), for which they both received Academy Awards.
Prior to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Hepburn made a number of memorable
films, such as The African Queen (John Huston, 1951). She published her experiences
about making the film in The Making of the African Queen or How I Went to Africa with
Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. In 1955, David Lean cast her in
Summertime, the story of a lonely middle-aged woman traveling in Venice. Hepburn
played the villainous Mrs. Venable in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s adaptation of Tennessee
Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer (1959) before giving a highly affecting performance
as a morphine-addicted mother in Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962).
Hepburn received another Academy Award the year after Tracy’s death for her tragi-
comic turn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968).
She returned to the theater in the 1970s, though she also appeared in a handful of
quality television movies, notably Love among the Ruins (1975), with Laurence Olivier,
and The Corn is Green (1979), both directed by Cukor. In 1981, Hepburn starred with
Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond (1981); the two played aging parents coming to grips
with their relationship with their adult daughter, played by Fonda’s real daughter, Jane
Fonda. For her moving performance, Hepburn won her record fourth Best Actress
Oscar.
In 1999, the American Film Institute declared Hepburn the Greatest Female Star in
the history of American cinema. She died on June 29, 2003, in her home in Old Say-
brook, Connecticut.

684
 Heston, Charlton

References
Berg, Scott A. Kate Remembered. New York: Berkley Books, 2003.
Hepburn, Katharine. Me: Stories of My Life. New York: Random House, 1996.
Phillips, Gene. George Cukor. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

—Kyle Stevens

HESTON, CHARLTON. As both actor and political activist, Charlton Heston cap-
tivated audiences with his portrayal of strong, masculine leaders in films while publicly
promoting conservative religious and social values to the American public. Born into a
hardworking Michigan family on October 4, 1923, Heston attended Northwestern Uni-
versity before serving in the army briefly before the end of World War II. He and his wife
Lydia worked as actors, earning roles on Broadway and directing at small theaters until
Heston’s first major role as Cinna in the 1949 television broadcast of Julius Caesar. After
this initial achievement, his career rose with the advent of television, and Heston won his
first star role in the 1950 film Dark City. Though he did not earn the Academy Award for
Best Actor until 1959, amidst the stunning success of William Wyler’s Ben-Hur,
Heston’s iconic representation of Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments
(1956) established his image as a bold, strong-willed leader on the screen. Throughout
the 1960s his roles in films such as El Cid, Khartoum, The Greatest Story Ever Told, The
Agony and the Ecstasy, and Planet of the Apes met with critical and box-office success and
solidified his reputation as an actor, while numerous forays into the American political
scene made him increasingly visible to the American public.
An active member of the Democratic Party, Heston threw his support behind Pres-
idents Kennedy and Johnson, marched on Washington in favor of the Civil Rights bill,
and supported Great Society programs. He also began serving on the board of the
Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and promoted “enlightened trade unionism” throughout
his six years as president of the organization. As such, Heston fought for actors’ rights
to withdraw personal dues from the guild and thus to maintain an independent work-
ing status if they disagreed with the union’s political philosophy and policies. As liber-
alism came to dominate the policies of both the U.S. government and SAG, Heston’s
formerly Democratic position turned increasingly toward the right, and he aligned
with neoconservatives in support of Ronald Reagan’s election, officially registering
with the Republican Party in 1987.
Though Heston’s career as actor and political spokesperson may seem like two dis-
tinct phases, with the success of his 1950s–60s acting career as the first and his
1970s–2000s political activism as the second, his actions in regard to both endeavors
remained intertwined. Switching from the Democratic to Republican parties, Heston’s
shift in allegiance occurred as Americans formerly united over Cold War–era concerns
became increasingly divided over national issues. As Heston faced radical liberalism
from the SAG, U.S. politicians, and independent social groups in the 1970s, ’80s,
and ’90s, he turned to leaders whom he had vivified onstage as true exemplars of Ameri-
can heroism and Christian morality. Speaking to voters in favor of the conservative

685
Heston, Charlton

right-to-work campaign of 1986,

the well-known public figure
informed his audience that the very
men he had portrayed on stage and
screen, such as Thomas Jefferson
and Abraham Lincoln, had held
upright American freedoms.
In the 1990s, Heston won the
offices of vice president and
president of the National Rifle
Association (NRA). Arguing that
the Second Amendment is essen-
tial to upholding American lib-
erty, Heston made reference to
one of his most iconic roles in a
speech he gave to the National
Press Club in 1997. Utilizing his
popular public image as the char-
acter Moses, the experienced actor
linked the Ten Commandments
to the Bill of Rights in an effort
to emphasize the importance of
basic American freedoms, such as
the right to own and use a firearm.
Both an inspirational and a polar-
izing figure at this point in his life,
Heston’s personal, political, and
Pictured here in 1981, Charlton Heston was known both as artistic choices during the last
an Academy Award–winning actor and a spokesperson for half-century have revealed just
conservative causes, most notably as president of the National how complex America’s evolu-
Rifle Association (1998–2003). (National Archives) tionary process has been.

References
Berkvist, Robert. “Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 84.” New York
Times, April 6, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/movies/06heston.html.
Heston, Charlton. “The Second Amendment: America’s First Freedom.” In Dizard, Jan E., et al.,
eds. Guns in America: A Historical Reader. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Heston, Charlton. “Winning the Cultural War.” Harvard Law School Forum Speech.
February 16, 1999. http://www.grossmont.edu/bertdill/docs/Winningculturewar.pdf.
Raymond, Emilie. From My Cold, Dead Hands. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Raymond, Emilie. “The Agony and the Ecstasy: Charlton Heston and the Screen Actors Guild.”
Journal of Policy History 17(2), 2005: 217–39.
—Sarah Bishoff

686
 Hill, George Roy

HILL, GEORGE ROY. Although George Roy Hill made only 14 feature films, he
showed a remarkable talent for deftly telling stories that explore the complexity of mar-
ginalized characters that exist on the outskirts of mainstream society and the close rela-
tionships they form. An intensely private man, Hill’s life as a member of the cinematic
community seemed to reflect the lives of many of his characters, as the Oscar-winning
director remained on the edge of Hollywood culture throughout his career.
George Roy Hill was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on December 21, 1921, to
George Roy and Helen Frances Owens Hill. His affluent Roman Catholic family was
involved in newspaper publishing and owned the Minneapolis Tribune. He attended
The Blake School, one of Minnesota’s most prestigious private schools. Hill developed
a love of flying when he was young and served as a cargo pilot in the U.S. Marine
Corps during World War II. After the war, he studied at Trinity College in Ireland.
Hill was 40 when he directed his first film, coming to Hollywood by way of military
service, flying with the Marine Corps in both World War II and the Korean War; from
academia, earning a BA in music from Yale and a B. Litt from Trinity University in
Dublin; from television, winning Emmy nominations for writing and directing; and
from directing on Broadway. Adapted for the screen, one of the plays that Hill directed
onstage, Period of Adjustment by Tennessee Williams, was the first feature film that he
directed. His second film, Toys in the Attic (1963), was also based on a stage play.
Hill’s third film, The World of Henry Orient (1964), concentrates on the lives of two
14- year-old girls who seek adventures in New York City. Even in this early film, Hill’s
attention is focused on dispossessed individuals—the girls, who are on the verge of
entering the messy relational world of adulthood after growing up in dysfunctional
families. Together, they dedicate themselves to the “world of Henry Orient,” a modern
concert pianist with whom one has fallen in love. Although Orient turns out to be a
fraud as an artist, his world still provides the girls with the love, community, and accep-
tance for which they hunger. Hill would revisit these themes in A Little Romance
(1979), in which two 13-year-olds, an American girl and a Parisian boy (a devotee of
American films, chiefly Hill’s), who meet and ultimately pledge their eternal love for
each other with a sunset kiss under the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. As with the girls in
Henry Orient, the characters in A Little Romance enlist the help of an aging con artist
who can provide the support that their families, apparently, cannot.
Clearly the most successful of Hill’s films, both critically and commercially, were
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). (Hill was nominated
as Best Director for both pictures, taking home the Oscar for The Sting.) Companion
pieces starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, both films focus on the friendship
between men who exist outside the borders of polite, legal society. While seemingly
perfect examples of traditional genre films, Butch Cassidy and The Sting actually act
to subvert the normative structures of genre itself. The Newman and Redford charac-
ters in each film portray “old-world” men committed to a dying way of life that favors
partnership over the individual accumulation of wealth. Although Hill allows audi-
ences to identify strongly with the roguish male protagonists in each of these pictures,
he also leaves viewers uneasy by weaving a dark existentialist thread through the narra-
tive fabrics of the films. Ostensibly celebrations of American culture, in the end, the

687
Hitchcock, Alfred

films prove to be unsettling critiques of that culture. Redford and Newman would each
work with Hill again, although not together. Redford starred in The Great Waldo Pep-
per (1975), a film about a barnstorming flying ace that, given Hill’s experience as a
Marine pilot and his joy of flying his open-cockpit Waco, was particularly close to
the director’s heart. Two years later, Newman would take the lead in Slap Shot
(1977), which explored the trials and tribulations of a losing hockey team. Although
in these films Hill sought to explore the same themes he had addressed in Butch Cassidy
and The Sting, The Great Waldo Pepper and Slap Shot did not enjoy the same success as
Hill’s earlier, iconic pictures.
Though a number of his films did extremely well at the box office, Hill’s concern as
a director was never simply to make money. One of a wave of 1960s and 1970s proto-
independent American filmmakers—along with others such as Robert Altman, Martin
Scorsese, Arthur Penn, and Mike Nichols—Hill strove to make pictures that would
appeal to cinematically intelligent audiences. Toward this end, he adapted for the
screen two modernist novels that focused on the existential struggles of the individual
in history: Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), based on Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s work of the same
name, and The World According to Garp (1982), based on John Irving’s work of the
same name. Although these quirky little pictures did not prove popular with audi-
ences, they remained true to Hill’s commitment to create films that sought to explore
the deepest levels of the human experience.
George Roy Hill died in 2002 from complications related to Parkinson’s disease.

Selected Filmography
Funny Farm (1988); The Little Drummer Girl (1984); The World According to Garp (1982); A
Little Romance (1979); Slap Shot (1977); The Great Waldo Pepper (1975); The Sting (1973);
Slaughterhouse-Five (1972); Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969); Thoroughly Modern
Millie (1967); Hawaii (1966); The World of Henry Orient (1964); Toys in the Attic (1963); Period
of Adjustment (1962)

References
Horton, Andrew. The Films of George Roy Hill. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005.
Shores, Edward. George Roy Hill. Boston: Twayne, 1983.

—Sarah N. Petrovic

HITCHCOCK, ALFRED. Sir Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), the acknowledged

master of the spy-thriller genre during his lifetime, is still regarded as one of the
supreme auteurs of the twentieth century. Few directors are as often cited or imitated
by filmmakers eager to claim a measure of creative cachet for their suspense-based
plots; but as yet, no one can reasonably claim to have surpassed Hitchcock in his ability
to evoke a world of fear, intrigue, and hidden guilt.

688
 Hitchcock, Alfred

Hitchcock’s middle-class
upbringing and Catholic edu-
cation afford few clues to an
understanding of his future
career, which began formally at
the age of 21 when he was hired
by the British branch of Para-
mount’s Famous Player-Lasky
studio to draw dialogue title
cards. Hitchcock’s literary as
well as artistic talents were soon
recognized, and he quickly
made the transition from art
director and scriptwriter to
director, thanks to the support
of Michael Balcon, for whose
Gainsborough Pictures Hitch-
cock directed several silent fea-
tures. The most important of
these early films was unques-
tionably The Lodger (1926), a
romantic thriller based loosely
on the real-life crimes of Jack
the Ripper. Hitchcock’s mys- Alfred Hitchcock, who began directing motion pictures in his
terious “lodger” is suspected of native Great Britain, immigrated to the United States, where
being a serial murderer of he directed and produced his most well-known films. (AP/
women, but by film’s end his Wide World Photos)
innocence is established and
the movie’s heroine is his. This is the first instance of Hitchcock’s use of the “wrong
man” motif, a theme that will appear and reappear in nearly all of his major works.
Hitchcock’s preference for evocative imagery, oblique angles, and dramatic lighting—
reminiscent of the German expressionist movement, which influenced him profoundly
during his year directing films in Germany—is equally evident in this film.
Hitchcock made the transition to synchronized sound in 1929 with the film Black-
mail, where a plot that turns on sexual violence, unsolved murder, and secret guilt
becomes the dramatic focus of this work. Hitchcock released two versions of this
film—one silent, the other with sound—but it is only in the latter that he is able
to fuse an obsessive visual motif with auditory clues that rivet the audience’s attention
on an instrument of death. Hitchcock’s work in his native England came to an end in
1939 when he accepted an invitation from legendary producer David O. Selznick to
join him in Hollywood, but during the decade from 1929 to 1939, he directed some
of the more memorable films of his career. Three films that stand out from this period
are The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes
(1938), and all three fall squarely within the spy-thriller category. In swift pacing and

689
Hitchcock, Alfred

deft characterization, each of these films demonstrates Hitchcock’s ability to construct a

suspenseful (if not always plausible) narrative, complete with touches of humor and
romance. However, to draw his audience into the controlled mayhem of a spy story,
Hitchcock also employs an additional plot device that he described as the “MacGuffin,”
meaning any dramatic conflict that sets the story in motion or provides a pretext for
action. And in each of these films, Hitchcock’s favorite MacGuffin is a conspiracy,
inimical to England (or to all freedom-loving people, as the case may be), hatched by
agents of a “foreign” power, against which the seemingly inadequate resources of his
unpolitical protagonists are pitted. The exposure and defeat of this conspiratorial group
then becomes the mainspring of the film’s plot. Hitchcock’s fondness for this peculiar
storyline is evident throughout his career, and it remains the one structural motif that
viewers of his major films can easily trace.
Hitchcock’s debut film in the United States was Rebecca (1940), based on Daphne
du Maurier’s wildly popular novel of that title. Selznick offered Hitchcock his choice
of A-list actors (in this case, Laurence Olivier and Judith Anderson) and outstanding
production facilities, but he also insisted on an intrusive regime of constant supervision
of scripts, and shooting schedules, and even camera set-ups, and before long Hitchcock
realized it would be impossible for the two of them to work together. Thus, Rebecca’s
success notwithstanding—it won an Academy Award for Best Picture—Selznick chose
to rent out Hitchcock to other studios like Universal, United Artists, RKO, and
Twentieth Century-Fox, where he made the next six of the next eight films, most of which
either reflect a wartime atmosphere or carry an explicit anti-Nazi message: Foreign
Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942), Lifeboat (1944), and Notorious (1946). Of
these, Notorious has proven to be the most enduringly popular, in part because of its
stellar performances, but also because of Hitchcock’s masterful use of the camera both
to capture emotional nuance and build suspense. In addition to these American pro-
ductions, Hitchcock took time out to make two short films for the British Ministry of
Information, Bon Voyage (1944) and Aventure malgache (1944), the latter in support
of the French Resistance.
Not all of Hitchcock’s work during this period, of course, was political in nature.
Suspicion (1941) marked the beginning of a more than decade-long professional rela-
tionship with Cary Grant (they made four films together), but it is also remembered
for its tentative multiple endings, and RKO’s insistence that Grant could not, under
any circumstances, be cast as a wife-murderer (thereby necessitating a last-minute plot
change). Nor was this the last time that studio heads would intervene to alter a Hitch-
cock script, and his desire to achieve complete directorial autonomy began to grow
from this period on. However, Hitchcock’s experience directing Shadow of a Doubt
(1943) for Universal proved a happier experience, and once again he was able to take
the story of a serial murderer of women (shades of The Lodger) and humanize his killer
by surrounding him with a loving and ultimately uncomprehending family. Returning
to Selznick in 1945, Hitchcock also directed Spellbound, one of the earliest films to
make explicit use of Freudian psychotherapy. Hitchcock had planned to incorporate
a series of elaborately designed dream sequences—drawn by Salvador Dali—only to
have this segment of the film sharply reduced by Selznick, who had convinced himself

690
 Hitchcock, Alfred

that Hitchcock’s work was too cerebral for popular audiences. Hitchcock’s last attempt
to work with Selznick was in 1947, when he directed The Paradine Case, a poorly
scripted courtroom drama that proved to be one of Hitchcock’s greatest box-office flops.
Now free from any further contractual obligations to Selznick International, Hitchcock
attempted to form his own production company, Transatlantic Pictures, which proved to
be a short-lived venture. However, he did manage to make one daringly experimental film
during this period entitled Rope (1948), an adaptation of a stage play based on the infa-
mous Leopold and Loeb murders. Rope is best remembered for its innovative use of
extended takes (creating the illusion of one continuous shot throughout) and its emotion-
ally heightened use of color, though film historians have also noted an interest in implied
homoerotic relationships between the two principal male characters that will resurface in
some of Hitchcock’s later films as well. It also marks the first of four films that Hitchcock
would make with Jimmy Stewart in a lead role. As for Hitchcock’s interest in the psycho-
pathic mind—a critical dimension of Rope—that would increase over the years until it
became the obsessive focus of his later films.
The films made during 1951 to 1964 are often referred to by Hitchcock’s biogra-
phers as the work of his “golden years,” and in swift succession he completed films that
won him both critical acclaim and immense box-office success. The first of these,
Strangers on a Train (1951) continues a theme that runs like a thread through many
of Hitchcock’s films, namely, the idea of a shared guilt (or in Joseph Conrad’s phrase
a secret sharer) that binds together the innocent and the truly guilty. In this case, the
seemingly fortuitous, yet fateful, connection that is established between a tennis pro,
Guy Haines (Farley Granger), and a talkative stranger he meets on a train, Bruno
Anthony (Robert Walker), leads to Bruno’s murder of guy’s estranged wife, and the
expectation that Guy will reciprocate by killing Bruno’s hated father. Guy’s refusal to
“exchange murders” leads to a typical Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse chase in which
Guy must prove his innocence while exposing Bruno as the real killer, and once again
we are confronted with the moral dilemma of the “wrong man.” Hitchcock’s obvious
fondness for this narrative construct suggests a deep authorial suspicion that clear
moral distinctions are often a camouflage for partly buried but undeniably powerful
unconscious desires.
Dial M for Murder (1954) explores similar terrain, albeit in a much more conven-
tional setting, by making an unhappy wife (famously played by Grace Kelly, in the first
of three Hitchcock films she would star in) as the target of a murder-for-hire plot from
which she must extricate herself, only to find that she has become the prime suspect in
the killing of her would-be assassin. Husbands in Hitchcock’s films tend, on the whole,
to be treacherous, and even homicidal, and Ray Milland’s Tony Wendice is no excep-
tion, and his exposure and apprehension at the conclusion of the film provides the
kind of moral-emotional closure that popular audiences craved throughout the 1950s.
Hitchcock’s next major work, Rear Window (1954), provides many of the melodra-
matic effects and emotional satisfactions of his earlier films, and certainly benefits from
a stellar cast; nevertheless, it presents us with an unsettling portrait of the artist as a
largely neurotic voyeur, and intimates a general view of marriage that is more subver-
sive than one would expect. Its protagonist, L. B. Jeffries, played with consummate

691
Hitchcock, Alfred

irony by Jimmy Stewart, is an action photographer who has been immobilized by an

injury and whose sole form of entertainment is the opportunity to spy on his neigh-
bors. The murder mystery that subsequently plays out before his prying eyes is compli-
cated by the tentative love affair that Jeffries maintains with his glamorous and
increasingly demanding girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (once again, Grace Kelly). Together,
they track down a wife killer (yet another!) whose attempt to kill Jeffries (by throwing
him out of his “rear window”) ends unsuccessfully. But in the process of unfolding his
convoluted plot, and allowing the viewer to glimpse the troubled lives of Jeffries’s stereo-
typically maladjusted neighbors, Hitchcock exploits our willingness to invade another’s
privacy. And out of this guilty pleasure arises yet another ironic insight: the realization
that practically all forms of intimate knowledge, even in the most innocent-seeming of
circumstances, are fraught with the possibility of danger and death.
By this time Hitchcock was safely ensconced at Paramount Studios, and there he
produced a series of entertaining films of somewhat lesser artistry, including To Catch
a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and a remake of an earlier spy thriller,
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Of this group, To Catch a Thief remains a per-
ennial favorite, chiefly owing to the comic/romantic pairing of Cary Grant and Grace
Kelly, whose clever verbal foreplay turns out to be far more interesting than the
unlikely tale of deception and detection that surrounds them. The closing years of this
decade, however, saw the production of two of Hitchcock’s undisputed masterpieces—
Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959)—and in both, Hitchcock is in full com-
mand of his powers of visualization and his talent for intricate plot construction. Based
on a French mystery novel (D’entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac),
Vertigo invites the viewer to enter a world of terrifying dreams and erotic obsessions,
bound up in a story of deception and murder. Once again, a scheming husband exe-
cutes an elaborate plan to do away with his wife, enlisting the unknowing support of
a former detective and college acquaintance (John “Scottie” Ferguson, played by
Jimmy Stewart) whose paralyzing acrophobia has led to his premature retirement from
the police force. Scottie’s discovery of the murder plot, however, is virtually displaced
by a romantic subplot that raises disturbing questions about the nature of identity
and the reality of love.
North by Northwest, by contrast, marks Hitchcock’s return to a far more conven-
tional narrative tradition of espionage and romantic entanglements. Centering on the
misadventures of Roger O. Thornhill, ad agency executive and ladies’ man (played
by Cary Grant in his last Hitchcock film), North by Northwest carries us along at break-
neck speed, as its protagonist is compelled not only to prove his innocence of a murder
he did not commit (echoes of the “wrong man’ theme), but also rescue a beautiful
counterspy with whom he has fallen in love. Hitchcock’s wildly implausible plotline
is more than redeemed, however, by witty dialogue and extraordinary camera work
that transforms a clichéd cliffhanger into a seriocomic melodrama of self-discovery.
Hitchcock’s filming of a chase scene across an empty field, in which his hero is pursued
by a deadly crop-duster (whose bullets, curiously, never find their mark) has become
one of the truly iconic images of American filmmaking, as well as a textbook illustra-
tion of Hitchcock’s talent for narrative/visual construction.

692
 Hitchcock, Alfred

The creative surge of this extraordinary decade reaches its point of climax with the
filming of two memorable thrillers, Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963), and in both
of these films Hitchcock attempts to shock his audience in a more direct and violent
manner than in any of his earlier movies. Of the two, Psycho is the more brutal and
explicitly terrifying work, much closer in subject matter and tone to contemporary
“slasher” films, in which innocent victims of a deranged killer are literally cut to shreds.
Both films, however, abound in images of entrapment and paranoia, and both reflect a
sudden darkening of Hitchcock’s vision of life. The Birds especially conjures up an
apocalyptic view of nature, as flocks of otherwise harmless birds suddenly descend on
Bodega Bay, attacking every human who comes across their path. In each of these works,
death comes suddenly and with a ferocity that defies rational explanation; never have
Hitchcock’s characters appeared quite so fragile or defenseless as in these experiments
in terror, and critics of his work have observed a growing nihilism in these late films.
Hitchcock’s next three films—Marnie (1964), Torn Curtain (1966), and Topaz
(1969)—all reveal a perceptible decline of creative energy and directorial control, and
not surprisingly all three did poorly at the box office. Changes in popular taste made
Hitchcock’s attempts to revisit the world of Cold War spies seem dated, and problems
of casting compounded Hitchcock’s inability to find scriptwriters and cinematogra-
phers whose gifts matched his storytelling abilities. His last two films, Frenzy (1972)
and Family Plot (1976), however, constitute an interesting coda to his remarkable
career, as Hitchcock recovers through both a measure of audience appeal and critical
esteem that he had lost in his later years. For many viewers, Frenzy seemed a companion
piece to Psycho, projecting us into the mind of a psychopathic murderer of women
whose seeming innocuousness belied his terrifying erotomania. Unlike the protagonist
of Psycho, however, Frenzy’s homicidal greengrocer has no revealing backstory that helps
us to understand his violent obsessions, and inevitably Hitchcock’s drama devolves into
a case of untimely (but ultimately successful) police work, as the “wrong man, unjustly
sentenced for another man’s crimes, leads authorities to the actual murderer.
Family Plot, by contrast, exhibits no grisly crimes, but rather adopts an almost
humorous tone, reminiscent of some of Hitchcock’s earlier films (for example, Rear
Window) in which a macabre sense of social satire and comedy merges with a suspense
plot and an atmosphere of imminent danger. That Hitchcock returned to the study of
moral perversity—in this case, a “family” of kidnappers whose greed and sense of
empowerment through crime drives the plot—in his last work is in many ways a fitting
finale for an artist whose work turns constantly on the struggle between innocence and
evil. No other Anglo-American director has yet managed to turn the resources of the
suspense genre to the purposes of psychological and moral analysis more compellingly
than Alfred Hitchcock, and his six decades of innovative filmmaking, in retrospect,
appear to be an amazing record of sustained creativity.

Selected Filmography
Family Plot (1976); Frenzy (1972); Topaz (1969); Torn Curtain (1966); Marnie (1964); The
Birds (1963); Psycho (1960); North by Northwest (1959); Vertigo (1958); The Wrong Man

693
Hopper, Dennis

(1956); The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956); The Trouble with Harry (1955); To Catch a Thief
(1955); Rear Window (1954); Dial M for Murder (1954); I Confess (1953); Strangers on a Train
(1951); Rope (1948); The Paradine Case (1947); Notorious (1946); Spellbound (1945); Lifeboat
(1944); Shadow of a Doubt (1943); Saboteur (1942); Suspicion (1941); Mr. & Mrs. Smith
(1941); Foreign Correspondent (1940); Rebecca (1940); Jamaica Inn (1939); The Lady Vanishes
(1938); Sabotage (1936); Secret Agent (1936); The 39 Steps (1935); The Man Who Knew Too
Much (1934); Number 17 (1932); The Skin Game (1931); Murder! (1930); Blackmail (1928);
The Manxman (1928); Champagne (1928); Easy Virtue (1928); The Farmer’s Wife (1928); When
Boys Leave Home (1927)

References
McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. New York: HarperCollins,
2004.
Mogg, Ken. The Alfred Hitchcock Story. London: Titan, 2008.
Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Anchor, 1992.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films. New York: Paperback Library, 1970.

—Robert Platzner

HOPPER, DENNIS. Dennis Hopper, in his more than 50 years as an actor and
director, has known extraordinary success and astonishing failure. Indeed, his career
appeared dead a number of times, but defying convention—as many of his on-screen
characters do—and showing uncanny survival abilities, he has always orchestrated
comebacks, becoming an iconic countercultural figure and one of the few Hollywood
legends in the process.
Hopper was born on May 17, 1936, in Dodge City, Kansas. In his early teens, he
moved with his parents to San Diego, California, and showed promise as an actor, win-
ning a scholarship to study at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, where he performed
Shakespearean roles. After high school, Hopper went to Los Angeles and got parts on
episodes of various television series, most notably as an epileptic on Medic. His perfor-
mance in that role impressed Hollywood studio heads. Harry Cohn of Columbia Pic-
tures agreed to meet him but made the mistake of belittling Hopper’s Shakespearean
background. Hopper told him off, in no uncertain terms, and was banned from
Columbia Pictures’ studios.
Hopper signed on with Warner Bros. and landed small roles in Rebel Without a
Cause (1955) and Giant, two pictures featuring James Dean. Dean, who introduced
Hopper to Stanislavsky’s style of “Method acting,” would die tragically in a car acci-
dent in September 1955, just as shooting on Giant was coming to a close. Dean’s death
devastated Hopper, and he decided to leave Los Angles and go to New York to study
Method acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute, as Dean had done. When Hopper returned
to Hollywood, his devotion to the Method put him at odds with the Hollywood estab-
lishment. Having developed a reputation for being difficult, Hopper had trouble land-
ing big roles; he continued to work, however, garnering supporting roles in major
films such as Cool Hand Luke (1967), as well as small parts in episodic television.

694
 Hopper, Dennis

In 1968, Hopper, who had

also been working as a photogra-
pher, directed and co-starred,
with Peter Fonda, in Easy Rider,
a landmark and extremely
controversial film about two
pot-smoking bikers who are
attempting to escape straight
America. Tapping into the
1960s counterculture, the pic-
ture, which cost less than
$400,000 to make, earned
$40 million after it was released
in 1969, and was a driving force
in the burgeoning movement of
independent filmmaking. Hop-
per, who earned his first Oscar
nomination as one of the film’s
co-writers (Peter Fonda and
Terry Southern were the others),
was declared a genius; within
two years, however, it seemed
that he had sabotaged his own
career. Attempting to undermine Director and actor Dennis Hopper in 1971. (AP/Wide
further the established process of World Photos)
Hollywood filmmaking, Hopper
made The Last Movie, a film that
sought to expose the illusionary character of the American movie industry. After taking
home top honors at the Venice Film Festival, the picture was a box-office disaster and
Hopper once again found himself struggling to get work.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Hopper did find parts—most notably in
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979)—but these were usually small roles in
marginal films. His problems were exacerbated by his extensive drug use, which led
to hallucinations and his eventual commitment to a psychiatric ward in 1984. After
being released, Hopper bounced back. In 1986, he played Shooter, an alcoholic
ex-basketball star, in Hoosiers—which earned him an Oscar nomination for best sup-
porting actor—and Frank Booth, a drug-crazed dealer in Blue Velvet. Building on these
performances, Hopper proved his versatility, performing in pictures such as The Indian
Runner (1991) and Super Mario Brothers (1993). He has since shown that he can tackle
almost any role, playing villainous parts in Speed (1994) and Waterworld (1995),
romantic parts in Carried Away (1996) and All the Way (2003), and comedic parts in
EdTV (1999) and Knockaround Guys (2002). Hopper also returned to the director’s
chair for Colors (1988), The Hot Spot (1990), Chasers (1994), and Homeless (2000);
and to television for the miniseries Paris Trout in 1991, for which he won an Emmy,

695
Huston, John

and for episodes of Flatland and 24 in 2002, E-Ring in 2006, and Crash in 2008 and
2009. Dennis Hopper died on May 29, 2010, at the age of 74, after a 10-year battle
with prostate cancer.

Selected Filmography
Homeless (2000); Bad City Blues (1999); The Venice Project (1999); Jesus’s Son (1999); Water-
world (1995); Straight Shooter (1999); EdTV (1999); Chasers (1994); True Romance (1993);
Red Rock West (1993); Super Mario Bros. (1993); The Indian Runner (1991); Paris Trout
(1991); The Hot Spot (1990); Catchfire (1990); Colors (1988); The Pick-up Artist (1987);
Straight to Hell (1987); Hoosiers (1986); Blue Velvet (1986); River’s Edge (1986); The Osterman
Weekend (1983); Rumble Fish (1983); Out of the Blue (1980); Apocalypse Now (1979); The Last
Movie (1971); True Grit (1969); Easy Rider (1969); Head (1968); Panic in the City (1968); Hang
’Em High (1968); The Glory Stompers (1968); Cool Hand Luke (1967); The Trip (1967); From
Hell to Texas (1958); Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957); Giant (1956); I Died a Thousand Times
(1955); Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

References
Gates, David and Devin Gordon. “Newsmakers.” Newsweek (2003). http://www.newsweek.com/
id/58705/page/2.
Martin, Adrian. “The Misleading Man: Dennis Hopper.” In Ndalianis, Angela, and Charlotte
Henry, eds. Stars in Our Eyes: The Star Phenomenon in the Contemporary Era. Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 2002: 3–20.
Rodriguez, Elena. Dennis Hopper: A Madness to His Method. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988.

—Albert Rolls

HUSTON, JOHN. One of the twentieth century’s most successful filmmakers, John
Huston directed a number of American classics and also excelled as a screenwriter and
actor. During a career that spanned a half-century, he was a larger-than-life presence in
Hollywood who worked with the greatest film stars of his generation. He was nomi-
nated for 10 Academy Awards.
John Marcellus Huston was born in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906, the son
of stage and screen actor Walter Huston and newspaperwoman Rhea Gore. Huston’s
childhood was unconventional, to say the least. After his parents divorced, he traveled
the country with his father on the vaudeville circuit and spent considerable time at
major news and sporting events that his mother covered. Though sickly as a child, he
eventually conquered his physical frailties and became a capable amateur boxer. Drop-
ping out of school at 14, he worked a variety of jobs, including breaking horses and
performing street theater, before winning his first Broadway role in the 1925 produc-
tion Ruint. Never one to stay in one place for long, Huston traveled to Mexico, London,
and Paris as he tried to chart a course for his life; he eventually ended up back in the
United States penniless. After lackluster attempts at newspaper and magazine reporting,

696
 Huston, John

he finally found his calling as a screenwriter and part-time actor. Catching the eye of
Warner Bros. executives, Huston got his big break in 1941 when the studio signed
him to direct the screen adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s popular mystery The
Maltese Falcon. One of the most popular films of all time, The Maltese Falcon estab-
lished Huston as a director and Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood star. The film
also was the first of a string of films directed by Huston and featuring Bogart,
including Across the Pacific (1942), Key Largo (1948), and Treasure of the Sierra
Madre (1948). Treasure of the Sierra Madre was an especially important film for the
Huston family, as John won the Academy Award for Best Director while his father
Walter won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. During World War II, Huston served
as an officer in the signal corps, where he produced documentaries for the U.S.
government. These included the controversial film Let There Be Light, which dealt with
the mental and physical problems experienced by returning World War II veterans.
For Huston, more success followed during the 1950s with a wide range of films
including his landmark effort The African Queen (1951), starring Bogart and Katharine
Hepburn; The Red Badge of Courage (1951), starring Audie Murphy; the Toulouse-
Latrec biographical film Moulin Rouge (1952); and the epic Moby Dick (1956), starring
Gregory Peck. In 1961, Huston directed Clark Gable’s last film, The Misfits, which also
featured Marilyn Monroe. During the same period, the director began acting in
films for the first time in years, usually playing small character roles. He received
an Oscar nomination for his performance as a supporting actor in the 1963 feature
The Cardinal. Although Huston peaked as a director during the 1950s, he continued
working on well-received films into the 1980s. His last major success as a director
came in 1985 with Prizzi’s Honor, which was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar
and in which Huston directed his daughter Angelica, who won the Academy Award
for Best Supporting Actress.
Perhaps a product of his unconventional childhood, Huston was known as one of
Hollywood’s great eccentrics and a man who did his best, for better or worse, to live life
to the fullest. In addition to his film pursuits, he was an accomplished painter and
sculptor and an avid outdoorsman who counted Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway
as two of his closest friends. He was also known as a hard and sometimes ill-tempered
drinker and an aggressive gambler. Huston was married five times and had five chil-
dren. During the latter stages of his life, he was plagued by a number of illnesses but
he continued to pursue various projects. He literally worked up until his last breath,
dying of emphysema on August 28, 1987, in Middleton, Rhode Island, on location
for a film in which he had a small role.

Selected Filmography
The Dead (1987); Prizzi’s Honor (1985); Under the Volcano (1984); Annie (1982); Victory
(1981); Phobia (1980); Wise Blood (1979); Independence (1976); The Man Who Would Be King
(1975); The MacKintosh Man (1973); The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972); Fat City
(1972); The Kremlin Letter (1970); A Walk with Love and Death (1969); Sinful Davey (1969);
Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967); Casino Royale (1966); The Bible: In the Beginning . . .

697
Huston, John

(1966); The Night of the Iguana (1964); The List of Adrian Messenger (1963); Freud (1962); The
Misfits (1961); The Unforgiven (1960); The Roots of Heaven (1958); The Barbarian and the Gei-
sha (1958); Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957); Moby Dick (1956); Beat the Devil (1953); Mou-
lin Rouge (1952); The African Queen (1951); The Red Badge of Courage (1951); The Asphalt
Jungle (1950); We Were Strangers (1949); Key Largo (1948); The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1948); Let There Be Light (1946); San Pietro (1945); Report from the Aleutians (1943); Across
the Pacific (1942); Winning Your Wings (1942); In This Our Life (1942); The Maltese Falcon
(1941)

References
Brill, Lesley. John Huston’s Filmmaking. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons. Lanham, MD: Cooper Square Press, 2000.
Huston, John. An Open Book. London: Macmillan, 1981.
Long, Robert Emmet. John Huston: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001.

—Ben Wynne

698
 v
K
KASDAN, LAWRENCE. Born in Miami Beach, Florida, on January 14, 1949,
Lawrence Kasdan began his adult life receiving his MA in education from the Univer-
sity of Michigan. Beginning as an award-winning advertising copywriter, Kasdan even-
tually made his way to Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter. Early on, he
sold two screenplays that would go on to become successful films: Continental Divide
(1981) and The Bodyguard (1992). Having caught the attention of Steven Spielberg
with Continental Divide, he soon met with the famed director and was introduced to
George Lucas. Kasdan, then, would be a key figure in the creation of three of the big-
gest Hollywood blockbusters of the 1980s: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980);
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983). During this
period of collaboration, he would also direct the 1980s hit Body Heat (1981), the
steamy romance starring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, before co-writing and
directing his biggest hit, the baby-boomer nostalgia flick The Big Chill in 1983.
Kasdan’s place in Hollywood history, it seems, would have been assured by way of his
work with George Lucas alone. As co-writer of the last two films of the original Star
Wars trilogy—The Empire Strikes Back is perhaps the most beloved of the Star Wars
films—Kasdan will forever be a pop culture icon. His contribution to another pop cul-
ture phenomenon, the Indiana Jones franchise, only adds to his luster. More than simply
a screenwriter on the first Indiana Jones film—Kasdan began the process by sitting in a
room with Lucas and Spielberg, tape-recorder preserving their conversations—Kasdan
was instrumental in sculpting the character and personality of one of Hollywood’s most
enduring heroes. In fact, characterization has always been one of his greatest skills.
Kasdan broke new ground with Body Heat (1981), a controversial noir thriller that
titillated audiences. The picture became one of the most popular films of the 1980s,
launching its stars, Turner and Hurt, into superstardom. Hurt would once again con-
nect with Kasdan as part of the director’s ensemble cast for The Big Chill. In addition
to Hurt, The Big Chill featured Kevin Kline, Tom Berenger, Jeff Goldblum, Glenn
Close, Meg Tilly, JoBeth Williams, and Mary Kay Place as former college classmates
who gather for the funeral of one of their dear friends. A critical and commercial suc-
cess, the film became a cultural icon of the 1980s, linking the decade with the 1960s.

699
Kazan, Elia

Though the two periods could not be more different politically, the soundtrack of the
film introduced teenagers of the Reagan era to the music of the 1960s, having a lasting
impact on the latter decade. The film itself also showed that the baby-boomer genera-
tion, teenagers in the ’60s, could still be considered “cool” and “hip” despite having
become part of the thirty-something establishment.
For the next decade, Kasdan’s record in the industry would be decidedly uneven—
just as many of the films on which he worked missed the mark as became hits. Still,
he was attached as either a writer or director—or both—to a number of popular films
during this period: Silverado (1985); The Accidental Tourist (1988); Grand Canyon
(1991); The Body Guard (1992); and Wyatt Earp (1994). In 1997, Kasdan would
finally appear in front of the camera, playing Dr. Green in the Oscar-award-winning
picture As Good As It Gets.
Though some have suggested that Kasdan’s star has dimmed since his halcyon days
of the 1980s, he is still considered a writer/director of distinction. Aside from playing a
key role in creating and deepening some of the most beloved characters in film history,
he contributed to defining popular culture in the late twentieth century.

Selected Filmography
Dreamcatcher (2003); Mumford (1999); Wyatt Earp (1994); The Bodyguard (1992); Grand Can-
yon (1991); The Accidental Tourist (1988); Silverado (1985); The Big Chill (1983); Star Wars:
Episode VI—Return of the Jedi (1983); Continental Divide (1981); Body Heat (1981); Raiders
of the Lost Ark (1981); Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

References
Indiana Jones: Making the Trilogy. Documentary. Paramount DVD, 2003.
Kasdan, Lawrence, and Jake Kasdan. Wyatt Earp: The Film and the Filmmakers. New York:
New Market Press, 1994.
Lawrence Kasdan. DVD: The Directors Series. American Film Institute, 2000.
Star Wars: Empire of Dreams. Documentary Twentieth Century-Fox DVD, 2004.

—Richard A. Hall

KAZAN, ELIA. Elia Kazan gained a reputation for being an actor’s director over the
course of a stunningly successful career, both on Broadway and in Hollywood. His work
won him three Tony awards and two Oscars—and his skill benefited actors (indeed,
those who worked with him in films alone garnered 21 Best Actor nominations and 9
Oscars for Best Actor). But in spite of his justifiable renown for being the guiding hand
behind some of the most powerful dramas of stage and screen of the 1940s and 1950s,
he never escaped the stigma that followed him after he agreed to testify in 1952 to the
House Committee on Un-American Affairs (HUAC) and “named names” of friends
and colleagues whom he claimed were communist sympathizers.

700
 Kazan, Elia

Born in Constantinople, Turkey in 1909 to Greek parents, Kazan moved with his
family to the United States when he was four, and grew up in the suburbs outside
New York City. His personal story is an example of American immigrant drive, deter-
mination, and success: son of a rug merchant, he went to public school, then to college,
receiving his BA at Williams College, where he became interested in drama, and then
moved on to Yale Drama School. He never fully lost his sense of being an outsider at
Yale. And while what he learned there deepened his understanding of how a director,
as Kazan put it in his memoir, performs an “overall task”, he found the model of the-
ater the school taught to be polite and sterile, and he balked at it.
He landed his first professional position not as a director but as an actor in the com-
pany of the far from sterile or polite Group Theater in 1933. Recently founded by
Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the Group was a leftist modern
theater collective that emphasized ensemble acting and a cooperative approach to
developing theater works. They integrated in their practices acting techniques derived
from the theories of Russian theater master Constantine Stanislavsky, techniques Stras-
berg dubbed “the Method,” a way in which actors created authentic performances by
remembering personal moments of intense feeling. Even though it was as an actor
that Kazan earned a major critical success, his experience performing for the Group
is significant mostly for two reasons: it later served his ability to direct a rising genera-
tion of Method actors, including Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Lee J. Cobb, and
James Dean, on stage and screen; and it provided him left-wing (some have said even
Stalinist) political affiliations that later he “named” to HUAC. Although the Group
Theater disbanded in 1942, Kazan along with Strasberg and other Group alumni
established in 1948 the Actors Studio, a school of Method acting in New York City
that serves to this day as a training ground for American actors in Group techniques.
Kazan received the New York Drama Critics Award for directing Thornton Wilder’s
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), and from that point he began the legendary period
during which he directed a series of extraordinary plays that defined American drama
of the mid-twentieth century. His collaboration with Tennessee Williams resulted in
four seminal Broadway productions, including Williams’s Pulitzer Prize–winning plays
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). His direction of
Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Death of a Salesman
(1949) cemented his reputation as a director of deeply American-themed works that
called for outsized raw emotionality in performance.
A man of exceeding ambition, Kazan launched a successful film career even while he
was America’s foremost theater director. His first major film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
(1945), a melodrama about an Irish family and their alcoholic father, began what
seemed to be a penchant to direct “social problem” pictures. Gentleman’s Agreement
(1947), for which he won his first Oscar, dealt with anti-Semitism; Pinky (1949) with
miscegenation; Panic in the Streets (1950), a noirish thriller, with disease control. But it
was the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, the only one of his stage works
Kazan directed for the screen, that established Marlon Brando as the most compelling
film actor of his generation, and Kazan as the master director of the Method in cinema.
Kazan’s films from then on were marked by powerful star performances, most notably

701
Keaton, Buster

On the Waterfront (1954) (another Best Director Oscar) in which Brando was a
conscience-stricken former prizefighter turned mob informer; and East of Eden
(1955), an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, in which James Dean captured the
angst of misunderstood adolescence caught in archetypal Oedipal conflict.
Kazan struggled with his decision to provide names to HUAC, but once he testified—
naming, among others, former Group colleagues Clifford Odets, John Garfield, and
Lee Strasberg—he maintained he was glad he had done it, a position he modified later
in life. The decision seems even today to affect readings of his work: On the Waterfront
has been seen as a treatise defending the morality of informing; America, America
(1963), a semiautobiographical film about Kazan’s family emigrating from Greece,
proclaims his deep roots in a particularly American story of identity and self-denial.
After his testimony, he had no trouble getting work, but many of the writers and actors
and directors who had refused to testify were blacklisted, and had trouble getting jobs
for the rest of their lives. So deep was the rift in the Hollywood creative community
that almost 50 years after his Congressional testimony, when Kazan was awarded a spe-
cial Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1999, his appearance at the Academy Awards cer-
emony prompted a flurry of protestations and denunciations.
In the 1960s Kazan turned the majority of his creative attention to becoming a best-
selling novelist; he succeeded, though with limited critical success. He died, in 2003, at
the age of 94.
See also: East of Eden; On the Waterfront; Splendor in the Grass; Streetcar Named
Desire, A

Selected Filmography
The Last Tycoon, The (1976); Splendor in the Grass (1961); A Face in the Crowd (1957); East of
Eden (1955); On the Waterfront (1954); A Streetcar Named Desire (1954); Gentleman’s Agreement
(1947); A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)

References
Kazan, Elia. A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
Murphy, Brenda. Collaborative Drama: Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Schickel, Richard. Elia Kazan: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
—Robert Cowgill

KEATON, BUSTER. Once considered a lesser talent than Charlie Chaplin and
Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton is now regarded by many as the most modern and influ-
ential of the silent comedians, and as one of the greatest directors and actors in the his-
tory of cinema. Though known as the “Great Stone-Face,” Keaton’s unsmiling visage
was subtly mobile, and his minimalist acting was ahead of its time. A daredevil athlete
and acrobat who performed his own stunts and directed his own films, his comedies

702
 Keaton, Buster

operate on a grand scale, as Kea-

ton’s characters contended against
the overwhelming forces of
nature and machinery, all the
while keeping their mysterious
inner equilibrium.
Born Joseph Frank Keaton on
October 4, 1895, he was allegedly
nicknamed by Harry Houdini
after taking a “buster” of a fall
down a staircase. By the age of five
he was starring in vaudeville with
his parents as one of “The Three
Keatons.” Playing in an almost
violent roughhouse act with his
father, he received an informal
education in timing, pratfalls,
and perhaps most importantly, in
how not to smile. As an adult,
Keaton had a chance encounter
with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle,
then the second most popular
film comedian in America, who
invited him to appear in a short,
The Butcher Boy (1917). Keaton
became Arbuckle’s sidekick and Actor/director Buster Keaton in costume in 1939. (Library
eventually his co-star and co- of Congress)
director. He embarked on a more
sophisticated and intricate form of comedy when he went solo, making 19 shorts
between 1920 and 1923 and 10 features between 1923 and 1928.
One Week (1920), his first important film, followed the construction of a mail-
order house and inaugurated Keaton’s technique of grappling with immense mechani-
cal props. He used this technique, with great comic effect, in The Boat (1922), in
which he struggles with a hopelessly sinking watercraft. The Scarecrow (1920) and
The Electric House (1922) showcased Keaton’s love of gadgetry: unlike Chaplin, who
stressed machinery’s alienating potential, Keaton strove to master technology. In The
Navigator (1925), for instance, Keaton is pitted against his largest prop, an eerily
empty, drifting ocean liner. Significantly, The Navigator featured Keaton in one of
his favorite roles: as a sheltered, hapless young man forced to rise to some overwhelm-
ing occasion. This character would be reprised in a rather unsettling way in the
Battling Butler (1926), in which the Keaton character must prove his manhood by
entering into a savage, and disturbingly realistic, boxing match. In Steamboat Bill, Jr.
(1928), an effete Buster braves cyclones and floods to prove himself to his overbearing
father and undergoes his most famous (and dangerous) stunt: a house-front falls on

703
Keaton, Buster

top of him and he passes through an open window, inches away from cinematic—and
literal—death.
Like Lloyd, Keaton’s characters succeeded through the classic American formula of
hard work and self-reliance. Unlike Lloyd’s, however, Keaton’s characters tended to
be ethereal loners, whose goals of making good occasionally descend almost to the
point of bleak pessimism. This can be seen in the Sisyphean image of Keaton caught
in a giant paddlewheel in Daydreams (1922), or in the nightmarish Cops (1922), where
he is hunted down by hordes of policemen who multiply with geometric regularity,
much like the mobs that pursue Keaton in Seven Chances (1926). The coda of College
(1927) telescopes a happy-ever-after ending into quick dissolves of parenthood,
decrepitude, and death. Keaton also turned a dispassionate eye toward Hollywood,
lampooning western masculinity in The Frozen North (1922) and Go West (1925)—
in the latter the leading lady is a cow—turning the conflict between Indians and whites
into a grotesque burlesque in The Paleface (1921), and derisively mimicking D. W.
Griffith’s triptych Intolerance (1916) in The Three Ages (1923).
As a director (frequently an uncredited one), Keaton was concerned with the
authenticity of action and space. His preference for long takes and long shots preserves
the fluidity of motion in continuous space, creating comedy from within the frame’s
depth of field and presenting his miraculous stunts as they were actually performed,
instead of cheating his audiences by relying on camera tricks and editing. Keaton’s con-
cern for authenticity included the incredible historical accuracy of his excursions into
period Americana. Our Hospitality (1923) recreates antebellum America by way of its
story of a Hatfield-McCoy type feud, for example, while The General (1926)—which
most critics claim is his masterwork—captures the Civil War in a way that many con-
sider more convincing than any other Hollywood production, even inviting compari-
sons to Mathew Brady’s stunning photographs. Named after the locomotive whose
theft triggers two chases across battle lines, it is Keaton’s most perfect stylistic integra-
tion of comedic and dramatic storylines.
Although his pictures were generally characterized by a certain cinematic realism, he
was not altogether adverse to using sight gags. In his short film Hard Luck (1921), for
instance, Keaton flubs a pool dive, leaving a hole in the earth from which he emerges
years later with a Chinese wife and kids; he also made an exception to the demand
for realism with the oneiric passages of Sherlock Jr. (1924)—one of the most self-
reflexive features ever made in Hollywood—which showcased the stunning special
effect of Keaton falling asleep and walking into the screen of the film he’s projecting,
interacting with a movie within a movie.
Early in his career, Keaton’s films had been independently produced by financier
Joseph Schenck, who distributed them through different Hollywood studios. In
1928, Schenck persuaded Keaton to sign with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Keaton would
come to regard his decision to follow Schenck’s advice as the worst mistake of his life,
although he had few options in a period of studio monopolization that drove out the
first generation of independent filmmakers. Although it may be argued that The
Cameraman (1928) and Spite Marriage (1929) approached the quality of his indepen-
dent work, after he made these films for MGM, the studio stripped Keaton of his

704
 Keaton, Diane

creative independence, forbidding him from using the improvisational style that had
made his films unique. The advent of sound made things even worse, as the newly
developed cameras used to lift filmmaking out of the silent era functioned at a pains-
takingly slow speed, limiting Keaton’s ability to shoot his pictures at the frenetic pace
he preferred. Sound also revealed Keaton’s own deep, husky Midwestern voice, leading
the studio to cast him as a graceless rube in progressively worse films. Frustrated, Keaton
turned to alcohol, with not unexpected results—he was fired in 1933.
Though no longer a star, Keaton continued to work hard for the rest of his life,
eventually returning to MGM as a gagman, making shorts for Columbia and Educa-
tional Pictures, appearing on TV and in Samuel Beckett’s Film (1964) and Chaplin’s
Limelight (1953), and regaining a measure of creative independence by making com-
mercials and industry-sponsored films, such as The Railroader (1965). Keaton’s reputa-
tion was revived after the 1949 publication of James Agee’s landmark essay “Comedy’s
Greatest Era,” leading to the rerelease of many of his silent films. He died a happy man
on February 1, 1966, acclaimed as a genius around the world.

Selected Filmography
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966); How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965);
Beach Blanket Bingo (1965); Pajama Party (1964); It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963);
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960); Around the World in Eighty Days (1956); Limelight
(1952); In the Good Old Summertime (1949); God’s Country (1946); She Went to the Races
(1945); San Diego I Love You (1944); Li’l Abner (1940); The Villain Still Pursued Her (1940);
The Taming of the Snood (1940); Pardon My Berth Marks (1940); Nothing But Pleasure (1940);
One Run Elmer (1935); Palooka from Paducah (1935); The Invader (1935); Allez Oop (1934);
The Gold Ghost (1934); What! No Beer? (1933); Speak Easily (1932); The Passionate Plumber
(1932); Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (1931); Doughboys (1930); Free and Easy (1930); The Camera-
man (1928); Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928); College (1927); The General (1926); Battling Butler
(1926); Go West (1925); Seven Chances (1925); The Navigator (1924); Sherlock Jr. (1924); Our
Hospitality (1923); Three Ages (1923); The Balloonatic (1923)

References
Agee, James. Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies. New York: Modern Library,
2000.
Keaton, Buster. Interviews. Sweeney, Kevin, ed. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007.
Kerr, Walter. The Silent Clowns. New York: Da Capo, 1975.
Smith, Imogen Sara. Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. Chicago: Gambit, 2008.

—Ihsan Amanatullah

KEATON, DIANE. Diane Keaton’s Oscar-winning turn as Annie Hall, the spirited,
slightly scattered romantic interest at the center of Woody Allen’s eponymous 1977
romantic comedy, remains one of her best-remembered roles. More than her contem-
poraries Meryl Streep and Glenn Close, Keaton has perfected a type of character

705
Keaton, Diane

during her years in the movies: charmingly vulnerable, independent, a bit flighty. Yet
Keaton’s four-decade career in film belies the notion she is primarily a comedic actress.
She showed dramatic range in Oscar-nominated roles as Louise Bryant, radical writer
and wife of the communist journalist Jack Reed, in Reds (1981); and as Bessie, the self-
less, caregiving aunt struck with leukemia in Marvin’s Room (1996). Collaborators and
critics have remarked on Keaton’s incisive intelligence and work ethic, qualities that
also account for the actress’s staying power in Hollywood.
Born Diane Hall in Los Angeles on January 5, 1946, Keaton enjoyed a comfortable
upbringing in Southern California. In 1965, she moved to New York City to study under
Sanford Meisner, mentor of acting luminaries including Gregory Peck, Grace Kelly, and
Robert Duvall. In New York, Keaton landed a part in the Broadway ensemble cast of
Hair, the musical celebration of 1960s free love, and performed in numerous cabaret acts.
Breakout film roles came in Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), The Godfather (1972), and
The Godfather: Part II (1974). From the beginning, Keaton displayed an independent
streak that put her somewhere on the peripheries of both youth culture and mainstream
American femininity. She gained press attention as the only one of Hair’s cast members
who refused to disrobe; and of her Godfather role as Kay Adams-Corleone—the willfully
innocent, WASPy wife of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone—Keaton has remarked that she
had “no interest in that woman” (Mitchell, 2001).
Keaton’s collaborations with Woody Allen better capture the tenor of her rise to
stardom during a tumultuous period in America’s collective sex life. Many of the
Hollywood productions she had grown up with during the 1950s had celebrated the
self-sacrificing, stay-at-home housewife as the keeper of domestic calm in a chaotic
“man’s world.” A wave of films during the 1960s and 1970s broke apart the stratified
gender roles of postwar Hollywood. After she played comic roles in early Allen films
like Play It Again, Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973), and Love and Death (1975), the nervous
energy and humor Keaton brought to Annie Hall—the name combines Keaton’s nick-
name and her birth surname—epitomized the excitements and anxieties of women
searching for personal and professional independence at a time of reinvigorated femi-
nism. On the heels of Annie Hall, Keaton starred in two more Allen films: the somber
Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979). In Interiors, Keaton played Renata, the eldest
daughter of a well-off family who struggles to accommodate her success as a published
poet with spousal jealousy and family turmoil. Manhattan was a return to comedy for
Allen; but unlike Annie Hall, Keaton’s Mary Wilke wastes no opportunity to show off
her intellect. The modern American woman could be assertive, aggressive even, Keaton
seemed to be saying through her character in Manhattan.
Keaton’s extremely successful career on the big screen has included its misfires. Her
turn as an American actress recruited to work for the Israeli intelligence services in The
Little Drummer Girl (1984), a cinematic adaptation of a John le Carré novel, received
mixed reviews; as did her performance—with its failed attempt at a Southern accent—
in Crimes of the Heart (1986), in which she starred with Sissy Spacek and Jessica Lange
as one of a trio of eccentric Mississippi sisters.
Keaton continues to thrive, however, as more recently she has defied the common
wisdom that there are no parts for older actresses in Hollywood. In the 1990s and

706
 Kubrick, Stanley

2000s, she anchored several lighthearted box-office successes, including Father of the
Bride (1991), Father of the Bride: Part II (1995), The First Wives Club (1996), and
Something’s Gotta Give (2003). She received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomina-
tion for her work on the last film. Keaton has also spent time on the other side of
the camera. Directing ventures have included an episode of David Lynch’s television
series Twin Peaks and her debut behind the camera on a feature film, the family drama
Unstrung Heroes (1995). An interest in photography has involved Keaton in several
book projects. She dedicated Local News (1999), a collection of mid-century photo-
graphs culled from the archives of an out-of-print Los Angeles tabloid, to “those who
slip away unnoticed.” The line captures something of Keaton’s offbeat celebrity: she
has parlayed movie success into examining facets of American life deemed less than
glamorous by Hollywood standards.

References
Ferriss, Suzanne, and Mallory Young. Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies. New
York: Routledge, 2008.
McMurtry, Larry. “Diane Keaton on Photography.” New York Review of Books 54(17),
November 8, 2007.
Mitchell, Deborah C. Diane Keaton: Artist and Icon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.

—Diana Lemberg

KUBRICK, STANLEY. Stanley Kubrick was a prominent director from the mid-
1950s until the end of the twentieth century. His films covered a wide range of subject
matter and were known for their bizarre, creative, and sometimes controversial subject
matter. A director who eventually rejected the Hollywood establishment, he left
behind a catalog that includes some of the greatest films of the second half of the
twentieth-century.
Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928, in the Bronx, New York. His father, Jacques
Kubrick, was a prominent physician, while his mother, Gertrude, was a housewife.
Kubrick was not a stellar student, but early on demonstrated a talent for photography.
While at Taft High School, his father gave him a 35mm camera, and he immediately
took an active interest in the art form. Kubrick’s big break occurred when one of his
pictures was purchased by Look magazine. Upon graduation he was hired by Look as
a staff photographer. During his time with the magazine, Kubrick also enrolled in
classes at Columbia University but never sought a degree. His real education came
from his work as a photographer and also by attending film screenings at the Metro-
politan Museum of Art (Turner, 1988).
His first foray into movies was a film short based on a picture story he had done for
Look. Day of the Fight (1950) focused on the life of boxer Walter Cartier. Kubrick
bankrolled the film from his own savings and sold the piece to RKO—netting a
$100 profit. His next work, Flying Padre (1951), was partially subsidized by RKO,
and its minor success led to his decision to become a feature filmmaker. Borrowing

707
Kubrick, Stanley

Film director Stanley Kubrick during production of The Shining. (AP/Wide World Photos)

money from his father and uncle, Kubrick embarked on his first full-length film
project (Phillips, 2002).
Fear and Desire (1953) was shot on location in the San Gabriel Mountains and tells
the story of a chance meeting between two American soldiers and two enemy soldiers.
The movie played the art-house circuit and received some favorable reviews. Though
Kubrick himself would later dismiss the film, at the time it did serve to encourage
him to borrow more money from another family member and to begin work on a sec-
ond full-length project. Killer’s Kiss (1955) was set in New York and revolved around
the life of a boxer and the girl he desired. It is in this picture that one sees what would
be a recurring theme in Kubrick’s pictures—dark visions of society engulfed in surreal
imagery.
Kubrick’s next picture was a foray into film noir. The Killing (1956) told the story
of a racetrack heist, filmed partially as a series of flashbacks. For the movie Kubrick
partnered with producer James Harris, with whom he would work on three additional
films. The Killing was a critical success and set the stage for the film that would place
him in the forefront of Hollywood directors. Paths of Glory (1957), starring Kirk
Douglas in the title role, still ranks today as one of the greatest antiwar films ever
made. Set during the World War I, the film is a condemnation of a system that led
to the horrors of trench warfare while simultaneously reflecting the callous attitudes
of officers toward their men—man’s inhumanity toward man. Douglas was so
impressed by Kubrick’s work that he hired him to take over the direction of his next
film, Spartacus (1960), a Roman-era epic based on the life of a gladiator who led a

708
 Kubrick, Stanley

rebellion against the empire. Unlike his previous films, Kubrick did not have complete
control over the picture and often found himself at odds with Douglas, who was not
only the film’s star but also its executive producer. Despite their differences, however,
the two men were able to create a final product that was both a critical and financial
success.
Stung by his experiences during the filming of Spartacus, and disillusioned by the
limitations of Hollywood’s studio system, Kubrick made the momentous decision to
leave the United States in 1962 and relocate to England, where he bought a small estate
in Hertfordshire. He would remain there for the rest of his life. The first picture he
shot in England was Lolita (1962), an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel about
a professor who marries a widow simply because he is obsessed with her adolescent
daughter. In order to heighten the sexually charged character of the film, Kubrick pro-
vided viewers with a disturbing twist by emphasizing the black-comedy nature of the
illicit relationship.
His next three films formed a trilogy dealing with controversial themes through the
lens of science fiction and biting satire. Building on the black-comedy theme from
Lolita, Kubrick now turned his attention to the futility of war in the nuclear age.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) was an
offbeat portrayal of nuclear holocaust, a condemnation of militarism run wild, and a
savage parody of the Cold War and its fears. Kubrick’s next film, 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), turned out to be a visual, sensorial, and technological masterpiece, and still
ranks today as one of the top science fiction films of all time. The third film of the tril-
ogy, A Clockwork Orange (1972), is set in England during a dystopic future in which a
youth gang, led by a Beethoven-obsessed sociopath, engages in extraordinarily unset-
tling, ecstatic acts of rape, torture, and physical assault.
In a departure from what had come before, Kubrick next made a long, sprawling
period piece, Barry Lyndon (1975), which turned out to be his only real commercial
failure. A five-year gap between films ended with his adaptation of a Stephen King
novel and a return to the themes that had made his previous films so successful. In
The Shining (1980), viewers enter the nightmarish world of a man (disturbingly por-
trayed by Jack Nicholson) slowly going insane while he and his family act as caretakers
of an isolated mountain lodge. While receiving mixed reviews from critics, it proved to
be a box-office success.
In 1987, Kubrick made his third antiwar film, Full Metal Jacket. Shot in England,
and following filmic offerings such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Michael
Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, and Oliver Stone’s Platoon, Full Metal Jacket was Kubrick’s
statement on the senselessness of the Vietnam conflict. Not surprisingly, his last film,
Eyes Wide Shut (1999), proved controversial. Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman,
who were then married, the picture follows a wealthy, New York City couple into a
debasing world of eroticism and sexual perversion; a world in which, the director
seemed to be saying, there is little hope for redemption. Ironically, Kubrick would
not live to see his final cinematic work released, as he died in his sleep on March 7,
1999, just four days after he had delivered the final print of his film.

709
Kubrick, Stanley

Selected Filmography
Eyes Wide Shut (1999); Full Metal Jacket (1987); The Shining (1980); Barry Lyndon (1975); A
Clockwork Orange (1971); 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964); Lolita (1962); Spartacus (1960); Paths of Glory
(1957); The Killing (1956); Killer’s Kiss (1955); The Seafarers (1953); Fear and Desire (1953);
Day of the Fight (1951)

References
Abrams, Jerold, ed. The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2007.
Lane, Anthony. “The Last Emperor: How Stanley Kubrick Called the World to Order.” New
Yorker, March 22, 1999: 120–23.
Phillips, Gene, and Rodney Hill. The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Facts on File,
2002.
Turner, Adrian. “Stanley Kubrick.” In Wakeman, John, ed. World Film Directors, Vol. II, 1945–1985.
New York: H. W. Wilson, 1987.
—Charles Johnson

710
 v
L
LANG, FRITZ. Fritz Lang was one of the most notable of the Austrian and German
directors who fled to the United States after Adolf Hitler came to power in the 1930s.
Already acclaimed as a major filmmaker after making masterpieces such as Metropolis
(1927) and M (1931), Lang did not quite match the success he had enjoyed in Europe
after he arrived in America. He did, however, work steadily for more than two decades
and was one of the major forces in creating what came to be known as film noir. Lang’s
bitterness and cynicism found an unusually suitable outlet in this genre, with his pro-
tagonists constantly struggling against their fates.
Born in Vienna in 1890, the son of an architect, Lang studied art in Munich and
Paris before serving in the Austrian army during World War I. Convalescing from
wounds he had received in battle, Lang tried writing screenplays. His film career began
in Berlin as a script reader, and by 1919 he was directing films, many written in col-
laboration with his second wife, Thea von Harbou. In films such as Dr. Mabuse: The
Gambler (1922), Lang displayed a deliberate pace and the expressionistic visual style
that dominated German filmmaking during the 1920s; Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler also
introduced Lang’s obsession with the shady world of criminals, police, and spies. A visit
to America in 1925—especially his experiences in Hollywood and the sight of the New
York City skyline—inspired him to make the futuristic Metropolis, which would
become one of the most iconic films of cinema’s early history. In 1931, Lang made
the first German sound film, M, a haunting portrait of a child killer that served as a
template for the director’s later film noirs. M was characterized by a claustrophobic
urban setting, streets that feel like steel traps, and a perverse protagonist (Peter Lorre,
in a masterful performance) overwhelmed by forces he cannot evade.
Although the director expressed his concerns about what he felt was the increasing
threat of National Socialism in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), he was asked to
work for the Nazis by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Instead, Lang fled to
Paris, leaving behind his fortune—including a large art collection—as well as his wife,
who was a member of the Nazi Party. Although Lang’s mother was Jewish, she had con-
verted to her husband’s Catholicism when their son was ten. Lang was raised as a
Catholic and always identified himself as such.

711
Lang, Fritz

After making the romantic

drama Liliom (1934), which was
later adapted as the Broadway
musical Carnival, Lang was
signed by MGM. This studio
was not known for the dark,
socially conscious films Lang
wanted to direct, and he left after
making Fury (1936)—an attack
on lynch-mob hysteria that
starred Spencer Tracy and Sylvia
Sidney—and began to make free-
lance films. He reunited with Sid-
ney for You Only Live Once
(1937), about a young couple on
the run from the law. Co-
starring Henry Fonda, the film
was inspired by the real-life out-
laws Bonnie and Clyde. With
their violence and dark, atmos-
pheric lighting, these first two
American films were tentative
steps in Lang’s evolution toward
his fully developed noir style.
Fascinated by the American
West, Lang spent periods on a
Austrian-born film director Fritz Lang during his days at Navaho reservation and used
Germany’s UFA studios in 1927. (Time Life Pictures/Getty what he observed there to help
Images) him make two westerns: The
Return of Frank James (1940),
with Fonda and Gene Tierney, and Western Union (1941), with Randolph Scott and
Robert Young. Interestingly, while most of Lang’s films are set in urban locations and
filmed in black and white, his westerns demonstrate a talent for composing striking
Technicolor landscapes.
With World War II raging in Europe, Lang next turned to more topical films. Man
Hunt (1941) involves a big-game hunter (Walter Pidgeon) on the run from Nazis. The
picture co-starred Joan Bennett, who went on to make three more films with Lang and
reportedly had an affair with the director. Another example of his early noirs, Man
Hunt gave Lang a chance to make a personal statement dramatizing the gathering Nazi
threat. Released in June 1941, before the United States entered the war and was thus
officially neutral, the film attracted the attention of members of Congress, who began
an investigation to determine whether the picture could be considered subversive; the
investigation was dropped after the events at Pearl Harbor occurred in December of
that year.

712
 Lang, Fritz

After Moontide (1942), a melodrama with Jean Gabin and Ida Lupino, Lang
explored the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in Hangmen Also Die! (1943); the film
was based on a story by Bertolt Brecht. Moontide and Hangmen Also Die! were poorly
received, but Lang quickly redeemed himself with films such as Ministry of Fear
(1944). Based on a Graham Greene novel, Ministry of Fear concerns a man (Ray Milland)
who has just been released from a mental institution and finds himself forced to flee from
both the Nazis, who are pursuing him because he has accidentally been given a secret
document, and the police, who suspect him of murder.
Along with films such as Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) and Billy Wilder’s Double
Indemnity (1944), Lang’s next two offerings were characterized by the mixture of sex,
greed, murder, and mystery that are the fundamental elements of film noir. In Woman
in the Window (1944), for instance, a mild-mannered professor (Edward G. Robinson)
finds himself the victim of capricious fate as he falls for a mysterious beauty (Joan Bennett),
kills someone in self-defense, and is blackmailed. Lang carried the theme of the ran-
dom character of fate even further in Scarlet Street (1945), often cited as one of his best
American films. A meek married man (Robinson again) becomes entangled with an
avaricious woman (Bennett), who persuades him to embezzle from his employer. This
story of innocence corrupted is one of Lang’s most pessimistic.
Lang’s next four films are less highly regarded. The talky espionage thriller Cloak
and Dagger (1946), with a miscast Gary Cooper, is notable as the first film about
atomic scientists, though Warner Bros. angered Lang by removing the final scene
warning of the dangers of atomic power. In Secret beyond the Door (1948), Lang’s final
film with Joan Bennett, a newly married woman discovers her husband (Michael Red-
grave) is unbalanced. Despite similarities to the director’s earlier psychological thrillers,
Secret beyond the Door seems muddled. Widely considered one of Lang’s weakest films,
An American Guerilla in the Philippines (1950) is the story of an American sailor
(Tyrone Power) stranded in Japanese-occupied territory during World War II. In The
House by the River (1950), a minor but efficient noir, a wealthy man (Louis Hayward)
kills the family maid (Dorothy Patrick) and tries to frame his brother (Lee Bowman)
for the murder.
Lang began his return to form with Clash by Night (1952), a love-triangle melo-
drama with noir touches, featuring standout performances by Barbara Stanwyck, Rob-
ert Ryan, Paul Douglas, and, in one of the best of her early efforts, Marilyn Monroe.
Lang followed Clash by Night with his final western, the truly strange Rancho Notorious
(1952), with Marlene Dietrich as a singer who runs a hideout for outlaws. Despite
interference from producer Howard Hughes, Lang created a stylish blend of western
and noir with this film, as a man (Arthur Kennedy), seeking revenge for the murder
of his fiancée, poses as an escaped prisoner to infiltrate the hideout.
In The Big Heat (1953), Glenn Ford plays a Los Angeles police detective whose wife
(Jocelyn Brando) dies in a car bombing intended for him. This portrayal of a dehu-
manizing quest for revenge is sometimes cited as Lang’s best American film. In The
Blue Gardenia (1953), Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) believes that while she was drunk,
she killed a man (Raymond Burr) who had been making unwanted advances. A remake
of Jean Renoir’s La Bête Humaine (1938) and adapted from an Emile Zola novel,

713
Lang, Fritz

Human Desire (1954) is one of Lang’s darkest noirs. It stars Glenn Ford as a railroad
engineer having an affair with the wife (Gloria Grahame) of a drunken, violent co-
worker (Broderick Crawford).
The swashbuckler Moonfleet (1955) was Lang’s first foray into CinemaScope,
although it appears that Lang was not particularly comfortable with the wide-screen
process. Lang was more successful with his final two American films, both noirs. In
While the City Sleeps (1956), journalists Edward Mobley (Dana Andrews), Mildred
Donner (Ida Lupino), and Mark Loving (George Sanders) stalk a serial killer, Robert
Manners (John Barrymore Jr.), with unforeseen consequences. Several plot elements
come together during a thrilling chase that winds through New York City streets and
down into the underground spaces of the subway system. In the similar Beyond a Rea-
sonable Doubt (1956), a publisher, Austin Spencer (Sydney Blackmer), convinces a
writer, Tom Garrett (Andrews again), to implicate himself in a murder so that an
incompetent district attorney, Roy Thompson (Philip Bourneuf ), can be exposed;
not surprisingly, the plan backfires. It is noteworthy that his final American film
focuses on a consistent Langian theme: the individual struggling against his or her
tragic fate.
During the mid-1950s, Lang returned to Germany to realize a film project adapted
from a novel written by Lang and his then wife von Harbou. An exotic, mystical story
set in India and divided into two films, The Tiger of Eschnapur (1958) and The Indian
Tomb (1959), the project gave the director a chance to try something new. In the end,
the pictures did not represent Lang’s best efforts, and the U.S. distributor American
International reedited the films into a single 90-minute offering, Journey to the Lost
City (1959).
Lang retreated to firmer ground for his final film, The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse
(1960), a continuation of his earlier Mabuse films. Unable to secure financing for
further films, the director made his first acting appearance since 1919 in Jean-Luc
Godard’s Contempt (1963). Lang plays himself, a once-great filmmaker relegated to
doing work-for-hire, on an ill-conceived adaptation of The Odyssey, for a bullying
Hollywood producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance). Godard’s screenplay gave Lang
opportunities to reflect upon his career. It may be that his best moment in Contempt
comes when Brigitte Bardot tells him she likes Rancho Notorious, and his expression
moves quickly from pleasure to wishing she had picked a better film.
Lang made 25 American films during the studio system era in Hollywood, working
on some projects for which he had little affinity and making certain pictures less dark,
brutal, sexy, or political than he would have liked. Nevertheless, most of his Hollywood
efforts convey his unsentimental personality and eerie, atmospheric style. Although he
fit the cliché of the monocled Teutonic perfectionist who demonstrated an antagonistic
attitude toward those with whom he worked, he was still able to elicit dozens of out-
standing performances from his actors. Initially considered inferior to the films he
made in Germany, Lang’s American films have now been accepted by critics and fans
alike as extremely important cinematic works. Lang died in 1976, in Beverly Hills,
California; he was 86.
See also: Big Heat, The; Film Noir; Metropolis; Studio System, The

714
 Laurel and Hardy

Selected Filmography
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956); While the City Sleeps (1956); Moonfleet (1954); Human
Desire (1954); The Big Heat (1953); Blue Gardenia (1953); Clash by Night (1952); Rancho Noto-
rious (1952); American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950); House by the River (1950); Secret
beyond the Door (1948); Cloak and Dagger (1946); Scarlet Street (1945); The Woman in the Win-
dow (1944); Ministry of Fear (1944); Hangmen Also Die! (1943); Moontide (1942); Man Hunt
(1941); Western Union (1941); Return of Frank James, The (1940); You Only Live Once (1937);
Fury (1936); M (1931); Metropolis (1927)

References
Eisner, Lotte. Fritz Lang. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernism. London: British
Film Institute, 2000.
Humphries, Reynold. Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in His American Films. Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.
—Michael Adams

LAUREL AND HARDY. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were members of one of the
most influential comic duos in American movies. Among those who brought the world
of vaudeville to the big screen during the transition period from silents to sound mov-
ies, they excelled in slapstick comedy, parodies, and situations that would be taken up
and used by later generations of admiring artists.
Born Arthur Stanley Jefferson, in Ulverston, Lancashire, England, on June 16,
1890, Stan Laurel was the son of actor-manager Arthur J. Jefferson and actress Madge
Metcalfe. He performed with the Levy and Cardwell Juvenile Pantomimes Company
from 1907 to 1909. Prior to his meeting with Hardy, he appeared in vaudeville shows
and pantomimes in Great Britain. He was an understudy to Charlie Chaplin before
appearing in American vaudeville in the 1910s.
Hardy was born Norvell Hardy, on January 18, 1892, in Harlem, Georgia, near
Augusta. His father, Oliver Hardy, who served in the Georgia Volunteer Infantry
during the Civil War, died when the young Norvell was only 10 months old. In honor
of his father, Norvell adopted his name, calling himself Oliver Norvell Hardy. As
Hardy grew, he began to fabricate stories about his family and himself. He claimed,
for instance, that his father had been an attorney and that at age eight he had sung with
Coburn’s Minstrels (Gehring, 1990). In reality, after her husband’s untimely death,
Hardy’s mother, Emily (Emmie) Norvell Tant, operated hotels in Madison, and later
in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Hardy eventually enrolled at the Atlanta Conservatory of Music, and later at the
Georgia Military College in Milledgeville. He worked as a film projectionist from
1910 to 1913, after which he migrated to Jacksonville, Florida, at that time a minor
center of film production. An endearingly portly presence on screen, Hardy worked

715
Laurel and Hardy

for various studios and appeared

with a slimmer comedic partner,
Bobby Ray, in The Paperhanger’s
Helper (1925). Significantly, this
union with the slender Ray would
foreshadow his iconic pairing
with Stan Laurel.
In his first short film, Nuts in
May (1917), Laurel portrayed
a mentally challenged man who
escapes an institution dressed as
Napoleon. In A Lucky Dog (1917),
he played a poor dog owner, while
Hardy was cast as a crook attempt-
ing to rob him. In 1921, film pro-
ducer Hal Roach created a series
of short comedy films with Laurel;
four years later Roach persuaded
Laurel to join the new Comedy
All-Stars, a troupe that included
Hardy. The first Laurel and Hardy
films were The Second Hundred
Portrait of comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. (Michael Ochs Years and Putting Pants on Philip,
Archives/Getty Images) both released in 1927. Between
1927 and 1932, Laurel and Hardy
would make 65 films with Roach,
The duo’s first sound film was Unaccustomed as We Are (1929). Their innovative
sound effects and sight gags would eventually be picked up by other early sound film-
makers. During World War II, they made more feature films together, among them Air
Raid Wardens (MGM, 1943), and The Bullfighters (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1945).
The government even issued a short film, The Tree in a Test Tube (1943), in which
the pair demonstrated conservation tips recommended by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture.
In their work ethic, they differed greatly: Laurel was a workaholic and designed
many of the duo’s acts. Extremely creative, he kept notepads throughout his house,
using them to record his thoughts as they came to him. Hardy, on the other hand,
was less interested in working when he was not on the set, enjoying diversions such
as gourmet cooking, golf, and gambling. Although master comedians, their films often
raised important social questions, as they poked fun at authority figures and members
of the upper classes. Vastly significant figures in the early American cinema, Laurel and
Hardy would profoundly influence other comedians such as Jack Benny, Lucille Ball,
Jackie Gleason, Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, and Dick Van Dyke. Oliver Hardy died
on August 7, 1957, the result of three debilitating strokes; Stan Laurel died on
February 23, 1965, after suffering a heart attack.

716
 Lee, Ang

References
Gehring, Wes D. Laurel & Hardy: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990.
McCabe, John. Babe: The Life of Oliver Hardy. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1989.
McCabe, John. The Comedy World of Stan Laurel. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.
Nollen, Scott Allen. The Boys: The Cinematic World of Laurel and Hardy. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1989.
—Ralph Hartsock

LEE, ANG. Ang Lee is a Taiwanese American director, producer, and writer of
international renown. Critics widely consider Lee to be one of the most significant
filmmakers working today. Over the past 15 years, his reputation has grown consider-
ably, and he has acquired worldwide audiences with films as varied as The Wedding
Banquet (1993), Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon (2000), The Hulk (2003), and Brokeback Mountain (2005). Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon garnered Lee a 2001 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and
the controversial but extremely popular Brokeback Mountain earned him a 2005 Acad-
emy Award for Best Director.
Ang Lee was born in Pingtung, Taiwan, on October 23, 1954. Early on, Lee showed a
preference for the arts and for drama in particular; however, his father, a school admin-
istrator and stern patriarch, strongly dissuaded him from pursuing the arts and
demanded that he follow what was considered a more intellectual, honorable profession
(Berry, 2005). Having fared poorly in his university entrance exams, Lee opted to enroll
in Taiwan’s National Art School, where he received his first formal exposure to theater
and graduated in 1975. He then moved to the United States to further his studies, even-
tually receiving his bachelor’s of arts in theater at the University of Illinois Urbana-
Champaign, in 1980, and acquiring his MFA in theater from New York University in
1984. During his time as a student filmmaker, Lee developed his skills and defined his
vision as an artist, showing preferences for technically sophisticated works that explore
the notion of identity and tradition. Lee’s talent was not lost on the artistic and academic
community, as he won student awards for Best Director and Best Film while at NYU.
Given the filmmaker’s connections to Taiwan, China, the United States, and
Europe, it is not surprising that Lee’s work is both expansive and decidedly cross-
cultural. It is also marked by a willingness on Lee’s part to openness and risk, from
both a formal and a thematic standpoint. Indeed, Lee has a history of utilizing young,
unknown actors; taking on difficult topics; and utilizing a range of experimental tech-
nical approaches in an attempt to enhance the narrative and visual elements of his
films. As is often the case with innovative artists, the quality of Lee’s work has proven
to be uneven: for instance, while film critics praised him for his stunning use of color
and magical realism in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, most found what he did in
Hulk to be awkwardly executed.
While Lee’s films are diverse in terms of subject matter, certain themes and motifs
continually emerge within them. The pressures of family and society are given

717
Lee, Ang

expression in his work by way of

examining the conflicted relation-
ships that exist among wives,
partners, children, and different
examples of filmic “father fig-
ures,” many of whom have an
overbearing and unhealthy influ-
ence on those around them. Lee
has reflected on this focus, noting
that in addition to giving his films
more emotional and psychologi-
cal complexity, it also offers him
an artistic means by which to
work through his relationship
with his own father (Berry, 2005,
336). He has also examined the
repression—both conscious and
unconscious—of heterosexual
and homosexual desire in charac-
ters forced to function within the
restrictive boundaries of what are
often stifling social constraints.
For Lee, repression is a funda-
mental element that is woven
through all of his work, one that
he believes humanizes his charac-
ters and helps to drive the story-
lines of his films (Crothers
In 2001, Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dilley, 2007).
Dragon became the first foreign-language film to earn more than
$100 million in the United States. (AP/Wide World Photos)
Selected Filmography
Taking Woodstock (2009); Lust, Caution (2007); Brokeback Mountain (2005); Hulk (2003);
Chosen (2001); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000); Ride with the Devil (1999); The Ice
Storm (1997); Sense and Sensibility (1995); Eat Drink Man Woman (1994); The Wedding Ban-
quet (1993); Pushing Hands (1992)

References
Berry, Michael. “Ang Lee: Freedom in Film.” In Speaking In Images: Interviews with Contempo-
rary Chinese Filmmakers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Cheshire, Ellen. Ang Lee. North Pomfret, UK: Trafalgar Square, 2001.
Dilley, Whitney Crothers. The Cinema of Ang Lee. London: Wallflower, 2007.

—Caleb Puckett

718
 Lee, Spike

LEE, SPIKE. Spike Lee has been one of the most prolific and controversial film-
makers working in American cinema over the past three decades. He occupies a special
position in film history as one of the only African American directors to work steadily
on films of his own choosing, maintain his creative autonomy, and showcase his work
through mainstream studio outlets.
Shelton Jackson Lee was born to musician/composer Bill Lee and schoolteacher Jac-
quelyn Shelton on March 27, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. The family moved to Brooklyn,
New York, while Lee was still young. Growing up in New York seems to have influenced
his filmmaking, as the city serves as the backdrop for most of his films. Lee enrolled at his
father’s alma mater, Morehouse College, in 1975. Many of his experiences there were
dramatized in his film School Daze (1988). After graduating, Lee entered the Tisch School
of the Arts at New York University. A friendship between Lee and another black film-
maker, Ernest Dickerson, formed while he was there. The friendship has endured, and
Dickerson has worked as the director of photography on seven of Lee’s pictures, including
his film school thesis at NYU, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1981), which won
the Academy Award for Best Student Film.
Success beyond film school was hard earned. Lee’s first post-film school project,
about a bike messenger who is forced to become the family breadwinner in the wake
of his mother’s death, had to be abandoned after financing disappeared (Lee et. al.,
1991). The setback seemed to fuel Lee’s passion for filmmaking, however; it also
taught him valuable lessons about the practical end of the industry, lessons that he
put to good use in making his first feature, She’s Gotta Have It (1986). The story of a
black woman, Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), and her relationships with three
very different men, the picture was shot independently over 12 days on a budget of
$175,000 and went on to make $7 million. Interestingly, one of Nola’s relationships
is carried out with “Mars Blackmon,” played by Lee, who would become a recurring
figure in a string of Nike commercials featuring Michael Jordon.
Lee continued working at a breakneck pace, putting out a film every year between
1988 and 1992. While School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo’ Better Blues
(1990), Jungle Fever (1991), and Malcolm X (1992) proved to be somewhat controversial
offerings, their critical and box-office success made it clear that audiences would turn out
to view “A Spike Lee Joint.” The films also demonstrated Lee’s commitment to empower-
ing black talent. Indeed, several of the actors who worked in these early Lee films—includ-
ing Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, Wesley Snipes, Martin Lawrence, and Oscar
winners Denzel Washington and Halle Berry—would go on to become Hollywood stars.
Lee stayed productive through the mid-1990s, working on a wide range of
films. The semiautobiographical Crooklyn (1994), written by his sister Joie and brother
Cinque, explored the challenges of a black Brooklyn family facing the death of its
matriarch. (Lee has taken advantage of his talented family on a number of occasions:
Beyond co-writing the script for Crooklyn, Joie has also starred in several of Lee’s other
films; his brother David has worked for Lee as a composer and his father as a cinema-
tographer.) In 1995, Lee directed the crime thriller Clockers, based on a Richard Price
novel; Martin Scorsese, one of Lee’s cinematic influences, produced the film. He
released two films in 1996: Girl 6, about a black actress who becomes a phone sex

719
Lee, Spike

Filmmaker Spike Lee arrives at the Bellas Artes museum in Caracas, July 24, 2009. Lee was in
Venezuela to give a seminar to young film students. (AP/Wide World Photos)

operator because she cannot find work, and Get on the Bus, an intimate look at a group
of men headed to the Million Man March.
In 1997, Lee partnered with HBO to make the documentary 4 Little Girls. An
examination of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,
Alabama, the film was nominated for an Academy Award. He has made two other,
Emmy Award-winning documentaries for the cable network: Jim Brown: All American
(2002), and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006). Lee teamed up with
Denzel Washington for a third time in He Got Game (1998) and rounded out the de-
cade by directing his first film with a predominantly white cast, Summer of Sam (1999).
The start of the new millennium found Lee exploring the issue of racial stereotyping
in the biting satire Bamboozled (2000). A powerful examination of the historical legacy
of denigrating black images in popular media, the film was a box-office failure. Still,
Lee understood how important the issue of stereotyping was in America, and the con-
cert film The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), as well as his film adaptation of Roger
Guenveur Smith’s Obie Award–winning A Huey P. Newton Story (2001), can be read as
critical companion pieces to Bamboozled.
Neither of Lee’s next two narrative features was financially successful, although both
addressed significant cultural issues. 25th Hour (2002) was one of the first major studio
films to address the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks; while She Hate Me (2004),
explored shifting familial mores, reproductive rights, and economic corruption.
Lee’s feature output has slowed, although he has directed several short films and
done television work including the short-lived drama series Sucker Free City (2004).

720
 Lewis, Jerry

Teaming once again with Denzel Washington, Lee scored with Inside Man in 2006,
although his Miracle at St. Anna of 2008 failed. Lee has claimed that critics and audi-
ences cannot separate his public persona from his work, but he has expressed no desire
to make a clean break between the two.

Selected Filmography
Miracle at St. Anna (2008); Lovers & Haters (2007); Inside Man (2006); She Hate Me (2004);
25th Hour (2002); Bamboozled (2000); The Original Kings of Comedy (2000); Summer of Sam
(1999); He Got Game (1998); 4 Little Girls (1997); Get on the Bus (1996); Girl 6 (1996); Lumi-
ère and Company (1995); Clockers (1995); Crooklyn (1994); Malcolm X (1992); Jungle Fever
(1991); Mo’ Better Blues (1990); Do the Right Thing (1989); School Daze (1988); She’s Gotta
Have It (1986)

References
Crowdus, Gary, and Dan Georgakas. “Thinking about the Power of Images: An Interview with
Spike Lee.” Cineaste 26(2), January 2001: 4–9.
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1993.
Lee, Spike, and Terry McMillan, et al. Five for Five: The Films of Spike Lee. New York: Stewart,
Tabori, and Chang, 1991.
Massood, Paula J. The Spike Lee Reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007.
Reid, Mark. “Spike Lee.” In Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds.
African American National Biography. Vol. 5. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

—Mikal Gaines

LEWIS, JERRY. A popular comedian and actor during the 1950s and 1960s, Jerry
Lewis achieved worldwide fame both on stage and in film for his slapstick comedy rou-
tines. He also proved himself to be an equally talented screenwriter and director. Lewis’s
numerous accomplishments as a comedic actor and filmmaker have earned him an
important place in American cinematic history.
Jerry Lewis was born Jerome Levitch on March 16, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey.
His parents, Daniel Levitch and Rae Brodsky, were both actors who performed onstage
professionally as Danny and Rae Lewis. In 1932, when Lewis was six years old, he made
his acting debut when he performed a rendition of the song “Brother, Can You Spare a
Dime?” in the Catskills, New York. In 1942, when Lewis was 16 years old, he quit high
school to perform professionally as a comedian. On July 25, 1946, he performed
onstage with singer Dean Martin at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This per-
formance, in hindsight, was a pivotal moment in Lewis’s acting career. Their onstage
chemistry and comedy routine quickly became popular. They performed regularly in
nightclubs and theaters across the country. From April 1949 through June 1953, the
duo also performed on their own radio show, the Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis Show.

721
Lewis, Jerry

Actor and comedian Jerry Lewis shares a banana split with Pierre, a five-year-old chimpanzee who’s
trying to make a name for himself in the movies, 1950. (AP/Wide World Photos)

In 1949, the comedy team made their motion picture debut with My Friend Irma. The
popularity of this first movie led to the duo’s collaboration on 16 other movies between
1949 and 1956. In all of their films, Martin played the straight man to Lewis’s slapstick
comedy acts. Some of their most popular movies included At War with the Army
(1950), The Stooge (1953), and Money from Home (1953). The team’s last two movies,
Artists and Models (1955) and Hollywood or Bust (1956), are considered by many critics
to be their best two movies. In 1956, Martin and Lewis ended their working relationship.
Following his split with Martin, Lewis embarked on a very successful solo acting
career. In 1960, he also made his screenwriting and directorial debut with the movie
The Bellboy. In 1960, he produced and starred in the smash hit Cinderfella. Lewis also
wrote, directed, and performed in The Ladies Man (1961), The Errand Boy (1961), and
The Nutty Professor (1963). Many critics consider The Nutty Professor to be Lewis’s
movie masterpiece because it highlighted his skillful use of the camera to execute a
comedy routine. Other popular movies made by Lewis included The Patsy (1964),
The Disorderly Orderly (1964), The Family Jewels (1965), in which Lewis took on seven
different roles, and Three on the Couch (1966), in which he played four different roles.
In 1967, Lewis taught a graduate course in film direction at the University
of Southern California. Some of his students included George Lucas, Francis Ford
Coppola, and Steven Spielberg. In 1971, he published the book The Total Film-Maker.

722
 Lloyd, Harold

During the early the 1970s, Lewis directed and starred in two additional movies. In
1970, Which Way to the Front was released; and The Day the Clown Died, shot in 1972,
was never released due to conflicts among the backers, producers, and Lewis. Through-
out the rest of the decade, Lewis devoted most of his attention to being the National
Chair and spokesman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Actively involved in
the fight for a cure since the 1940s, Lewis has been a tireless host and fund-raiser on
the annual Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, which began in 1966. In 1983,
he returned to acting in his critically acclaimed role in the Martin Scorsese film The
King of Comedy.
In total, Lewis starred in 63 motion pictures, 17 of which he directed, 14 of which
he produced, and 11 of which he wrote. His brilliant comedy routines established him
as one of the world’s most famous funnymen. Equally important, the Martin and
Lewis comedy team is also considered to be one of the most successful teams in
American cinematic history. Lewis’s talents as a comedic actor, screenwriter, producer,
and director have earned him an important place in America cinematic history.

References
Levy, Shawn. King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.
Lewis, Jerry, and James Kaplan. Dean & Me: (A Love Story). New York: Doubleday, 2005.
Neibaur, James L., and Ted Okuda. The Jerry Lewis Films: An Analytical Filmography of the Inno-
vative Comic. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994.

—Bernadette Zbicki Heiney

LLOYD, HAROLD. Harold Clayton Lloyd was one of the most successful actor/
comedians of the silent film era. Between 1913 and 1947, he made almost 200 films,
both silents and “talkies,” rivaling Charlie Chaplin as one of the industry’s top money-
makers. Lloyd’s on-screen persona the “Glass Character,” with his signature tortoise-
shell horn-rimmed glasses, was an earnest mild-mannered character who faced
adversity and triumphed, a man to whom people in the 1920s could relate. Known
for his very physical comedy, Lloyd has been characterized as “The King of Daredevil
Comedy.” In addition to his acting career, Lloyd produced several movies and film
compilations and was involved in radio and television. In 1953, at the 25th annual
Academy Awards, he received an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, recogniz-
ing nearly a half-century of filmmaking.
Lloyd was born April 20, 1893, in Burchard, Nebraska, to James Darsie “Foxy”
Lloyd and Elizabeth Fraser. His father had several unsuccessful business ventures and
moved his family from town to town after each failed attempt to strike it rich. Elizabeth
Fraser had dreamed of becoming an actress, but while visiting relatives in Nebraska she
met and married Lloyd. The stress of Foxy’s financial failures and constant relocation,
however, took its toll, and Lloyd’s parents divorced in 1910. After receiving a $6,000
cash settlement in a lawsuit and splitting the enormous sum with his attorney, Foxy

723
Lloyd, Harold

moved to San Diego, where Harold was enrolled in high school and began starring in
high school plays. By 1912, Harold had joined the Burwood Stock Company, which
was headed by John Lane Connor, an early mentor to Lloyd. Continuing to act in
school plays, Lloyd also began teaching at the San Diego School of Expression, another
one of Connor’s enterprises.
Lloyd arrived in Hollywood in 1913 and found work with Universal as an extra. It
was there that he met Hal Roach, who would be an important force in Lloyd’s career.
Roach soon began making one-reel comedies starring Lloyd as “Willie Work,” and
Pathé Films eventually offered Roach a distribution contract after the release of Just
Nuts (1915), one of the few surviving films of that period. Lloyd next developed the
character of “Lonesome Luke,” a variation on Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp; but it
was his “Glasses Character” that allowed him to transform his acting career.
The first of the glasses films was Over the Fence (1917). Lloyd convinced Pathé that
such “one-reelers” were ideal for distribution while he was developing the character.
Released every week or so, these short films allowed audiences to familiarize themselves
with the new character. In 1919, he began to make more complex films, such as Ask Father
(1919), considered one of the best one-reel comedies of the time. Unfortunately, while
posing for publicity photos that same year, Lloyd had the thumb and index finger of his
right hand ripped off when a prop bomb accidentally exploded, leaving him hovering near
death for days. Recovering fully, he wore a prosthetic thumb and finger thereafter.
His most memorable film may be the feature Safety Last (1923), where his character
is seen hanging from the hands of a clock high above a busy street. Audiences loved
these stunts, and Lloyd, it seems, enjoyed his reputation as a daredevil actor willing
to take chances with his life. Safety Last turned out to be a wildly popular film, one
of the last he would make with Hal Roach. In 1924, he became an independent pro-
ducer, releasing Girl Shy (1924), The Freshman (1925), Kid Brother (1927), and his last
silent film, Speedy (1928). In 1929, he made the transition to sound with Welcome
Danger (1929). Sadly, he released only six more films between 1929 and 1947.
Harold Lloyd married his leading lady, Mildred Davis on February 10, 1923. They
had two children: Gloria and Harold Clayton Lloyd Jr. (b. 1931). They also had an
adopted daughter, Gloria Freeman, renamed Marjorie Elizabeth Lloyd. In 1926, Lloyd
started construction on his Beverly Hills estate, “Greenacres,” a 44-room mansion on
16 sprawling acres. Lloyd died of prostate cancer at the age of 77 on March 8, 1971.
After his death, Lloyd’s beloved Greenacres was opened for public tours from
May 1973 to February 1974.

Selected Filmography (Director)

Just Neighbors (1919); The Lamb (1918); Over the Fence (1917); Pinched (1917)

References
Baer, William. Classic American Films, Conversations with Screenwriters. Westport: Praeger,
2008.
Dardis, Tom. Harold Lloyd: The Man on the Clock. New York: Viking, 1983.

724
 Lucas, George

Vance, Jeffrey, and Suzanne Lloyd. Harold Lloyd: Master Comedian. New York: Henry N.
Abrams, 2002.

—Katie Simonton

LUCAS, GEORGE. As a screenwriter, director, and producer, George Lucas has

been one of the most influential figures in the American cinema. Not only did he craft
some of the most successful films of all time, he pioneered—through his production
company Lucasfilm and its many subsidiaries—a number of innovative technologies
that continue to reshape modern cinema.
Even before his graduation from the film school at the University of Southern California,
Lucas had become associated with a number of young filmmakers who wanted to escape the
constraints of Hollywood’s studio system. With Francis Ford Coppola, he was instrumental
in creating American Zoetrope, a production company headquartered in San Francisco that
was designed to utilize younger talent and engage in a type of cinéma vérité. Coppola
became an early mentor who helped Lucas create and sell his first professional films, THX
1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973). The latter was a coming-of-age film loosely
based on Lucas’s own adolescent years of “cruisin’ ” in Modesto, California, just prior
to the cultural convulsions of the 1960s. Although the film sparked a nostalgia for this
American “age of innocence” (leading to television series such as Happy Days and its own
multitude of spin-offs), it also employed several innovative techniques—such as intertwin-
ing several unrelated narrative threads and integrating original period songs into the
narrative schema—that became conventions in subsequent films and even television
dramas. Produced on a shoestring budget, the film was a huge commercial success and pro-
vided Lucas with the finances and clout he needed to create his own production company
(Lucasfilm), which in turn allowed him to pursue other, original projects.
Lucas’s next film would become a cultural phenomenon. Originally envisioned as a
swashbuckler set in outer space, Star Wars (1977) became an industry unto itself in
more ways than one, ultimately giving rise to five sequels and prequels and revolution-
izing filmmaking in the process. Unable to use existing technology to achieve the
effects he envisioned, Lucas established his own special effects studio, Industrial Light
and Magic (ILM), and hired John Dykstra to create the technology required.
Famously, Dykstra spent over $1 million before a single frame of film was shot, but
the computer-controlled camera he developed forever transformed special effects.
Eventually, ILM would become an independent subsidiary of Lucasfilm, winning
multiple Academy Awards for its sophisticated visual effects.
As with special effects for his film, Lucas desired sound effects for Star Wars that
exceeded the capabilities of existing systems, so he experimented with the new sound
recording and mixing techniques that would become the basis for Skywalker Sound,
another subsidiary of Lucasfilm. By the third installment of the original trilogy, The
Return of the Jedi (1983), the engineers at Skywalker Sound had developed a state-of-
the-art digital system, THX Sound (after THX 1138) that has become an industry
standard. Like ILM, Skywalker Sound, now completely digital, has won numerous
Academy Awards as well as multiple Clio Awards for its successes in television.

725
Lucas, George

Beyond its inspiring special

effects, Star Wars has endured
because of the archetypal power
of its rather simple narrative. As
an undergraduate, Lucas had been
introduced to Joseph Campbell’s
interpretations of world mythol-
ogy, and it was Campbell’s influen-
tial study of the hero myth that
informed the storyline of the Star
Wars series. Other films, such as
Labyrinth (1986, produced by
Lucas and directed by Muppets
creator Jim Henson), Willow
(1988, co-written and produced
by Lucas), and the Indiana Jones
series (all co-written and produced
by Lucas and directed by Steven
Spielberg) reflect similar themes of
the heroic quest.
Convinced that the future of
filmmaking lay in digital image
and sound, Lucas rereleased the
original Star Wars trilogy in
the late 1990s with new digital
Film director George Lucas, shown here in 1974, has directed enhancements. This served as a
such films as American Graffiti and THX 1138 and is the prelude to the digital technology
creator behind the entire Star Wars series. (AP/Wide World used in the prequel trilogy that
Photos) began with The Phantom Menace
(1999) and continued with The
Attack of the Clones (2002), which was the first “virtual” commercial film shot entirely
in a high-definition digital format.
In addition to ILM and Skywalker Sound, Lucasfilm has been an incubator for
other digital projects. The graphics division was sold in 1986 to Steve Jobs of the Apple
Corporation and became Pear, but Lucas has retained the game division (Lucas Arts)
and the eponymous educational foundation and its clearinghouse for interactive tech-
nology for home and school known as Editorial.

Selected Filmography
Star Wars: Episode III, Revenge of the Sith (2005); Star Wars: Episode II, Attack of the Clones
(2002); Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace (1999); Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope
(1977); American Graffiti (1973); THX 1138 (1971)

726
 Lumet, Sidney

References
Baxter, John. Mythmaker: The Life and Work of George Lucas. New York: Avon, 1999.
Hearn, Marcus. The Cinema of George Lucas. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005.

—Rodger M. Payne

LUMET, SIDNEY. A venerated American filmmaker, Sidney Lumet directed more

than 40 films over a career that lasted longer than half a century. His most notable
films include 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and The Verdict.
He received an honorary Academy Award in 2005, after having received five previous
Oscar nominations. Throughout his career, Lumet’s films often sympathized with the
political left and made arguments for social justice.
Born in Philadelphia on June 25, 1924, Lumet moved with his family to New York
City two years later. As a child, he acted in New York’s Yiddish Theatre, and he contin-
ued to act onstage as a young adult before transitioning to directing television for CBS
in the early 1950s. Lumet is strongly identified as a New York filmmaker, with many of
his films having been shot on location in the city.
Lumet directed his first feature film, 12 Angry Men, in 1957. The film is woven
through with elements that would become trademark features of the director’s sub-
sequent work, including an urban, realist aesthetic and a focus on matters of social
justice. In the film, Henry Fonda plays a juror, the only one of 12, who initially
believes that a teenage boy on trial for murder may be innocent of the charges against
him. Throughout the film, Fonda attempts to convince the other jurors that the boy,
who is understood to be poor and of color, is a victim of social prejudice. Although
his arguments are at first rejected by his fellow jurors—who are hot, hungry, and,
because in their minds the boy is clearly a delinquent, unconcerned that they are mak-
ing a life and death decision—Fonda slowly brings them around to his socially enlight-
ened way of thinking. Lumet would return to the courtroom as a setting for several
other films, including The Verdict (1982) and Find Me Guilty (2006).
Lumet’s characters frequently challenge authority figures. In the Arthur Miller adap-
tation A View from the Bridge (1961), an Italian immigrant community in Red Hook
bands together against immigration officials. The story, which Miller penned as a
response to Elia Kazan’s anticommunist allegory On the Waterfront, acts as a critique
of the House Un-American Activities Committee and of red-baiting informants. And
in one of his best-known films, Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Al Pacino plays a likeable
bank robber who connects with a New York City crowd that represents a post-
Watergate America disillusioned by corrupt authority figures.
In addition to A View from the Bridge, several of Lumet’s films are sympathetic to the
people and ideals of the political left. Fail-Safe (1964), for instance, presents viewers with
a story in which the United States and the Soviet Union come to the verge of nuclear
war, serving as an argument for nonproliferation; and in Daniel (1983), an adaptation
of E. L. Doctorow’s novel The Book of Daniel, the children of a fictionalized Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg wrestle with the legacy of their parents in the midst of the Vietnam

727
Lumet, Sidney

War era. More recently, Lumet’s

cable television movie Strip Search
(2004) critiqued the deterioration
of civil liberties under President
George W. Bush with a story con-
cerning the detainment of an Arab
American man.
Arguably Lumet’s greatest
film, Network (1976) takes a
satirical behind-the-scenes look
at television network news. The
Academy Award-winning screen-
play, written by Paddy Chayefsky,
tells the story of Howard Beale
(Peter Finch), an anchorman
who suffers an emotional break-
down while on the air. After
ratings soar, Diana Christensen
(Faye Dunaway), a cutthroat,
ratings-driven junior executive,
seizes the opportunity to revamp
the network’s programming sch-
edule, filling it with sensationalis-
tic shows. She develops the “Mao
Tse Tung Hour,” hosted by a co-
mmunist and featuring a radical
guerrilla group, along with a new
Director Sidney Lumet arrives at the 2007 LA Film Critics’
show for Beale in which psychics
Choice Awards held at the InterContinental on January 12,
forecast the news. A cautionary
2008, in Los Angeles. (Frederick Brown/Getty Images)
tale, the film predicts the rise of
reality television and “entertainment” cable news programs. It is number 66 on the
American Film Institute’s list of their top 100 movies.
Lumet’s diverse filmography ultimately defies rigid definitions, as evidenced by his
adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and the Broadway
musical The Wiz (1978). The latter film, having been poorly received by critics and
audiences alike, also exemplifies the somewhat uneven nature of his work. Despite this
unevenness, Lumet remained a deeply influential and highly lauded director. Sidney
Lumet died of lymphoma on April 9, 2011, at his home in Manhattan.
See also: Serpico
Selected Filmography
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007); A Stranger Among Us (1992); Q and A (1990); Ver-
dict, The (1982); Network (1976); Dog Day Afternoon (1975); Serpico (1973); The Appointment
(1969); The Deadly Affair (1966); Fail-Safe (1964); Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962)

728
 Lumière, Auguste and Louis

References
Cunningham, Frank R. Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2001.
Lumet, Sidney. Making Movies. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Rapf, Joanna E., ed. Sidney Lumet Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.
—Andrew Paul

LUMIÈRE, AUGUSTE AND LOUIS. Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière was
born on October 19, 1862 in Besançon, France, while Louis Jean Lumière was born
in the same town on October 5, 1864. Known as the Lumière brothers, they patented
the groundbreaking optical device called Cinématographe Lumière, or the cinemato-
graph, on February 13, 1895.
The Lumière family lived in Besançon, where they owned a photographic studio
that developed into a prosperous company of photo products. Their family name,
meaning “light,” epitomized their business. Auguste and Louis helped their father,
Charles Antoine Lumière, run and expand the family enterprise until the beginning
of the 1890s. Inspired by Thomas Alva Edison’s Kinetoscope peep-show or viewing
machines consisting of individual looking boxes, the Lumière brothers decided to take
the images out of the box and make them available for larger audiences. For this they
needed a new apparatus. The Lumières were determined to construct a complex device
with a threefold function: a camera, a projector, and a film developer or printer (that
used perforated paper strips to advance the film roll), all assembled in one tool.
After the Kinetoscope show, the technically talented Louis designed the Lumière
film camera. Louis was responsible for the step-by-step development of the cinemato-
graph, a lightweight, handheld motion picture camera, with a mechanism similar to
that of a sewing machine. Despite the initial success of his project, Louis was skeptical
about the prospects of motion pictures; he believed that cinema was an invention with-
out a future. Instead of pursuing a career in film, he became interested in creating color
photography called Autochrome Lumière (1903) and with the autochrome transpar-
ency system (1907), followed by Photo-Stereo-Synthesis plates. The latter were three-
dimensional images that are the antecedents of today’s holograms. In the 1930s, Louis
was still involved with the study of relief cinematography: he explored stereoscopy and
stereoscopic films. Meanwhile, Auguste directed many Lumière movies and even
appeared in several of their early films. Although he had the idea of constructing the
cinematograph, his interest focused rather on medical research on tuberculosis, cancer,
and related medical fields, and less on further developments in film.
The first public screening of 10 short Lumière films took place on December 28,
1895, at Salon Indien, the basement of the Grand Café in Paris. Viewers were charged
an admission fee to watch filmed reality projected on a large canvas, a screening that
afterwards led to many other small group projections and then to mass viewing of mov-
ing images, first across Europe and then throughout the whole world. This event inaug-
urated the birth of cinema as a mass medium and also prefigured the commercial
potential of the movies.

729
Lupino, Ida

The Lumières were fascinated by the idea of capturing reality on film; they recreated
the world in a total of over 1,420 films and experimented with a fixed camera on vari-
ous mundane subjects and episodes of public and private events recorded in black-and-
white short, silent films that had a running time ranging from 40 to 50 seconds. Some
of their most famous movies include the Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895)
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895), Baby’s Breakfast (1895), and Teasing the
Gardener (1895). The last two films can be considered the forerunners of today’s home
videos; additionally, the latter is the precursor of chase movies and comedy films. How-
ever, all Lumière films are prototypes of documentaries and newsreels.
The Lumières did not recognize the narrative and entertainment potential of mov-
ing pictures; and soon the novelty of their invention ebbed and their popularity faded,
along with their financial success. Toward the end of their careers, they worked pri-
marily as inventors and manufacturers of cameras; eventually, however, they were
unable to fill the numerous orders they received for film equipment, and ultimately
sold their cinematograph patent to the talented entrepreneur Charles Pathé.
Auguste died on April 10, 1954 in Lyon, while Louis died on June 6, 1948 in
Bandol. Today, the Institut Lumière in Lyon, established in 1982, commemorates
the pioneering work of the Lumière brothers in the film world.
See also: Silent Era, The

References
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, 2nd ed. New York and London: W. W. Norton,
1990.
Herbert, Stephen. “Louis Jean Lumière. Inventor of the Cinématographe and the Autochrome
Colour Photography Process.” Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema. http://www.victorian
-cinema.net/louislumiere.htm.
Herbert, Stephen. “Auguste Marie Nicolas Lumière. Medical Researcher and Co-Patentee of the
Cinématographe.” Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema. http://www.victorian-cinema.net/
augustelumiere.htm.
Kracauer, Siegfried. 1999. “Basic Concepts.” In Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film
Theory and Criticism. Introductory Readings, 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press,
1999: 171–82.
—Réka M. Cristian

LUPINO, IDA. Ida Lupino had a successful acting career in the 1930s and 1940s.
However, she is best known as one of the few successful women directors in post-
World War II cinema. Lupino’s films addressed the traumatic aspects of life during
the Cold War with a particular focus on women’s limited public roles.
Lupino was born on February 4, 1918, in London to Stanley Lupino, a comedian
and playwright, and Connie Emerald, a musical-comedy performer. A child actress,
Lupino attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She came to Hollywood in
1933, signing with Paramount as “the English Jean Harlow.” Lupino generally played

730
 Lupino, Ida

older women in B-films such as Peter Ibbetson (1935) with Gary Cooper and The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) with Basil Rathbone. A bout with polio in
the late 1930s almost terminated her career, and Lupino would later use the experience
in her film Never Fear. Lupino’s greatest success came in the early 1940s when she
worked alongside Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra (1941) and Edward G. Robinson
in The Sea Wolf (1941). She won a New York Film Critics award for her work in The
Hard Way (1942).
Lupino never seemed satisfied with just acting. In the 1930s, she had some success
as a classical musical composer. She appeared on several movie soundtracks, including
The Man I Love (1947), as a singer and piano player. By the mid-1940s, she expressed
aspirations to direct or produce. In 1946, she became an uncredited co-producer on
War Widow. Two years later, she coproduced a low-budget thriller, The Judge. In
1949, Lupino and television producer Anson Bond formed Emerald Productions, later
renamed The Filmmakers. When the director of Emerald’s 1949 feature film, Not
Wanted, suffered a heart attack, Lupino stepped in to complete the film. She also co-
wrote and co-produced it. Like many of The Filmmakers’ productions, the film is a
melodrama that focuses on a social problem and possesses elements of film noir. Not
Wanted addressed unwed motherhood. Outrage (1950) focused on rape, Never Fear
(1949) centered on polio, and Hard, Fast, and Beautiful (1951) told the story of a
young tennis player with a dominating mother. Lupino directed these films along with
The Hitchhiker (1953) and The Bigamist (1953). She also wrote the screenplays for
Never Fear, Outrage, and The Bigamist, as well as the script for Private Hell 36
(1954). None of the films were successes at the box office, and The Filmmakers col-
lapsed in 1954. However, Lupino’s peers recognized her talents by giving her the honor
of presenting the Oscar for Best Film Direction at the 1950 Academy Awards. She was
one of a very few women directors at the time. She directed her last Hollywood feature
film, The Trouble with Angels, in 1966.
Lupino, who once stated that she preferred to focus on the talents of others, seemed
most comfortable behind the camera. As an actress, she worked slowly. As a director,
she gained a reputation for working quickly and staying on budget. She also used loca-
tion shooting long before it became common to do so. Much as she enjoyed directing,
however, acting paid the bills. Lupino continued to act through the 1950s, in films
such as On Dangerous Ground (1951) and in the 1957–1958 television comedy series
Mr. Adams and Eve. Lupino earned two Emmy nominations for her acting. In the
1960s and 1970s, she only acted occasionally, undoubtedly because she did not need
to do so. She derived more satisfaction from directing. Lupino appeared in Sam Peck-
inpah’s Junior Bonner (1972) before making her final big-screen appearance in My Boys
Are Good Boys (1978). A 1977 Charlie’s Angels episode served as her last television
appearance.
Lupino, who wrote scripts for several television shows in the 1950s, became one of
the busiest directors in the medium in the 1960s. She directed episodes of Dr. Kildare,
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Virginian, Gilligan’s Island, The Twilight Zone, 77 Sunset
Strip, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Although honored by film societies and museums
today, ironically, Lupino was slow to recognize her own contributions to cinema and

731
Lynch, David

television. She seemed to think that any attention she received was due only to the fact
that she was a woman who had worked in an almost exclusively male field. After field-
ing numerous queries about her directorial accomplishments, Lupino realized at the
end of her life that she was an exceptional director. She died on August 3, 1995.
See also: Women in Film

Selected Filmography (Director)

The Trouble with Angels (1966); The Bigamist (1953); The Hitchhiker (1953); Hard, Fast, and
Beautiful (1951); Outrage (1950); Never Fear (1949); Not Wanted (1949)

References
Donati, William. Ida Lupino: A Biography. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
Kuhn, Annette, ed. Queen of the ‘B’s: Ida Lupino behind the Camera. Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1995.
—Caryn E. Neumann

LYNCH, DAVID. Emerging from a background in painting, David Lynch, born on

January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, is Hollywood’s most unlikely filmmaker—a
creator of dreams and alternative realities, abstractions and textures, deformity and vis-
cera, and mystery and darkness. Despite a relatively meager output of films—only six in
17 years (and one of those an offshoot of his television work)—Lynch’s twisted vision
has been carved into the minds of moviegoers on the strength of his visual imagery.
After making a couple of short films and attending the American Film Institute’s
Center for Advanced Film Studies, Lynch completed Eraserhead, the bizarre tale of a
man living with his deformed baby in an industrial wasteland. Featuring the work of
two frequent Lynch collaborators—the crisp black-and-white photography of Frederick
Elmes and the aural constructions of soundman Alan Splet—the film eventually became
a succès de scandale. In an odd embrace by Hollywood, the perceptive Mel Brooks offered
Lynch the job of directing The Elephant Man, the Victorian-era story of the hideously
deformed, but internally pure, John Merrick. Eight Oscar nominations followed, and so
did an offer from the less perceptive Dino De Laurentiis to direct the $60 million sci-fi
adaptation of Frank Herbert’s opus Dune, a monumental failure on every level. Lynch,
however, returned with Blue Velvet, a strange film noir that continues the explorations
begun in Eraserhead.
Since then, Lynch’s film work has been both sparse and subpar—his Wild at Heart
took the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but its excessive violence turned off
most viewers, while his Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me seemed a lazy way of squeezing
a theatrical release out of his television series. Twin Peaks, ABC television’s gutsy foray
into experimental drama, has proven to be Lynch’s chief contribution to popular cul-
ture. Producing the series and directing numerous episodes, Lynch managed to bring

732
 Lynch, David

his vision of a dark and troubled America directly into America’s living rooms. While
several film projects such as Ronnie Rocket and One Saliva Bubble have been rumored
but have never materialized, Lynch has been branching out into music (producing an
album by singer Julee Cruise and creating the Industrial Symphony #1 at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music in 1991), photography, installations, and a return to painting. “All
my films are about trying to find love in hell” (quoted by Greg Olson in Film Com-
ment, May-June 1993).

Selected Filmography
Mulholland Dr. (2001); Wild at Heart (1990); Blue Velvet (1986); Dune (1984); The Elephant
Man (1980); Eraserhead (1978)

References
Lewis, Jon. American Film: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Olson, Greg. “Heaven Knows, Mr. Lynch: Beatitudes from the Deacon of Distress.” Film Com-
ment 29, no. 3 (May-June 1993): 43–6.
Sklar, Robert. A World History of Film. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002.
—Daniel Curran

733
This page intentionally left blank
 v
M
MANN, MICHAEL. Michael Kenneth Mann was born in Chicago, Illinois, on
February 5, 1943. His father was a Ukrainian immigrant, his mother a local girl. He
earned an English degree from the University of Wisconsin (Madison), followed by
graduate studies at the London International Film School. Although from the same
generation as New Hollywood directors like Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Lucas,
Mann’s Midwestern roots and international education set him apart. His most signifi-
cant formative cinematic influence was Dr. Strangelove (1964). Mann claims to have
learned from Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire that filmmaking could be simultane-
ously accessible and socially conscious. His early work reflects Strangelove’s radical
impulses. The nonfiction Insurrection (1968) documented the Paris student revolts,
which also inspired the rarely seen experimental short Juanpuri (1971). His interest
in 1960s politics also surfaced in Ali (2001).
Mann’s cinematic skills are readily discernible in his work; and, in the manner of
many latter-day filmmakers, Mann often directs, writes, and produces his pictures.
He uses a coterie of cast and crew (which has included two of the biggest names in
American film acting, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino), and has perfected a powerfully
expressive mise-en-scène. Many of his films contain distinctive color schemes, and he
has used high-definition video in films and television shows such as Ali, Robbery Hom-
icide Division (CBS, 2002–03), Collateral (2004), and Miami Vice (2006). As Mann
makes clear, he uses the latter process not to reduce costs, as it does not, but because
it enhances the specific qualities of the film image. Interestingly, his narratives are
almost exclusively concerned with men who exist in morally decaying societies. He val-
orizes protagonists who obey a code of morality and duty, and demeans their antago-
nists who do not. Clashes between pairs of strong but divergent male characters drive
the plots of Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), and Collateral.
Mann’s fondness for buddy narratives appears in his early television work. He wrote
for Starsky and Hutch (ABC, 1975–79), and in 1979, he directed the made-for-
television movie The Jericho Mile, about a Folsom State Prison inmate who was per-
suaded to try out for the Olympic track team. Committed to narrative realism, Mann
employed several Folsom inmates as actors in this picture. The film proved popular

735
Mann, Michael

with both viewers and critics, winning multiple Emmy Awards, including one for
Mann’s co-written script. Following the success of Jericho Mile, Mann became the
executive producer for Miami Vice (NBC, 1984–89), a character-driven cop show that
focused, rather atypically for the period, on moral questions. (In 2006, Mann directed
the film version of Miami Vice.) Putting his stamp on the show, Mann helped to shape
1980s pop culture. Adopting an “MTV” aesthetic, consisting of glossy advertising
images and a prominent soundtrack, Miami Vice provided audiences with glamorous
characters and showcased pop songs, cutting-edge fashion, luxury brands, and Miami
itself. The show’s soundtrack topped the charts for months, and young men adopted
the fashion sense of the leading male characters, marking the birth of the “metrosex-
ual.” Sonny Crockett’s (Don Johnson) ensembles, including pastel T-shirts under
expensive Italian suits and sockless loafers, remain emblematic of the decade.
In order to become intimately familiar with the literal, psychological, and emo-
tional spaces that his characters inhabit, Mann does extensive research on his films.
His obsessive attention to detail and procedural verisimilitude tends to be expressed
in powerful and provocative ways in the cold, clinical, compulsive professionalism of
his films’ male characters. Even though he has not yet compiled an extensive filmogra-
phy, the pictures that he has made reflect the painstaking work process that he
employs.
Again, Mann’s films tend to be character-driven examinations of angst-ridden
men. This has remained the case even when he has ventured into the realm of the
genre film. In his 1992 adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the
Mohicans, for example, Mann produced what, on one level, was a traditional genre
film, although he sought to trope the Eurocentrism that marked both the novel
and other film adaptations of this literary work. Similarly, in Heat, Mann generally
stayed with the framework of the conventional detective/gangster film, yet he also
sought to expose the psychological and emotional wounds suffered by both the good
cop (Al Pacino) and the bad criminal (Robert De Niro). This sense of depicting
male characters marked by a certain tortured masculinity has become a trademark
of Mann’s films.
See also: Ali; Insider, The

Selected Filmography
Public Enemies (2009); Miami Vice (2006); Ali (2001); The Insider (1999); Heat (1995); Last of
the Mohicans (1991); Thief (1981); Insurrection (1968)

References
Marc, David, and Robert J. Thompson. Prime Time, Prime Movers. Boston: Little, Brown,
1992.
Zoglin, Richard. “Cool Cops, Hot Show.” Time, September 16, 1985: 61.
—Gerald Sim

736
 Marx Brothers, The

MARX BROTHERS, THE. If you have never seen one of the Marx Brothers’ movies,
then stop reading and find a way to watch one—now. Not one of the tired later pictures
like Go West (1940) when the brothers worked under the formulaic thumb of MGM,
but an early MGM delight like A Night at the Opera (1935) before the formula had calci-
fied. Or better yet one of their anarchic Paramount productions like Horsefeathers (1932),
which will prove to you that the movies have lost their capacity to be this strange, this
mad, and this funny.
If you have laughed at the Marx Brothers, then the only question that matters is
what is your favorite Marx Brothers movie? For many it is Duck Soup (1933): Groucho
as Rufus T. Firefly, leader of Freedonia, leading the whole cast as he sings “to war, to
war/ to war we gotta go/ hi-dee hi-dee/ hi-dee hi-dee/ hi-dee hi-dee ho”: it’s one of
the transcendent moments in the movies. If you are ever lucky enough to see it in a the-
ater, stand in the back of the house and wait until the laughter rolls toward the screen
in an explosive wave of joy that at times drowns the punch lines.
There were four of them (yes, brothers in real life), and then there were three when
deceptively funny straight man Zeppo was shed after the brothers moved from Para-
mount to MGM in 1934. Their act could only have grown from vaudeville. Chico
(Leonard by birth), the oldest, affected an Italian accent and played piano in a swagger-
ing, finger-pointing style; Harpo (Adolph), mute (in the act, not in life), donned a
curly wig, played the harp, and chased scantily clad women (not in life), behavior lewd
enough in the pre-Code Paramount Pictures to lead some of the audience in repertory
screenings in the 1930s to hiss the screen. Groucho (Julius Henry) used greasepaint to
smear a huge mustache and eyebrows on his face and delivered a steady mixture of
deadpan sarcasm, caustic insults, and brilliant wordplay; but if any of his jokes was
worth a groan, he always let the audience know he knew it. By 1925, they had a Broad-
way hit, The Cocoanuts, written by George S. Kaufman with help from Morrie Ryskind
and songs by Irving Berlin, and it ran 375 performances; it was turned into a dread-
fully stagy early sound film in 1929. It was followed by another Broadway show, Animal
Crackers, also by Kaufman and Ryskind, and it became their second dreadfully primitive
and stagy early sound film in 1930. Small matter: the Marx Brothers could survive bad
sound, and they thrived on clunky supporting acting; it was the slick studio work in their
later MGM films that they couldn’t overcome.
Irving Thalberg, chief of production at MGM, tried to shape their act by making
them appear lovable to everyone except themselves and the tiffany studio’s safely
snooty villains. His meddling had mixed artistic and financial results: receipts for the
Marx Brothers MGM films, even their most successful ones, indicate they never
attained the box-office success of, say, Charlie Chaplin, or even the later Abbott and
Costello. And the most loving fans will admit that of the 13 movies they made
together, the 4 that were produced after 1940 are depressing. The old fizz flattened,
exhaustion haunts the proceedings.
But as Clifton Fadiman put it in his rave review for A Night at the Opera, “the
Marxes are quite funny enough to be taken seriously”; and while he flatly vowed not
to construe “their impertinent treatment of the social properties . . . as a revolt against
the constrictions of American life, or as proletarian propaganda” (1935, 322)—a

737
May, Elaine

vow all true Marxists are willing

to take—it’s clear the Marx
Brothers have shown to nearly
every comic who has been influ-
enced by them (and that includes
Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld
and Chris Rock and Jon Stewart)
that the only way to combat the
restrictions, class absurdities, and
ethnic barriers of American life is
to find a way to reiterate Groucho’s
declaration in Duck Soup: “This is
war!”

References
Eyman, Scott. Lion of Hollywood: The
Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer.
New York: Simon and Schuster,
2005.
Fadiman, Clifton. “A New High in
Low Comedy.” In Kauffmann,
Stanley, ed. American Film Criti-
cism: Reviews of Significant Films at
the Time They First Appeared. New
The Marx Brothers, a team of sibling comedians, appeared in York: Liveright, 1972: 322–28.
vaudeville, stage plays, film, and television in a successful Kanfer, Stefan. Groucho: The Life and
career spanning five decades. Pictured from top to bottom Times of Julius Henry Marx. New
are Zeppo, Harpo, Groucho, and Chico Marx. (Library of York: Vintage, 2001.
Congress)
—Robert Cowgill

MAY, ELAINE. Elaine May began her rise to fame by performing in America’s first
improvisational theater, The Compass Theater (which evolved into The Second City).
She became a household name in 1957 as half of Nichols and May, the comedy part-
nership she formed with Mike Nichols (who would later become known as a director
of Broadway and Hollywood). In the 1970s and 1980s, she emerged as one of Holly-
wood’s first and most successful female directors and screenwriters.
May was born Elaine Berlin on April 21, 1932, in Philadelphia. As a child, she per-
formed on stage and on radio with her father, Jack Berlin, who led his own traveling
Yiddish theatrical company. She studied acting under Maria Ouspenskaya before
moving to Chicago to sit in on classes at the University of Chicago. There she
involved herself in improvisational theater, where she met Nichols. Nichols and May
utilized improvisational techniques in television and radio appearances before

738
 May, Elaine

appearing on Broadway in a hit revue show, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine
May (1959). The pair produced three successful albums: Improvisations to Music
(1958), An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May (1960), and Nichols and May
Examine Doctors (1963). Nichols and May exposed clichéd 1950s American middle-
class attitudes toward sex, gender, class, race, celebrity, psychoanalysis, the arts,
and more.
May’s career as a film director began in 1971 with A New Leaf, which she also
wrote and starred in (and for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award
for Best Actress). She plays Henrietta, a dizzy heiress and botanist who becomes the
target of a bankrupt playboy, played by Walter Matthau. She followed in 1972 with
The Heartbreak Kid, based on a screenplay by Neil Simon. The story follows a nice
Jewish boy (Charles Grodin) who marries a shrill, stereotypical Jewish American
Princess (played by May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin). On their honeymoon, he falls
for his blonde fantasy shiksa (Cybill Shepherd), inspiring a series of humorous
deceptions.
Her next feature, Mikey and Nicky (1976), starred John Cassavetes as a nervous
small-time crook who contacts his old friend, played by Peter Falk, to help him evade
a hitman (Ned Beatty). The narrative extends over the course of one night, as the men
descend into the dark recesses of Philadelphia’s back alleys. The film made extensive
use of improvisation, and legendary acting teachers Sanford Meisner and William
Hickey appear in cameos as mob bosses. The raw sensibility of May’s direction and
the improvised performances make the film more about male friendship and the psy-
chology of American masculinity than a traditional gangster picture. May clashed with
studio executives over the final edit. It was not until a decade after its initial release that
audiences were able to view May’s preferred version.
Ishtar (1987) was the final film May directed. Although the film has gained a cult
following for its Orwellian vision, critics and audiences at the time rejected it. Dustin
Hoffman and Warren Beatty (who also served as producer) play untalented musical
lounge performers who book an engagement in the fictional nation of Ishtar. There
they become entangled in a political revolution when the CIA enlists them to interfere
with a plot to overthrow Ishtar’s government.
As an actress, May also appeared in Enter Laughing (Carl Reiner, 1967); Luv (Clive
Donner, 1967); In the Spirit (Sandra Seacat, 1990), co-written by Berlin; and Small
Time Crooks (Woody Allen, 2000).
Beginning with the 1969 Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright (for
Adaptation), May has also enjoyed success as a writer. For the screen, she co-wrote
Heaven Can Wait with Warren Beatty (Beatty and Buck Henry, 1978). She also con-
tributed to the scripts of Such Good Friends (Otto Preminger, 1971), Reds (Warren
Beatty, 1981), Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), and Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986).
She reunited with Nichols by writing screenplays for The Birdcage (1996) and Primary
Colors (1998), both of which he directed. May was nominated for an Academy Award
for her work on Heaven Can Wait and Primary Colors, for which she won a British
Academy of Film and Television Award. She has been nominated for three Writer’s
Guild of America awards, and has won one, for Heaven Can Wait.

739
McDaniel, Hattie

Selected Filmography
Down to Earth (2001); Primary Colors (1998); The Birdcage (1996); Ishtar (1987); Labyrinth
(1986); Tootsie (1982); Reds (1981); Heaven Can Wait (1978); Mikey and Nicky (1976); Such
Good Friends (1971); A New Leaf (1971); Bach to Bach (1967)

References
Kercher, Stephen. Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006.
Probst, Leonard. Off Camera: Leveling about Themselves. New York: Stein and Day, 1975.
Sweet, Jeffrey. Something Wonderful Right Away: An Oral History of The Second City and The
Compass Players. New York: Limelight, 2003.

—Kyle Stevens

MCDANIEL, HATTIE. Hattie McDaniel—singer; songwriter; radio, stage, and film

actress—is best known for her role as “Mammy” in the David O. Selznick movie Gone
with the Wind (1939). This role earned her the honor of being the first African American
to be nominated for an Academy Award; when she won the Oscar for Best Supporting
Actress, she became the first African American to win an Academy Award. She was
also the first African American woman to sing on radio and the first African American
Academy Award winner to appear on a U.S. stamp. McDaniel had a prolific career in film.
She appeared in well over 100 productions, usually as a domestic, and was befriended by
some of the leading stars of her day, including Clark Gable, who routinely attended parties
at McDaniel’s home and who worked with her on several films (Watts, 2007). Believing
she deserved to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery, she requested this honor in her will;
when she died in 1952, the owner of the cemetery refused McDaniel’s request, pointing
out that African Americans were not allowed to be buried there.
Hattie McDaniel was born on June 10, 1895, in Wichita, Kansas, to Civil War vet-
eran Henry McDaniel and Susan Holbert, a former slave (Jackson, 1993). She was the
youngest of 13 children. The McDaniel family moved to Colorado in 1900, and Hattie
was raised in Denver. She and her brothers Sam and Chris eventually began touring
with their father’s Henry McDaniel Minstrel Show. In 1910, she won an award for
reciting a poem at a Women’s Christian Temperance Union event, and this contributed
to her desire to perform. In 1920, she joined a popular all-black band called George
Morrison’s Jazz Orchestra and toured with them through 1925. Her radio career began
on KOA radio station in Denver. She appeared in a touring company of “Showboat” as
the character “Queenie” from 1929 to 1930. McDaniel joined her brother Sam, who
had become a film actor, and sisters Etta and Orlena in Los Angeles in 1931. She
teamed with Sam on KNX radio, playing the bossy maid “Hi-Hat Hattie” on The
Optimistic Do-Nut Hour.
McDaniel secured her first film role in The Golden West (1932); she followed this
picture with appearances in Love Bound, Impatient Maid, and Are You Listening?, all

740
 McDaniel, Hattie

of which were released in 1932.

She joined the Screen Actors
Guild (SAG) in 1934, and in
1935 the Fox Film Corporation
offered her a contract to appear in
The Little Colonel with Shirley
Temple and Bill “Bojangles”
Robinson. Amazingly, she appeared
in 70 films in the 1930s alone. She
was routinely cast as a maid, nanny,
cook, or servant in these films
(Bogle, 1994). Although she would
win an Oscar for her role in Gone
with the Wind, McDaniel, along
with the other African American
actors who appeared in the pic-
ture, was barred from the film’s
1939 Atlanta, Georgia, premiere.
Protests by David O. Selznick
and Clarke Gable fell on deaf ears.
Even after she took home the
Academy Award in 1940, she con-
tinued to be cast as a domestic
throughout her career.
Hattie McDaniel plays a tune as she portrays the title role of
McDaniel was active in film Beulah in the CBS Radio Network’s comedy series in New
and then in television throughout York City, 1951. (AP/Wide World Photos)
the 1940s. During this period in
her career, she co-starred in pic-
tures such as In This Our Life
(1942), with Bette Davis, and Since You Went Away (1944). Her last film appearances
were in Mickey and Family Honeymoon, both of which were released in 1949. She
starred in The Beulah Show on radio in 1947; the show was later adapted for TV and
shown on ABC during 1950s. McDaniel was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1951,
having appeared in only a few episodes of the television version of The Beulah Show.
She died from the disease on October 26, 1952, in Woodland Hills, California.
One of the most important contributors to the development of American radio and
film, McDaniel was a trailblazer, opening the way for future African American actresses
(Jackson, 1993). She has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for her con-
tributions to film and another for her accomplishments in radio.

References
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in
American Film. New York: Continuum, 1994.

741
Méliès, Georges

Jackson, Carlton. Hattie: The Life of Hattie McDaniel. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993.
Watts, Jill. Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. New York: HarperCollins,
2007.
—Hettie Williams

MÉLIÈS, GEORGES. Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès (December 8, 1861–January 21,

1938) was a crucial figure in the development of motion pictures. Méliès, the youngest
son of a wealthy French family, was a man of startling artistic virtuosity who intro-
duced seminal changes to early filmmaking. Charlie Chaplin appropriately called
him “the alchemist of light.”
A talented man with a classical education, Méliès began his career drawing carica-
tures under the anagrammatic pseudonym “Geo Smile” for the satirical journal
La Griffe. Attracted by the subversive dream-world of the stage, he bought the Théâtre
Robert-Houdin in 1888, where he worked as director, inventor, performer, producer,
conjurer, and designer until 1895, establishing himself as a successful and respected
personality in the Parisian entertainment world. Enchanted by the Lumière brothers’
show at the Grand Café in 1895, Méliès wanted to purchase a cinematograph but
Antoine Lumière refused to sell him one. A year later, Méliès constructed his own
camera modeled after R. W. Paul’s cinematic device, built the first European glass-
structure film studio, and began the production of his own films.
Méliès understood that a movie is more than a simple process of reality recording.
Unlike the Lumière brothers, who saw film as no more than a scientific curiosity
employed in the mimesis of the world, Méliès recognized the artistic, entertaining,
and narrative potential of movies. He combined theatrical skills and filmmaking, turn-
ing from being a conjuror of the stage into a magician of the screen. Méliès realized
that film as new technology was to make magic shows available for large audiences in
a place that combined the technical potential of the film medium with the artistic val-
ues of the theater: the film theater.
He created the basic grammar of special effects and trick pictures in movies. Méliès
used the reversal of time, the split screen, the overlapping process, the double and
multiple exposure, time-lapse, and the dissolve process; he was the first to shoot the
stop trick, afterwards used in Disappearance of a Lady (1896). The stop trick and the
time-lapse were techniques that later would create the need for professional film cut-
ters. Long before Technicolor’s three-color pellicle format, Méliès had his own color
films, which were manufactured by 21 women employed at a special studio to hand-
tint his films individually, frame by frame.
Méliès was, at the turn of the twentieth century, the most inventive filmmaker in the
world. Today he can be considered the first cinematic auteur. His early films were
groundbreaking artifacts that have influenced mainstream and avant-garde filmmakers
alike. The 14-minute epic A Trip to the Moon (1902) was the first movie in film history
to employ animation; together with Impossible Voyage (1904) it was the precursor of
science fiction and fantasy films. The Devil’s Manor (1896) is the prototype of thriller

742
 Micheaux, Oscar

and horror films, while the reconstructed reality of the Dreyfus Affair (1899) posits
Méliès as the pioneer of the docudrama.
The films of Méliès enjoyed enormous worldwide popularity and began to be pla-
giarized. In 1903, he decided to fight his film imitators in America—where copies of
A Voyage to the Moon were widely pirated—by opening his STAR-FILM company in
New York to rent his films. This investment failed because his small company was inca-
pable of fighting the intensifying commercialism of the rapidly growing film industry.
Despite his active involvement in early cinema, Méliès finally went bankrupt.
Fewer than 140 of his 520 films survive. A considerable number of valuable movies
were melted down during World War I in order to produce a chemical for the manu-
facturing of boot heels needed by the French army; in addition, in a moment of finan-
cial and emotional crisis, Méliès destroyed a batch of his film negatives and sold his
remaining stock of prints by the kilogram to a second-hand film dealer in 1923.
In 1931, Méliès was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French Government.
Twenty-two years later, Georges Franju produced, with the assistance of the Méliès
family, a stylish bio-documentary entitled Le Grande Méliès in which he pays tribute
to the first wizard of cinema, who created a coherent artistic world of blissful escapism
in films.
See also: Silent Era, The

References
Bawden, Liz-Anne, ed. The Oxford Companion to Film. New York: Oxford University Press,
1976: 459–60.
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, 2nd ed. New York and London: W. W. Norton,
1990: 16–20.
Gronemeyer, Andrea. Film: A Concise History. London: Laurence King Publishing, 1999: 30–31.
Kracauer, Siegfried. “Basic Concepts.” In Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory
and Criticism. Introductory Readings, 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999:
171–82.
—Réka M. Cristian

MICHEAUX, OSCAR. Novelist, producer, director, and actor, Oscar Micheaux

was the first African American to produce a feature-length film (1919) and a sound
feature-length film (1920). He was also one of the first African Americans to write a
best-selling novel—The Case of Mrs. Wingate (1943), which sold 55,000 copies.
Micheaux, active primarily from 1919 to 1948, participated in more than 40 film pro-
ductions as a writer, director, producer, or actor. Upon his death on March 25, 1951,
in Charlotte, North Carolina, it was noted that of the 82 all-black films made to date,
Micheaux was responsible for creating more than half of them. Having served as a
Pullman porter and a homesteader in the American West, he was also a pioneering
black filmmaker during the Harlem Renaissance era (1919–1934). His films were
often classified as “race films” because he challenged the stereotypical depictions of

743
Micheaux, Oscar

African Americans presented in the popular pictures of the day while maintaining a
black visual iconography and giving expression to a more positive representation of
“blackness” (Bowser, Gaines, and Musser, 2001).
Micheaux was born January 2, 1884, in Metropolis, Illinois, one of 13 children. His
parents were former slaves. He was raised in Great Bend, Kansas. Leaving home at age
17, he made his way to Chicago, where he became a Pullman rail car porter. Influenced
by the self-help philosophy of Booker T. Washington, he moved West with thousands
of other African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century. He became a home-
steader, eventually acquiring a 160-acre plot of land in Gregory County, South
Dakota, in 1905 (McGilligan, 2008).
Micheaux published his first novel in 1913. Titled The Conquest: The Story of a
Negro Pioneer, it was based on his experience as a homesteader. This book became
the basis of a later cinematic work. Micheaux often wrote his life story into the narra-
tive structure of his films, thereby documenting the historical experience of African
Americans through personal biography (Bowser, Spencer, 2000). In 1915, he lost his
farm due to financial hardship; he relocated to Sioux City, Iowa, where he established
the Western Book Supply Company. He continued to write, self-publishing and selling
his novels door-to-door. Micheaux wrote the novels The Forged Note in 1915 and The
Homesteader in 1917. He made Western Book Supply viable by selling stock in the
company to businessmen and farmers in Sioux City. After rejecting an offer from
African American filmmakers George and Noble Johnson—owners of the Los
Angeles-based Lincoln Motion Picture Company—to make The Homesteader into a
film, Micheaux transformed his Western Book Supply Company into the Micheaux
Film and Book Company. Through his fund-raising efforts, he secured enough capital
to develop The Homesteader himself. The film premiered February 20, 1919; it was the
first feature-length picture developed by an African American (Cripps, 1977).
Micheaux is recognized as an important personality in American filmmaking for sev-
eral reasons. His films were both controversial and progressive for the times during
which they were produced. The African American newspaper The Chicago Defender
heralded the coming of a “new epoch” in black culture with the premiere of The Home-
steader in 1919. Micheaux directly challenged prevailing racial attitudes with his pro-
ductions. His picture Within Our Gates, released in 1920, was a direct challenge to
the romanticized depiction of the Ku Klux Klan presented in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film
The Birth of a Nation. Griffith’s film is often lauded as a cinematic masterpiece, but it
aroused a great deal of criticism from the African American community due to its bla-
tant stereotypes of blacks. Micheaux’s response was an attempt to showcase a more real-
istic depiction of white supremacy and the brutality leveled at African Americans in the
South. Micheaux also sought to highlight controversial racial issues in Body and Soul,
released in 1924. The story of Body and Soul concerned a corrupt minister, played by
Paul Robeson (1898–1976), an African American performer who was introduced to
movie audiences in this film, who beats and rapes a black woman. Micheaux’s 1931 pic-
ture The Exile was the first sound feature-length film created by an African American.
Oscar Micheaux produced and directed 44 movies and wrote a total of seven novels
including The Winds from Nowhere (1941), The Case of Mrs. Wingate (1943), The Story

744
 Miller, Arthur

of Dorothy Stanfield (1946), and Masquerade, a Historical Novel (1947). He has been
recognized by both the Producers Guild of America, which honored his work by creat-
ing the Oscar Micheaux Award, and the Directors Guild of America, which acknowl-
edged his work by creating the Golden Jubilee Special Award in 1986. Micheaux is
recognized by many as one of the most influential African Americans in American his-
tory. As a writer, director, and producer of American films, he embodied the self-help
ethic central to the development of the black experience in America.

Selected Filmography
The Betrayal (1948); The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940); God’s Step Children (1938); Swing!
(1938); Underworld (1937/I); Murder in Harlem (1935); Harlem after Midnight (1934); The
Exile (1931); Darktown Revue (1931); Wages of Sin (1929); The Millionaire (1927); The Spider’s
Web (1927); The Broken Violin (1927); The House behind the Cedars (1927); Body and Soul
(1925); The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921); The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920); The Brute
(1920); Within Our Gates (1920); The Homesteader (1919)

References
Bowser, Pearl, and Louise Spence. Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent
Films, and His Audiences. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Bowser, Pearl, Jane Marie Gaines, and Charles Musser, eds. Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African
American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2001.
Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 1977.
Green, J. Ronald. With a Crooked Stick: The Films of Oscar Micheaux. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2004.
McGilligan, Patrick. Oscar Micheaux, the Great and Only: The Life of America’s First Black Film-
maker. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
—Hettie Williams

MILLER, ARTHUR. Arthur Miller is primarily remembered for writing plays that
deal with tortured individuals facing what might be understood as existential injustice,
but early in his career he was connected with the film industry. That connection grew
as his career progressed, partially because his plays were turned into films and partially
because he married movie star Marilyn Monroe. Although he eventually saw his
screenplays produced for television and the big screen, he never committed himself
fully to the cinematic community.
Arthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City. He began making
a name for himself as a playwright while attending college in Michigan in the 1930s,
winning the Avery Hopwood Award twice and the Theatre Guild National Award.
After college, he returned to New York and took a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In

745
Miller, Arthur

his spare time, he wrote radio

scripts for The Dupont Cavalcade
of America, a weekly serial broad-
cast on NBC, among other pro-
grams. In 1944, he began to
expand his horizons, signing a
contract to do research for the
script of The Story of G.I. Joe (1945),
based on the war correspon-
dence of Ernie Pyle. Although
he was not credited for his work
on the film script, he did turn
his research into a book, Situa-
tion Normal (1944). The follow-
ing year he published the novel
Focus, which was ultimately ad-
apted for the screen in 2001;
he also found success on the
stage with the plays All My Sons
(1947) and Death of a Salesman
(1949), both of which were
adapted as films, the first in
1948 and the second in 1951.
Late in the 1940s, Miller com-
pleted a screenplay that bore the
Arthur Miller, along with William Inge and Tennessee title The Hook. The script was
Williams, was an influential voice in the American theater
rejected by studio executives,
in the 1950s. His best works are characterized by concerns
for societal problems and a passion for social liberation.
even though Miller’s friend, the
(Library of Congress) influential Elia Kazan, who had
directed All My Sons and Sales-
man on stage, pushed to have it
made. The script was thought
too “leftist” for the Cold War times—too “communist”—as it suggested that America’s
workers were being exploited by their capitalist employers. Interestingly, even though
Kazan had pushed to have Miller’s screenplay made into a movie, he went on to testi-
fied before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), informing on
“communist colleagues” and damaging his friendship with Miller. Miller’s plays con-
tinued to be adapted for television throughout the 1950s. Significantly, one of them,
The Crucible (1953), turned the Salem witch trials of the 1690s into an allegory of the
HUAC hearings.
Cognizant that he could be caught up in the political controversies of the day, and
seeking to avoid charges that his work was merely a veiled attempt to indict figures
such as Joseph McCarthy in the court of public opinion, Miller had sought to make
The Crucible as historically accurate as possible. Nevertheless, he developed a

746
 Monroe, Marilyn

reputation as a political dissident, and HUAC influence prevented him from making a
movie about juvenile delinquency in 1955. The following year, shortly after he married
Monroe, he was called to testify before HUAC and was convicted of contempt of
Congress for refusing to cooperate; the conviction was ultimately overturned on
appeal. Monroe stood by Miller during his trouble with HUAC, even though she
had been warned by Hollywood insiders that she should distance herself from her hus-
band. Miller also stood by Monroe, even as her insecurities led her to suffer mood
swings, to abuse drugs and alcohol, and to become increasingly unhappy. Attempting
to lift her spirits, Miller adapted his story “The Misfits” into a screenplay and a star
vehicle for Monroe; by the time The Misfits arrived in theaters, however, Miller and
Monroe had divorced. He married the Hollywood photographer Inge Morath in
1962, six months before Monroe died of a drug overdose.
After his marriage to Monroe ended, Miller largely devoted himself to writing for
the theater. He did remain tangentially connected to the film industry, however. For
example, his play After the Fall (1964)—a statement about both HUAC and his first
two wives—was adapted for the screen in 1964. He also wrote screenplays for televi-
sion projects in the 1970s and 1980s—Fame (1978), about a playwright’s overnight
success, and Playing for Time (1980), an adaptation of Fania Fenelon’s Holocaust
memoirs—and the screenplay for the movie Everybody Wins (1984), a hard-boiled
detective film about corruption in a Connecticut town. He also adapted The Crucible
for the 1995 film version of the play. Yet Miller remained first and foremost a play-
wright—certainly one of America’s greatest. He died on February 10, 2005, a
respected man of letters.

References
Abbotson, Susan C. W. Student Companion to Arthur Miller. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.
Gottfried, Martin. Arthur Miller: His Life and Work. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004.
Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1987.

—Albert Rolls

MONROE, MARILYN. Marilyn Monroe became a global sex symbol as a result of

playing coquettish blondes in mid-1950s Hollywood movies. Born Norma Jean
Mortenson on June 1, 1926, she was baptized Norma Jean Baker, the surname of her
mother’s ex-husband. After her mother was committed to a mental institution,
Monroe lived in a series of foster homes. The last of these was run by family friends
Grace and Erwin Goddard, with whom Monroe lived until she was 15. Facing reas-
signment to another foster home when the Goddards decided to relocate to a different
area, the teenage Monroe married James Dougherty, a 21-year-old neighbor, to avoid
her fate. The marriage disintegrated after Dougherty joined the Merchant Marines in
1944, and Monroe took a job at airplane factory. While working at the factory, she
was discovered by photographer David Conover; she eventually became a model and
came to the attention of Hollywood studio executives.

747
Monroe, Marilyn

Movie legend Marilyn Monroe, appearing with the USO Camp Show “Anything Goes,” poses for
photos after a performance at the Third U.S. Infantry Division area in Korea on February 17,
1954. (National Archives and Records Administration)

Near the end of the summer of 1946, Monroe signed a contract with Twentieth
Century-Fox. Shortly afterwards, Norma Jean Baker bleached her hair blonde and
changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. For the next few years, she played a series of
small parts in movies such as The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947), Love Happy (1949),
and A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950). Larger parts in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and All
about Eve (1950) earned her fans and the attention of critics; a number of more visible
roles followed, including the lead in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952). Her performance in
Niagara (1953), as a wife plotting to kill her husband, propelled her to stardom and
began to establish her as a major sex symbol of the silver screen. Monroe became Hol-
lywood’s preeminent “Blond Bombshell” after Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to
Marry a Millionaire were released in 1953.
Monroe married New York Yankee superstar Joe DiMaggio at the beginning of 1954;
the marriage did not last, however, largely because of Monroe’s sex-symbol status and
DiMaggio’s insecurity. Monroe’s career had taken off, and even a stilted performance in
River of No Return (1954) and the negative box-office figures of There’s No Business Like
Show Business (1954) could not derail it. Repeatedly cast as the sexy, dimwitted blond,
however—a type she once again portrayed in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch—Monroe
became disheartened. In an effort to escape that image and become a serious screen

748
 Moore, Michael

performer, she travelled to New York City and studied at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio.
While in New York, she met playwright Arthur Miller, whom she married in 1956. That
same year she returned to Hollywood and starred in Bus Stop (1956), a film partially
financed by her own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions. Her character
in that film, Cherrie, was the first well-rounded filmic figure that she had portrayed; crit-
ics and moviegoers alike appreciated the change in her screen persona.
Bus Stop was followed by The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), the only movie
entirely produced by Marilyn Monroe Productions; it co-starred Laurence Olivier,
who also directed. Monroe again played a showgirl, Elsie Marina, but an intelligent
one who controls much of the film’s action. Although the picture failed at the box
office, Monroe’s performance earned her a David Di Donatello Award, the Italian
Academy Award. In 1959, Monroe appeared as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk in Some Like
It Hot. Playing opposite Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, Monroe starred as a singer
in an all-girl band infiltrated by two men in drag, who are hiding from the mob after
witnessing the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. It was the most successful film of her career
and won her a Golden Globe.
Her next film, Let’s Make Love (1960), based on a terrible script that Monroe was
forced to accept by Fox, was a flop. Worse, her life seemed to be unraveling; she had
been using prescription drugs to escape her insecurities for years but was now suicidal.
Miller had attempted to help by adapting his story “The Misfits” into a screenplay for
her, but when The Misfits (1961) appeared, their marriage was over. She did not live to
finish her next film, Something’s Got to Give (1962). Monroe was found dead on
August 5, 1962, having overdosed on barbiturates.

References
Churchwell, Sarah Bartlett. The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Macmillan, 2005.
Leaming, Barbara. Marilyn Monroe. New York: Crown, 1998.
Rollyson, Carl Edmund. Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo,
1993.
—Albert Rolls

MOORE, MICHAEL. A talented yet controversial figure, Michael Moore uses his
films to promote his worldview and challenge the status quo. A self-described populist,
Moore has long been interested in social activism and fights fervently for his causes.
Born April 23, 1954, in Flint, Michigan, where his father worked for General
Motors, Moore was raised in nearby Davison. Growing up, Moore was a highly moti-
vated student, winning a library award for reading more books than any other seven-
year-old. Raised in a blue-collar Catholic family, his first foray into politics came in
1972, when he won a seat on the local school board. Following high school, Moore
started an area hotline for people struggling with issues related to unwanted pregnan-
cies, drug addiction, and suicidal thoughts; he also began publishing Free to Be,
a community newspaper. After dropping out of the University of Michigan, Moore

749
Moore, Michael

started The Flint Voice—which

became The Michigan Voice in
1982—as a liberal alternative to
the conservative Flint Journal. A
National Public Radio commen-
tator by the time he was 31,
Moore became editor of the
progressive magazine Mother
Jones in 1986; he was fired a short
time after taking the position.
While details of his dismissal
are unclear, Moore received a
$58,000 wrongful dismissal set-
tlement, although Mother Jones
never publicly admitted any
wrongdoing. Moore used the set-
tlement monies to fund his first
full-length documentary, Roger
& Me (1989).
Roger & Me details Moore’s
failed attempts to interview Roger
Smith, then CEO of General
Motors, about the company’s clo-
sure of its plant in Flint. Moore
depicted company officials as
hardhearted bureaucrats who
cared nothing about their emp-
loyees or about the community;
Michael Moore, American filmmaker and liberal political he even went so far as to blame
activist (1954– ). (Shutterstock) General Motors for the economic
woes plaguing his hometown.
Holding the film’s premiere at
Flint’s Rainbow Cinemas, he donated a large portion of the proceeds to the commu-
nity. In 1994, Moore created TV Nation, a television program devoted to political sat-
ire. The program fed his next film, Canadian Bacon (1995), a narrative comedy in
which the President (Alan Alda) attempts to cast Canada as an American enemy. The
film did not do well in the United States, but was well received in Canada.
Moore’s next documentary, Bowling for Columbine (2002), tackled gun control.
Moore argued for stricter regulations while criticizing the National Rifle Association,
President George W. Bush, and the media for creating a culture of violence through
fomenting fear. The film became the top-grossing documentary of all time, and
won the 2003 Best Documentary Oscar. During his acceptance speech, Moore

750
 Moore, Michael

openly criticized President Bush; his comments elicited mixed reactions from audi-
ence members.
His vehement disapproval of Bush administration policies led him to make Fahren-
heit 9/11 (2004). While critical of Bush’s policies in general, the film focused on the
administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Despite winning the top prize at
the Cannes Film Festival, Disney-owned Miramax, Moore’s distributor, dropped the
project before the film was released in the United States. Miramax executives cited
what they said was Moore’s politically motivated decision to release the film in the
midst of the 2004 presidential campaign, claiming that he was attempting to influence
the election. Interestingly, Moore accused Miramax of playing politics, claiming that
studio heads had actually been pressured by Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the president’s
brother. Ironically, the controversy only increased interest in the film, which ended up
grossing $222 million worldwide, surpassing Bowling for Columbine as the all-time
highest-grossing documentary.
Moore continued to push for social reform in the projects that followed Bowling for
Columbine. In Sicko (2007), for instance, he examined what he believes is the critical
state of the American health care industry, suggesting that the United States desperately
needs some form of universal health care; and in Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), he
explored the faltering economy that accompanied the 2008 election.
Moore’s commercial success can be attributed to his unique cinematic style. Relent-
lessly making his case—his critics, and even his supporters, point out that his films are
hardly representative of objective documentary filmmaking—Moore manages to inject
his films with a great deal of humour. His goal, it seems, is not to present a balanced
discussion of an issue, but rather to provoke an emotional response from viewers in
order to convince them of his side of the argument.
Although Moore has proven to be a polarizing figure, he has nevertheless become
the most successful documentary filmmaker in cinematic history. Undaunted by his
critics, Moore continues to champion his causes and, in the process, to produce enter-
taining and controversial films.

Selected Filmography
Capitalism: A Love Story (2009); Slacker Uprising (2007); Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004); Bowling for
Columbine (2002); The Big One (1997); Canadian Bacon (1995); Roger & Me (1989)

References
Larner, Jesse. Moore and Us: One Man’s Quest for a New World Order. London: Sanctuary, 2005.
Rapoport, Roger. Citizen Moore: The Life and Times of an American Iconoclast. Muskegon, MI:
RDR Books, 2007.
Schultz, Emily. Michael Moore: A Biography. Toronto: ECW Press, 2005.

—Sean Graham

751
Mulvey, Laura

MULVEY, LAURA. Laura Mulvey is a filmmaker, film historian, and theorist best
known for her contributions to feminist film theory.
Mulvey was born August 15, 1941 in Oxford, UK. From 1960 to 1963, she
attended St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, receiving an honors bachelor’s
degree in history. After writing a number of essays on psychoanalysis and film theory,
as well as venturing into filmmaking, in 1975 she published “Visual Pleasure and Nar-
rative Cinema” in Screen magazine.
Influenced by theorists such as Christian Metz, who used psychoanalytic theory to
establish a relationship between the viewer and the camera (usually referred to as
“Apparatus Theory”), the essay attempted to explain how women are seen through
the lens, and, by extension, how men and women are conditioned to view women.
According to Mulvey, the subjectivity of cinema is almost invariably male. Therefore,
cinema is a place where women are denied independence of thought and motion.
Women become a spectacle whose purpose is almost exclusively defined in sexual
terms. Female sexuality is given only a passive space in cinema, where women are char-
acterized as preferring to be looked at than to look themselves. It is from this essay that
the concept of the domineering “male gaze” became widely introduced into film and
media studies.
Mulvey applies her theory of male-dominated cinematic scopophilia to textual
analysis. Discussing Joseph von Sternberg’s relationship with Marlene Dietrich,
Mulvey states that his films are “one-dimensional” in their fetishizing of Dietrich’s form.
This erotic worship allows the male viewer a pure appreciation of sexual difference without
the castration anxiety that Freud explored. Alternatively, Alfred Hitchcock provided a
“more complex” scopophilia, both fetishizing the female form in a manner similar to
Sternberg’s and reducing it through either voyeurism or sadism. In the case of both direc-
tors, female stars were invariably weakened through the cinematic process.
Subsequent pieces clarified her position on the very polemical essay. She expanded
her theoretical viewer to include multiple perspectives and even, functioning as more
of a film historian than theorist, uncover areas of more complex female spectatorship.
Avant-garde works, such as Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren, and certain more
mainstream works, such as Douglas Sirk’s melodramas and the films of Rudolph Val-
entino, provided at least some space for women viewers.
Mulvey also directed, from 1974 to 1983, six films with her partner Peter Wollen,
also a film theorist. The films were intended to apply their theoretical explorations to
film production. They were known for confronting the concept of male spectatorship
and denying traditional cinematic pleasures and viewer passivity.
Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) consists of a 13 360-degree shots of different environ-
ments, using cinema’s ability to create a “psychic” space to find new spaces for women.
Amy! (1980) examines British aviatrix Amy Johnson using a jarring, cinematic collage
approach. It has been called an “antidocumentary.” Crystal Gazing (1982) is known
as Wollen and Mulvey’s most conventional film, about Thatcherite Britain’s social con-
servatism and economic decline.
Mulvey has since expanded into a number of new theoretical and disciplinary are-
nas. In 1991, she returned to filmmaking with Disgraced Monuments, about the fate

752
 Murnau, F. W.

of communist imagery after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her contribution to the British
Film Institute’s Film Classics series of short monographs was on Citizen Kane. Her
writing was heavily historical, not theoretical, in its intent to use the film as a barom-
eter of American political thinking on the verge of WWII. The Criterion DVD release
of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) included Mulvey reading a short essay of
appreciation for the film.
In 2006, Mulvey published a book of essays, Death Twenty-Four Times a Second:
Stillness and the Moving Image. She is currently Professor of Film and Media Studies
at Birkbeck College, University of London.
See also: Feminist Film Criticism; Male Gaze, The

References
Burke, Eleanor. “Laura Mulvey.” Screen Online, 2003. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/
id/566978/index.html.
Hill, John, and Gibson, Pamela Church, eds. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16(3), Autumn 1975.
Murphy, Robert. Directors in British and Irish Cinema: A Reference Companion. London: British
Film Institute, 2006.
Reynolds, Lucy. “Riddles of the Sphinx.” Screen Online, 2003. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/
film/id/567526/index.html.

—Alan C. Abbott

MURNAU, F. W. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was a prominent German film direc-

tor of the 1920s. During a brief career spanning only 12 years, Murnau was credited
with pioneering many of the techniques still used in film today.
Murnau was born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe on December 28, 1888, in Bielefeld,
Westphalia, to a family of Swedish ancestry. His education included time spent at uni-
versities in Heidelberg and Berlin, where he studied art history, literature, and philoso-
phy. It is during this period of his life that he came under the influence of director Max
Reinhardt (Deutsches Theatre) and decided to pursue a career in acting. A subsequent
rift between father and son caused by this decision resulted in Friedrich changing his
name to Murnau (after a Bavarian town) and the father cutting the son off financially.
It was only through the help of his grandfather that Plumpe (now Murnau) was able to
complete his education (Wakeman, 1987). With the outbreak of World War I,
Murnau served first in the infantry on the Russian front and later in the air corps as
a pilot. Forced to land in Switzerland during a heavy fog, he was interned there for
the remainder of the conflict.
Murnau’s initial foray into film occurred during his Swiss internment, where he
worked on propaganda films for the German embassy. At the end of the conflict he
returned to Berlin and formed a film company with actor Conrad Veidt (Murnau
Veidt Filmgesellschaft). Murnau’s directorial debut came in the 1919 production of

753
Murnau, F. W.

Onboard the Demeter, the vampire Count Orlok, played by German actor Max Schreck (1879–
1936), emerges from one of his coffins before they can be destroyed by the ship’s first mate, played
by Wolfgang Heinz, in a scene from F. W. Murnau’s expressionist horror film Nosferatu, Eine Sym-
phonie Des Grauens, 1921. The film is based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and was released in
1922. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Der Knabe in Blau (The Blue Boy). This interpretation of a Gothic melodrama introduced
techniques such as the inventive use of light and space and the use of the camera to inter-
pret character emotions that would reappear over the course of his career (Mauro, 1997).
Of the 21 films directed by Murnau, the most influential was Nosferatu (1922).
During an age when most films were still done on soundstages, Murnau deliberately
chose to shoot on location in order to achieve a greater sense of realism. To further
enhance the film’s supernatural mood, he drew upon expressionist film techniques such
as the use of shadows and light as well as stop-action and accelerated motion. Nosferatu
is considered one of the classic works of the German Expressionist film genre and the
benchmark by which all subsequent vampire films are measured.
From 1924 to 1926, Murnau directed three films for UFA Studios: Der letzte Mann
(The Last Laugh), Tartuffe (1926), and Faust (1926). The release of these films contin-
ued not only to solidify his reputation as a director in Germany, but also to earn him
international recognition. A combination of factors, including problems in his per-
sonal life and the financial failure of Faust, led him to accept an offer from William
Fox of Fox Studios to move to Hollywood, in 1926 (Wakeman; and Tibbetts, 2002).

754
 Muybridge, Eadweard

Murnau was given full control as a director; he was also allowed to bring over his
film crew. In his first picture for Fox, Sunrise (1927), Murnau employed many of the
techniques he had perfected in his German films, with the result being a very
“German” English-language film (it also helped that the film was based on German
author Herman Sudermann’s Die Reise nach Tilsit). Critically successful, Sunrise gar-
nered three Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Janet Gaynor. Unfortunately
for Murnau, the picture was a box-office flop, which resulted in his losing control over
his subsequent films with Fox (Four Devils and City Girl). Disheartened and disen-
chanted with Hollywood and the studio system, Murnau broke his contract with Fox
in 1929 and became an independent director.
By this time Murnau was financially well off (he now owned a farm in Oregon and a
luxury yacht) and could afford to embark on a documentary project with fellow film-
maker Robert Flaherty. Tabu (1931) was filmed on location in Tahiti, focusing on the
lives of Polynesian pearl divers. In this, his last film, Murnau reflects and draws upon
all his previous techniques to create what Gary Lewis called the “metaphysical and tragic
themes which always interested him” (Lewis, 1966)—in essence, German Expression-
ism fused with an idyllic South Pacific to create the ultimate escape from reality.
The film opened on March 18, 1931, although Murnau did not live to celebrate the
moment. One week earlier, on March 11, he was killed in a tragic car accident near
Santa Barbara, California. Influential beyond the grave, Murnau’s legacy lived on in
future generations of filmmakers—most notably Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock—
as well as in the horror and film noir genres.

Selected Filmography
Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931); City Girl (1930); 4 Devils (1928); Sunrise: A Song of Two
Humans (1927); Faust (1926); Tartuffe (1925); The Last Laugh (1924); The Phantom (1922);
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922); The Haunted Castle (1921); Desire (1921); The
Dark Road (1921); Abend—Nacht—Morgen (1920); The Two-Faced Man (1920); Der Bucklige
und die Tänzerin (1920); Satanas (1920); Emerald of Death (1919)

References
Kemp, Philip. “F. W. Murnau.” In Wakeman, John, ed. World Film Directors, Vol. I, 1890–
1945. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1987.
Mauro, Laurie, ed. “F. W. Murnau.” In Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 53. Detroit:
Gale Research, 1997: 237–38.
Tibbetts, John C. “F. W. Murnau.” In The Encyclopedia of Great Filmmakers, Vol. 2, L-Z. New
York: Facts on File, 2002: 456–58.

—Charles Johnson

MUYBRIDGE, EADWEARD. Edward James Muggeridge, later known to the

world as Eadweard Muybridge, was born in Kingston-upon-Thames, England, on
April 9, 1830. He had a flamboyantly odd personality and was known as an eccentric

755
Muybridge, Eadweard

photographer, whose interest in biomechanics set the stage for the invention of the
motion pictures.
Muybridge moved in his youth to the United States and became, after a New York
commercial career in book binding and selling, a professional photographer. Known
also by the artistic name of “Helios,” he specialized in landscape views of the American
West after he moved to California in 1855. His outstanding stereoscopic pictures and
stunning wet collodion shots of Yosemite Valley (1867, 1872) established his reputa-
tion as the top photographer of the West Coast. As official photographer for the
government departments, he recorded pictures of Alaska (1868), of the Pacific Rail-
road, of armed conflicts between the United States Army and the Modoc Indians,
and created uniquely detailed pictorial information in the panoramic pictures of San
Francisco before the 1906 earthquake. After the tragic events in his personal life, when
Muybridge was tried for murdering his wife’s lover and then acquitted on the paradoxi-
cal grounds of justifiable deeds, he went into a self-imposed working exile and joined
an expedition to Central America, which he richly documented in photos. After he
returned, he dedicated his work almost entirely to high-speed photography and to
the studies of motion.
In 1872, Muybridge was commissioned by the railroad baron Leland Stanford to
settle an incisive dispute among racing men about the position of hooves during a
horse’s gallop. The scheme, constructed at Palo Alto, California, was designed to inves-
tigate the phases of rapid equine locomotion. Muybridge first used 12 cameras in a row
along a track. He attached a high-speed shutter mechanism to each camera and used a
long trip wire that he stretched across the track so Leland’s trotting racehorse could
trigger each shutter as it went past the cameras. These caught each phase of the move-
ment in a series of 12 photographs. This experiment proved that the horse in swift
movement lifted all four feet off the ground simultaneously at a given point during
the gallop. For a more precise recording of movement, Muybridge used 24 cameras,
as well as lateral cameras with oblique views and more sophisticated shutter-release
methods that led to substantial motion studies on animals and even people. The auto-
mated shutters Muybridge used in high-speed photography were later adopted for the
first movie cameras.
Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope, also known as zoopraxinoscope or zoogyro-
scope, which was the projection version of the earlier spinning picture disk, the phena-
kitoskope. The zoopraxiscope was the forerunner of the movie projector and the first
machine to project sequential images of animals, birds, and humans from a dinner-
plate-sized rotating glass disk, which produced the illusion of animation by concat-
enating images into a primitive version of moving images. The zoopraxiscope was
the most sophisticated projector of successive photographs at the time and preceded
Étienne Jules Marey’s chronophotographic gun or the shotgun camera and Thomas
Edison’s and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson’s Kinetoscope.
By 1887, Muybridge’s studies incited broad scientific interest, and in the same year he
published an 11-volume summary of his experiments at the University of Pennsylvania
entitled Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of
Animal Movements. This was the most comprehensive and richly illustrated study on

756
 Muybridge, Eadweard

movement and is used even today as a primary work of reference. Muybridge lectured
widely in America and Europe and used the zoopraxiscope for projections during his pre-
sentations. Additionally, he published other notable “dictionaries” of animal and human
motion: Descriptive Zoopraxography or the Science of Animal Locomotion Made Popular
(1893), Animals in Motion, an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of
Animal Progressive Movements (1899), and The Human Figure in Motion: An Electrophoto-
graphic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Muscular Actions (1901).
The self-proclaimed artist-photographer retired to his birthplace and died on
May 8, 1904. The complete collection of his photographic plates and lantern slides,
his zoopraxiscope and other miscellaneous materials, preserved in London’s South
Kensington Museum, document the innovative spirit of the man who believed in the
technological potential of the medium and also in the power of photography as an
art form.
See also: Silent Era, The

References
Coe, Brian. “Eadweard James Muybridge. British Photographer.” Who’s Who of Victorian Cin-
ema, March 2004. http://www.victorian-cinema.net/muybridge.htm.
Katz, Ephraim. 1982. The International Film Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1982:
844–85.
Mitchell, Leslie. “The Man Who Stopped Time.” Stanford magazine, May/June, 2001. http://
www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2001/mayjun/features/muybridge.html.
Pioneers of Early Cinema: 12, Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904). http://www.national
mediamuseum.org.uk/~/media/Files/NMeM/PDF/Collections/Cinematography/Pioneers
OfEarlyCinemaMuybridge.ashx.

—Réka M. Cristian

757
This page intentionally left blank
 MOVIES IN
AMERICAN HISTORY
AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
Volume 3

Philip C. DiMare, Editor

Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a
review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Movies in American history : an encyclopedia / Philip C. DiMare, editor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978–1–59884–296–8 (hardcopy (set) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–1–59884–297–5 (ebook (set))
1. Motion pictures—United States—Encyclopedias. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—
United States—Biography—Encyclopedias. 3. Motion picture producers and directors—
United States—Biography—Encyclopedias. 4. Motion picture industry—United States—
Encyclopedias. I. DiMare, Philip C.
PN1993.5.U6M68 2011
791.4309730 03—dc22 2011006901
ISBN: 978–1–59884–296–8
EISBN: 978–1–59884–297–5
15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.
Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.
ABC-CLIO, LLC
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
 v
N
NEWMAN, PAUL. Rejected from Naval pilot training during World War II
because of his color-blindness, Paul Newman, born January 26, 1925, instead served
as a radioman and gunner in the Pacific theater before returning to school in Ohio.
He soon relocated to the northeast, studying drama at Yale and under Lee Strasberg
at the Actors Studio. He acted on Broadway—including the original Broadway pro-
duction of Sweet Bird of Youth, which he would return to for the film version—before
gravitating to Hollywood. He was never proud of his first film role, as Basil, a Greek
artist commissioned to cast the Holy Grail in silver in The Silver Chalice (1952), and
when it aired on television in 1966—at a point when the movie had no life except to
capitalize on his fame—he took out an advertisement apologizing for it. He received
considerably more acclaim for Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), in which he took
over the role of middleweight boxer Rocky Graziano after the death of intended star
James Dean. He had already substituted for Dean in a live color television broadcast
of Our Town, with Eva Marie Saint and Frank Sinatra.
Roles came his way quickly, including The Long Hot Summer (1958), based on short
stories by William Faulkner. The movie co-starred Joanne Woodward, who had previ-
ously understudied in a Broadway production of Picnic that Newman starred in. The
two fell in love and were married after the film, not long after his divorce from his first
wife, Jackie Witte (with whom he had three children, Scott, Susan, and Stephanie).
Joanne would costar with Newman in nine more movies: Rally Round the Flag, Boys!
(1958), From the Terrace (1960), Paris Blues (1961), A New Kind of Love (1963), Win-
ning (1969), WUSA (1970), The Drowning Pool (1975), Harry & Son (1984), and Mr.
and Mrs. Bridge (1990). They had three daughters, Elinor, Melissa, and Claire.
By the 1960s, Newman was undeniably a movie star, known as much for his ability
to take on complex roles as for his blue eyes and matinee-idol charm. Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (1958), which paired him with the equally photogenic Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie
the Cat, was his first blockbuster hit; The Hustler (1961) followed not long after. He
later reprised his Hustler role as Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, for which
he won his only Oscar. Movie after movie cast him in especially masculine roles—pool
sharks, gunslingers and other cowboys, spies, detectives, racecar drivers, and the title

759
Newman, Paul

character in Cool Hand Luke

(1967). At the same time, espe-
cially in the 1970s with movies
like WUSA (about a radio sta-
tion’s role in a right-wing con-
spiracy) and Robert Altman’s
1976 Buffalo Bill and the Indians
(in which Sitting Bull refuses to
play out revisionist history for
Newman’s Buffalo Bill Cody),
the actor showed a vital interest
in social and political concerns,
shared by his wife and by Robert
Redford, his co-star in the George
Roy Hill movies Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid (1969) and
The Sting (1973). The Redford
collaborations, Buffalo Bill, and
Slap Shot (1977, also by Hill)
showed off the actor’s comedic
Paul Newman, as Ari Ben Canaan, in the 1960 film Exodus. chops, something too rarely on
(Sunset Boulevard/Corbis) display in his earlier work.
The 1980s saw Newman’s
career slow down, though he received Oscar nominations for Absence of Malice
(1981) and The Verdict (1982), and again in 1994 for Nobody’s Fool, a character study
of aging rambunctious construction worker Sully. That same year, he chewed the sce-
nery in the Coen brothers’ broad screwball comedy The Hudsucker Proxy, as the
unscrupulous industrial tycoon Sidney Mussburger.
His last big-screen role (save for Cars, in which he did voice work) yielded his 10th
Oscar nomination: in 2002’s Road to Perdition, based on the Max Allan Collins graphic
novel, Newman played Irish American crime boss John Rooney, whose foster son
(Tom Hanks) pursues a vendetta against his biological son (Daniel Craig). Newman
was director Sam Mendes’s first choice for the role.
A prolific actor, Newman’s directorial output was considerably slimmer—but also
more focused on those things that were personal to him and of less commercial interest
than many of his movies. He directed Woodward in Rachel, Rachel (1968), an adapta-
tion of Margaret Laurence’s Jest of God, the story of a woman’s “second adolescence”
when she discovers romance one summer; The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-
Moon Marigolds (1972), which adapted Paul Zindel’s play; and The Glass Menagerie
(1987), an adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play. Sometimes a Great Notion
(1970) starred Newman as Ken Kesey’s strong-willed logger, while Harry & Son
(1984), adapting Don Capite’s novel The Lost King, cast him as the working-class
father who doesn’t understand his sensitive son (Robby Benson), who wants to be a
writer.

760
 Nichols, Mike

After Sometimes a Great Notion, Newman, Barbra Streisand, and Steve McQueen
co-founded First Artists, a production company modeled after United Artists and
meant to let actors produce their own projects.
In 1982, Newman co-founded Newman’s Own with writer A. E. Hotchner, starting
with a line of salad dressings and expanding to other products, with an emphasis on
quality ingredients. After taxes and expenses, all profits are donated to charity. New-
man’s oldest daughter with Joanne, Elinor, acted under the name Nell Potts (in both
Rachel, Rachel and The Effect of Gamma Rays), before founding Newman’s Own
Organics in 1993, an extension of the brand. In the wake of her father’s death—of lung
cancer on September 26, 2008, at age 83—she now heads the company.

References
Levy, Shawn. Paul Newman: A Life. New York: Harmony, 2009.
Porter, Darwin. Paul Newman. New York: Blood Moon Productions, 2009.
Quirk, Lawrence J. The Films of Paul Newman. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1986.

—Bill Kte’pi

NICHOLS, MIKE. Mike Nichols (born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in 1931) fled
Nazi Germany with his family in 1939, later attended the University of Chicago,
and began his theatrical career there as an improvisational comic actor. He is one of
the few directors of his era to be still in demand, both on Broadway and in Hollywood,
though he has received far more acclaim for his theatrical work than for his work in
cinema. His films have received numerous Academy Award nominations, though he
has won Best Director only once, for The Graduate, in 1967.
Nichols’s transition from theatrical direction to film appears in retrospect to be
almost predestined, though in fact he has returned again and again to the theatre when
his film work has failed to interest either audiences or critics. His two earliest ventures
in film direction—Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1966) and The Graduate were
hugely successful, and served to catapult him to the A-list of young directors of the
1960s. Both films openly challenged contemporary sexual mores and the Production
Code that sought to restrict (or repress altogether) any open and candid presentation
of sexuality in American movies. Indeed, Nichols’s eagerness to challenge, and even
offend, his audiences’ moral sensibilities remains one of the most enduring traits of
his films, right up to the present.
Nichols’s timing in the making of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate could not have
been better. Jack Valenti had just taken over the presidency of the MPAA (Motion Pic-
ture Association of America), and had already decided to scrap the old Production
Code in favor of a more precise ratings system, implicitly acknowledging that public
tastes had changed since the 1930s. That said, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? pushes
the cultural envelope as far as it can through its open discussion of sexual dysfunction
and marital infidelity, combined with profanity-laced dialogue that startled theatrical
audiences in 1962. Ernest Lehman’s screenplay stays as close to Edward Albee’s drama

761
Nichols, Mike

as possible, while Nichols (and his cinematographer, Haskell Wexler) makes several
obvious attempts to move beyond the proscenium arch and open up the often claustro-
phobic inner space of this domestic melodrama. Nichols’s choice of Elizabeth Taylor
and Richard Burton as the ill-suited academic couple-from-hell was obviously dictated
by a desire to capitalize on the Burtons’ celebrity—and on their penchant for public
brawling—but in the end, each gives the performance of a lifetime, guaranteeing
Academy Award nominations for both.
Nichols’s next film, The Graduate, generated even more controversy, while introduc-
ing a young, largely unknown Dustin Hoffman to contemporary audiences. Adapting
Charles Webb’s 1963 coming-of-age novel to the antiestablishment sensibility of the
later 1960s, Nichols, and his screenwriters, Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, trans-
formed a dialogue-heavy and rather banal piece of fiction into a satirical tour-de-force.
The casting for this film has since become the stuff of Hollywood legend, and audiences
can still be startled to learn that Anne Bancroft—who plays the cynical middle-age
seductress, Mrs. Robinson to Hoffman’s twenty-something Benjamin Braddock—was
in fact only six years older than her co-star. Both performances, complemented by a
large cast of supportive character actors, give this film its lasting edge, offering up a
series of middle-class caricatures whose lives are aptly summed up in the film’s comic
tag-line “plastics.” By adding the music of Simon and Garfunkel to the soundtrack,
Nichols insured that contemporary audiences would respond to this movie the way
theatre-going audiences tend to react to topical musical comedies. Though The Gradu-
ate received half as many Academy Award nominations as Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?, it brought the one that Nichols, of course, most coveted: Best Director.
Over the next seven years, Nichols threw himself into a series of film projects, nearly
all of which turned out to be poor creative investments with diminishing critical as well
as financial returns. His 1970 adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—a greatly
admired, narratively complex antiwar novel—ran into funding difficulties long before
its release, and contemporary audiences found it far less amusing or even poignant
than its obvious competitor of that year, M*A*S*H*, which drew upon exactly
the same revulsion toward the war in Vietnam on which Catch-22 tried to capitalize.
Nichols’s next film, Carnal Knowledge (1971), met a similar fate, though its production
values (and overall production costs) were only a fraction of Catch-22’s, and its linear
plot not nearly as disjointed. Jules Feiffer’s script spans a period of 25 years in the lives
of two college friends whose misadventures in love and lust form the focus of this
essentially two-character film. Carnal Knowledge marks the beginning of Nichols’s cre-
ative relationship with Jack Nicholson, with whom he was to make two additional
films, but neither Nicholson’s trademark grin nor Art Garfunkel’s earnest (but largely
affectless) line readings were able to save this film from ultimate banality. Carnal
Knowledge is perhaps best remembered today for the lawsuit it inspired in the state of
Georgia, where it was found to be obscene for its frank portrayal of sexual relation-
ships. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling (1974), concluded that Nichols’s
film exhibited none of the traits that defined “hard core” pornography.
The last two films from this period, The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and The Fortune
(1975), were such flops that no one was really surprised by Nichols’s decision to

762
 Nichols, Mike

abandon filmmaking for the next seven years and to concentrate instead on the theatre,
where he enjoyed much greater success. Of the two, The Fortune has acquired the dubi-
ous honor of being labeled a “Golden Turkey,” but in truth neither film had a script
worthy of the talents of its leading actors. In The Day of the Dolphin, George C. Scott
labors to teach two charming and utterly anthropomorphic dolphins to speak a kind of
high-pitched English, only to discover that a sinister government-connected agency is
secretly plotting to use them to assassinate the president. As for The Fortune, neither
Jack Nicholson nor Warren Beatty is able to bring the least bit of comic credibility to
a plot that turns on their attempts to exploit, then murder, the heiress to a sanitary-
napkin empire, and when this expensive but humorless attempt at screwball comedy
tanked at the box office, Nichols realized it was time for a break.
Apart from a performance movie featuring Gilda Radner (Gilda Live, 1980) doing
many of the character skits she had already developed for Saturday Night Live, Nichols
avoided the world of cinema until 1983, when he shot Silkwood, starring Meryl Streep
as the title character. Nichols half-resists and half-surrenders to the powerful tempta-
tion to spin a conspiracy theory around the life and death of Karen Silkwood, whose
whistle-blowing actions at an Oklahoma nuclear plant seemed to many at the time
to be directly related to her mysterious traffic death. Streep’s totally convincing perfor-
mance and Nichols’s unheroic depiction of her life and loves aroused favorable com-
parisons to similar working-class melodramas, such as Norma Rae. Nichols was
sufficiently impressed by Streep’s work on this film to cast her three years later oppo-
site Jack Nicholson in Heartburn (1986), a social comedy constructed around a Nora
Ephron script about a yuppie marriage gone bad. Nicholson (as always) creates a
credible portrait of a charming cad, while Streep struggles to make the wronged wife
something other than pathetic or boring; neither actor, however, was able to rescue
this film from a largely uninteresting and predictable plot. Nichols’s Biloxi Blues
(1988) met with a similarly mixed response from viewers two years later. Neil Simon
adapted this hit play to the screen—it constitutes the second in Simon’s trilogy of
mostly autobiographical coming-of-age plays—but the results were seen as passable
to dull. Though many found Matthew Broderick a charming fictional stand-in for
Simon, “barracks comedies” had become a minefield of clichés by the late 1980s,
and Nichols’s direction was seen to offer little more than a faithful transcription of
the theatrical original.
Nichols’s second film of 1988, Working Girl, met with a very different fate, and for
the first time in decades Nichols found himself with a certifiable hit. Described by one
critic as a modern-day urban fairy tale, Working Girl combines elements of mordant
social satire with the conventions of modern romantic comedy, as Nichols follows
the career trajectory of an ambitious working-class heroine (played by Melanie
Griffith) from the secretarial pool to the executive suites of ruthlessly competitive
corporations, while allowing her to succeed by pluck, brains, and sexual charm.
Channeling Judy Holliday, Griffith manages to appear both shrewd and endearingly
naive as she simultaneously disposes of a cunning rival (Sigourney Weaver), gets the
job of her dreams, and lands the man she loves (Harrison Ford). As in The Graduate,
Nichols found himself benefiting greatly from a hit song, this time written by yet

763
Nichols, Mike

another songwriter named Simon—Carly Simon—whose “Let the River Run” won the
only Academy Award Working Girl received.
By the early 1990s, Nichols was in familiar territory once again: satirical portraits of
dysfunctional personalities caught up in dysfunctional environments. In Postcards from
the Edge (1990), Nichols employs Meryl Streep’s considerable talents to very little effect
in an adaptation of Carrie Fisher’s thinly veiled autobiographical novel of an aspiring
(albeit drug-addled) actress growing up in a show-business family. Shirley MacLaine
offers a tart caricature of a domineering and largely unsympathetic actress-mother,
but the principal novelty of this film is its supposed resemblance to the real-life Carrie
Fisher/Debbie Reynolds relationship. Regarding Henry (1991) aspires to be a far more
serious take on the yuppie class and its seemingly incurable narcissism, but with no
greater dramatic success than in Postcards from the Edge, and without a trace of humor.
Harrison Ford’s Henry Turner presumably undergoes an affective transformation from
predatory lawyer to born-again husband and father, but even a bullet to the hero’s
brain—and the obligatory amnesia that follows—did not succeed in convincing most
audiences that this badly scripted morality tale had even a trace of moral credibility.
Nichols’s next assignment, Wolf (1994), probably qualifies as the most offbeat sub-
ject he has tackled to date: latter-day werewolves at large in the Big Apple. The decision
to cast Jack Nicholson in the title role was seen by critics as either inspired or slightly
perverse, since even without makeup, Nicholson’s characteristic facial expressions are
vaguely lupine. But in what appears, at first, to be a case of reverse casting, Nicolson’s
character (Will Randall) is presented to us as a mild-mannered and easily exploited
book editor in an urban jungle where only the duplicitous survive. Once bitten, how-
ever, Randall’s passive aggression gives way to brazen cunning and carnality, and from
this point in the film Nicholson’s talent for dramatic anarchy and comic mayhem is
given full rein. The result is a movie that shifts unpredictably from horror to bitter
comedy of manners, back to horror again, without ever really merging these two dispa-
rate genres into one. Nevertheless, Ennio Morricone’s resonant score and Giuseppe
Rotunno’s occasionally haunting cinematography give Wolf a look and a sound that
place it in a category well-above most factory-made horror flicks.
Returning again to satiric comedy—a genre with which he obviously feels entirely at
ease—Nichols next remade the Jean Poiret/Francis Weber sex farce of the 1970s, La
Cage aux Folles, as The Birdcage (1996), featuring new songs by Stephen Sondheim
and a cast led by Robin Williams and Gene Hackman. Watching pompous personal-
ities expose themselves to ridicule is a staple of satire, and Nichols has as much fun
as he can stripping away the respectable persona of Gene Hackman’s right-wing Senator
Keeley while getting in as many jabs as possible at arch-conservative views toward gays
and Jews. Yet in spite of its commercial success, The Birdcage never managed to create
characters who rise above the level of caricature, and the plot contrivances that bring
the two young lovers together at last are just that: contrivances in a bedroom comedy-
by-numbers.
In Primary Colors (1998), Nichols casts a satiric glance at the Clinton
administration, casting John Travolta as Jack Stanton—a Clinton look-alike whose
folksy charm and compulsive womanizing are disturbingly close to reality—and Emma

764
 Nichols, Mike

Thompson as his long-suffering wife and unofficial political manager. Based on a Joe
Klein roman à clef, and released in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal,
Nichols’s often biting portrait of the Clintons and their team of campaign operatives
is only slightly more grotesque than real life, and it is never quite clear why anyone
should care whether characters as morally clueless or disingenuous as the Stantons
finally succeed in outrunning the scandals that follow them wherever they go. Com-
pared with Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate (1972)—which takes the American politi-
cal process seriously enough to dissect its glaring weaknesses—Primary Colors seems
only to lampoon its characters and then feebly moralize upon them.
Nichols’s next foray into comic absurdity, What Planet Are You From? (2000), was no
more successful, either with critics or at the box office. With Gary Shandling in the role
of an extraterrestrial in search of an earthly bride, Nichols tries, to no avail, to mine
whatever humor can be found in a drama of planetary opposites attracting. Annette
Bening, the hapless object of the spaceman’s affections, gives a game performance but
cannot really compete with a mechanical penis and an episodic plot that goes nowhere.
Not even the labors of Elaine May and Joe Klein were sufficient to bring this film to life.
But as so often happens when Nichols’s film career seems sunk in mediocrity, he
took a sharp turn in dramatic style and substance toward a form of tragicomedy in
his next, and arguably one of his most accomplished films of the new millennium,
Wit (2001). Working from a script he and his lead actress, Emma Thompson, had
adapted from Margaret Edson’s play, Nichols places Thompson’s character, Vivian
Bearing, at the center of virtually every scene, often speaking directly to the camera
in what amounts to a sustained (and only occasionally interrupted) monologue. As a
professor of English literature who has specialized in the poetry of John Donne, Bear-
ing is haunted and then consoled by the words of Donne’s “Holy Sonnet X”—“Death
be not proud . . .”—as she lies dying of cervical cancer. With unsparing wit she dissects
her emotions, her interactions with physicians, and her memories of a past that is rap-
idly receding from view. Few films have ever presented the terrifying reality of certain
death with less sentimentality or greater intellectual clarity, and Thompson’s perfor-
mance is one of the most brilliant expressions of a fully realized personality that Nichols
has ever elicited from the many talented actors he has directed.
Nichols’s next film, Angels in America (2003), like Wit, was adapted from a hit play
and released on HBO, where it attracted huge audiences that might never have gone to
see Tony Kushner’s theatrical production. With a screenplay adapted by Kushner him-
self, and cast including Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and (once again) Emma Thompson
playing multiple roles in a fractured narrative that moves between heaven and earth,
and between moral allegory and satire, Nichols constructs a surreal multipart drama
that focuses on the AIDS epidemic and a political culture that makes denial and sexual
hypocrisy possible. Though occasionally stridently didactic, Angels in America is often
eloquent in its evocation of personal anguish and indignation as it mounts a case for
compassion and moral honesty in the face of a latter-day plague.
Closer (2004), yet another adaptation of a successful stage play of the same name,
attempts something far more modest, or at least apolitical—though no less structurally
intricate—as Nichols fashions a drama of sexual duplicity modeled after Mozart’s Cosi

765
Nicholson, Jack

Fan Tutte. Unlike Mozart, however, Nichols and his screenwriter Patrick Marber (who
also wrote the original stage play) construct a complicated quadrille of changing sex
partners and shifting identities, and the end result is a work that views love and the
business of coupling in a much darker light than one often encounters in Nichols’s
earlier films. A similar attitude of bemused cynicism permeates Nichols’s latest film,
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), though unlike Angels in America and Closer, Nichols’s
original “text” is a journalistic expose of U.S. involvement in the Afghan-Soviet war
and the Texas congressman who badgered the CIA and the Pentagon to back the
Afghan mujahadeen. Nichols and his screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin (of West Wing fame),
of course, have the benefit of ironic hindsight as they trace the initial involvement and
subsequent disengagement of the Reagan White House in Afghan politics, but most of
their attention is devoted to the central figure in this diplomatic melodrama,
Representative Charlie Wilson himself. Tom Hanks’s portrayal of this figure as part clown
and part idealist probably evokes more sympathy for his character than the real-life
Wilson deserves, but Nichols’s nuanced perception of his protagonist’s awakening to the
seriousness of his campaign—and the potentially disastrous consequences of the events
he has set in motion—give this film a sharper edge than one would expect from a script
that sees American foreign policy as the work of ideological schemers and buffoons.
Clearly, Nichols’s trademark irony and occasionally savage humor—some of the many
gifts of a cultural outsider—have survived into the fifth decade of his filmmaking career.

Selected Filmography
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007); Closer (2004); What Planet Are You From? (2000); Primary Colors
(1998); The Birdcage (1996); Wolf (1994); Regarding Henry (1991); Postcards from the Edge
(1990); Working Girl (1988); Biloxi Blues (1988); Heartburn (1986); Silkwood (1983); The For-
tune (1975); The Day of the Dolphin (1973); Carnal Knowledge (1971); Catch-22 (1970); The
Graduate (1967); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

References
Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New
York: Penguin, 2009.
Hill, Lee. “Mike Nichols and the Business of Living.” Senses of Cinema. http://
archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/nichols.html.
Schluth, Wayne H. Mike Nichols. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Smith, Gavin. “Of Metaphors and Purpose: Mike Nichols Interviewed.” Film Comment, May-
June, 1999.
—Robert Platzner

NICHOLSON, JACK. An iconic American actor, Jack Nicholson has successfully

entertained audiences worldwide for more than five decades. In large part, this has
been due to his enormous talent as a Method actor and his willingness to portray

766
 Nicholson, Jack

unconventional and sometimes

unsympathetic characters. Equally
important has been Nicholson’s
willingness to take on roles in pic-
tures that cross various film genres.
John Joseph “Jack” Nicholson
was born on April 22, 1937, in
Neptune, New Jersey, and was
raised by his grandparents, Ethel
May and John Nicholson. In
1957, while visiting an older
sister in Los Angeles, Nicholson
took a job as an office boy in the
animation department at MGM.
It was while working at MGM
that Nicholson met movie pro-
ducer Joe Pasternak, who encour-
aged him to take acting lessons
and to join the Players Ring The-
atre Troupe. While taking acting
lessons, he met Roger Corman,
an up-and-coming director of
B-movies who would give Nicholson
his first film role in The Cry
Baby Killer (1958). Throughout
the 1960s, he took roles in
numerous low-budget B-movies Movie star Jack Nicholson in 1970. (AP/Wide World Photos)
that appealed more to counter-
culture audiences than they did
to mainstream America audiences. These movies included Little Shop of Horrors
(1960), The Raven (1963), The Terror (1963), and Easy Rider (1969), which earned
him his first Academy Award nomination.
In 1970, Nicholson portrayed a concert pianist in the critically acclaimed Five Easy
Pieces, which earned him a second Academy Award nomination. He secured his third
Academy Award nomination for his role in the 1973 The Last Detail. In 1975, he por-
trayed Randle Patrick McMurphy, a patient in a mental hospital, in the critically
acclaimed One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The success of the picture earned Nicholson
his first Academy Award for Best Actor, and also catapulted the young star to movie
star status.
Nicholson began the 1980s with a stunning performance in The Shining (1980).
Today, it is still considered to be one of his most significant roles. Throughout the
1980s, Nicholson took on numerous roles in movies that became box-office hits. His
choice of roles often involved characters who faced life-changing situations. He also
began to play characters that were the same age as the actor. This allowed Nicholson

767
Nicholson, Jack

to remain profitable for movie studios and popular with American audiences. One
such example was his portrayal of a middle-aged ex-astronaut in the blockbuster hit
Terms of Endearment (1983), for which he won an Academy Award. In 1985, he earned
an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of a mafia killer in another hit, Prizzi’s
Honor. In 1987, he played the devil in the successful The Witches of Eastwick, and in
1989, he played the Joker in the international blockbuster, Batman.
During the 1990s, Nicholson, who had indisputably reached superstar status, con-
tinued to choose diverse roles. In 1992, he received an Academy Award nomination for
his role in A Few Good Men. Then, in 1997, he won another Academy Award for his
performance in the critically acclaimed As Good As It Gets.
Throughout the 2000s, Nicholson continued to chose characters who were age
appropriate. In 2002, he played a retired actuary in the highly successful About
Schmidt. In 2003, he played an aging playboy in Something’s Gotta Give, and in
2006, he took on the role of a mob boss in The Departed. In 2008, he co-starred with
Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List. Aging, terminally ill men, the characters set out to
fulfill a list of life goals before dying.
For more than five decades, Jack Nicholson has entertained American audiences.
His enormous talents as a Method actor combined with his unconventional and varied
character choices have produced numerous box-office hits. It is a measure of his talent
and success that he has received 12 Academy Award nominations and has won 3. To-
day, Nicholson holds the honor of being the most nominated male actor in Academy
Award history. Now considered an American movie icon, Nicholson continues to
entertain movie audiences.

References
Douglas, Edward. Jack, the Great Seducer: The Life and Many Loves of Jack Nicholson. New York:
Harper Entertainment, 2004.
McDougal, Dennis. Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in
Modern Times. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2008.
McGilligan, Patrick. Jack’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

—Bernadette Zbicki Heiney

768
 v
P
PACINO, AL. An award-winning stage and screen actor, Al Pacino is one of the
most enduring and respected figures in entertainment history. Now in his fifth decade
of acting, he has created an unrivaled legacy of Method acting, carving out memorable
roles in such iconic films as The Godfather (1972), Serpico (1974), Scarface (1983), and
Scent of a Woman (1992). Not limited to acting in film, Pacino has also found success
on Broadway, in television, and as a producer, screenwriter, and director.
Alfredo James Pacino was born April 25, 1940 in East Harlem, New York. At age
two, Pacino, nicknamed Sonny, moved in with his grandparents following the divorce
of his parents. Unmotivated in his studies, Pacino found relief by reenacting scenes
from films as well as acting in school plays. Dropping out of school at 16, he spent
the next 10 years working odd jobs, accepting bit parts in plays, and taking acting
classes when he could afford them.
Pacino’s first breakthrough came in 1966 when he was accepted into Lee Strasberg’s
Actors Studio. Strasberg’s influential school of Method acting proved to be a revelation
for Pacino. Initial success on Broadway playing a junkie in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?
garnered him a Tony Award and, most importantly, the attention of Hollywood. His
portrayal of yet another addict in The Panic of Needle Park (1971) led to a connection
with to a young director named Francis Ford Coppola.
Coppola, set to direct the screen adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel The
Godfather, fought studio executives and Puzo himself who believed Pacino was the wrong
actor for the role of Michael Corleone. Coppola triumphed and Pacino’s smoldering,
inward-focused performance moved him past typecasting in psychotic or addict roles.
The Godfather (1972) brought Pacino his first of seven Academy Award nominations.
Stardom came quickly for Pacino, and the rest of the 1970s saw him mix powerful
performances in Serpico (1973), The Godfather Part II (1974), and Dog Day Afternoon
(1975) with personal drug addiction and a general aversion to his new stardom. In fact,
he was offered and turned down roles in Star Wars (1977), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979),
and Apocalypse Now (1979) to take parts in a string of unforgettable films.
Pacino’s portrayal of Tony Montana in Scarface (1983) helped him resurface as
one of the best Method actors in the business. Still in character offscreen, Pacino came

769
Pacino, Al

face-to-face with a neighbor’s rav-

enous attack dog and instead of shy-
ing away, channeled Tony Montana
and yelled, “Back off!” to which the
dog eagerly obliged. Initially ridi-
culed by critics, Scarface (1983) has
lived on as a cult classic. The rest of
the 1980s saw Pacino act in only
five films. He spent a great deal of
time getting sober, seeking therapy,
and acting on the stage.
A comedic turn in Dick Tracy
(1990) garnered Pacino his sixth
Academy Award nomination,
and from there good parts grew
plentiful again. His role as the
blind, pugnacious Lieutenant
Colonel Frank Slade in 1992’s
Scent of Woman earned him his
elusive, first Academy Award.
His personal and professional life
Actor Al Pacino is seen as Michael Corleone in a scene from now in harmony, Pacino solidi-
the motion picture The Godfather. (AP/Wide World Photos) fied his place as a culturally sig-
nificant contributor to the enter-
tainment industry. He acted
alongside Hollywood stalwart Robert De Niro in Heat (1995) and wrote, produced,
and directed the highly acclaimed Shakespeare adaptation, Looking for Richard (1996).
Not content with being the elder statesman, Pacino continued to stretch his acting range
throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. He played a low-level mobster in 1997’s Donnie
Brasco, Satan in the flesh in The Devil’s Advocate (1997), a weary coach in Oliver Stone’s
football drama Any Given Sunday (1999), and cop-on-the-edge in Insomnia (2002). In each
role, Pacino surprised audiences and acted as mentor to his younger co-stars.
Whether a mafia kingpin, whistle-blower cop, blind retired lieutenant colonel, or
stressed-out real estate agent, Pacino has been a significant cultural and historical con-
tributor in the world of entertainment. Despite personal and professional setbacks, he
has operated on his own terms and become one of the greatest actors of the last
40 years. Perfecting the practice of Method acting, Pacino is a stalwart in the industry
and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

References
Beer, Tom. “Al Pacino Character Study.” Biography, June 2002.
Grobel, Lawrence. Al Pacino. New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2008.

—Lucas Calhoun

770
 Peckinpah, Sam

PECKINPAH, SAM. “The outlaws of the old West have always fascinated me,” Sam
Peckinpah said. “I suppose I’m a bit of an outlaw myself.” Peckinpah’s ancestors were
pioneers. Once merchants and farmers in Illinois, they crossed the continent by
covered wagon in the 1850s and settled in California, where they entered the logging
business. The Peckinpahs established a lumber mill atop a mountain near Coarsegold,
California, and the names Peckinpah Meadow and Peckinpah Creek appear today on
the official U.S. geographical maps. Peckinpah’s father, David Edward, had worked
on Denver Church’s sprawling ranch as a cowhand and later married Church’s daugh-
ter Fern. The Churches were among the oldest Fresno families. Church later became a
Superior Court Judge and then a California Congressmen. Peckinpah’s father followed
Denver into the legal profession with his help.
David Samuel Peckinpah, born on January 25, 1925, grew up in California’s
cherry-picking capital of Fresno. As contentious in his youth as any of his film protag-
onists, Peckinpah preferred outdoor activities on the cattle ranch of his maternal
grandfather, Denver Church, to being stuck in a school classroom. Peckinpah heard
many stories about the old West from the sons of nineteenth-century miners and
ranchers who toiled on Church’s ranch. These stories, and the strict moral code that
Denver and Peckinpah’s father maintained, made a powerful impression on young
Sam. The family was disappointed when Sam sought a career in the entertainment

Film director Sam Peckinpah looks through the camera lens while filming Cross of Iron in 1977.
(Getty Images)

771
Peckinpah, Sam

industry rather than entering the legal profession. Hoping to set him on the right path,
and to deal with his fiery temper, Peckinpah’s parents transferred him during his senior
year from Fresno High School to the San Rafael Military Academy in 1943; although
he enlisted in the Marines in 1945, he missed out on any action in the South Pacific.
Peckinpah’s battalion wound up in China, where he disarmed Japanese soldiers and
repatriated them. These frontier tales and war experiences undoubtedly inspired Peck-
inpah’s penchant for telling stories about law and order and foreshadowed his conten-
tious attitude that soured so many relationships with producers.
Although Peckinpah directed only four westerns during the 1960s, he emerged from
that turbulent decade as one of the most creative and controversial figures in Hollywood.
In many ways, Peckinpah proved to be his own worst enemy, and many of the setbacks
that he suffered occurred because he refused, like his filmic protagonists, to genuflect
to a higher authority. Impelled to follow his father’s rigid moral code, he began to set
standards for himself that others could rarely meet. Peckinpah’s career began in network
television as a writer for series such as Gunsmoke (1955), Trackdown (1957), Tombstone
Territory (1957), and Broken Arrow (1958). He also served as an assistant to director
Don Siegel on five films, notably Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) and Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956). Peckinpah created the television western The Rifleman in 1958. The
story followed a widowed father—the rifleman (Chuck Connors)—attempting to raise
his son without subjecting him to the violence of the frontier. He also created The
Westerner, but the network canceled it after 13 episodes. Although The Rifleman lasted
five years, Peckinpah quit the series in 1959 because the producers changed the content
of the show so as to appeal to children rather than adults.
Difficult at best, Peckinpah did not suffer fools gladly. He clashed with producers
and studio heads on The Deadly Companions (1961), Ride the High Country (1962),
and Major Dundee (1965). MGM did little to promote his first classic, Ride the High
Country, allowing it to languish even after the picture received critical praise. Quarrels
with Major Dundee producer Jerry Bresler and later Martin Ransohoff on The Cincin-
nati Kid (1965) (Ransohoff fired Peckinpah after five days for shooting a nude scene
with Ann-Margret) led to three years of being blacklisted until producer Daniel
Melnick signed him to direct Katherine Anne Porter’s drama Noon Wine (1966) for
ABC-TV. Peckinpah penned two western screenplays, for The Glory Guys (1965) and
Villa Rides (1968), only to have both significantly rewritten.
Peckinpah released his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, in 1969. It proved to be one
of the most violent films ever produced—moving far beyond even the violence of
Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde—earning the director the nickname “Bloody Sam.”
Yet, while the picture was ridiculed by some as being nothing more than a slide into
gratuitous brutality, Peckinpah’s film troped the traditional notion of the West as a
place of promise where intrepid pioneers bring civilization to savagery; Peckinpah’s
West was a dying dystopian wasteland, populated by outlaws and mercenaries
who have finally outlived their usefulness. Interestingly, the father of the traditional
Hollywood western, John Ford, had hinted at the need to deconstruct the mythologi-
cal sensibilities of the western when he made The Searchers in 1956, but Ford had
given his hard-edged picture a sentimental ending; not so Peckinpah, who created

772
 Penn, Arthur

such a disturbingly vicious finale for The Wild Bunch that even today, it still shocks
when watched for the first time.
The Wild Bunch rejuvenated Peckinpah’s career, but he failed to capitalize on the
film’s success, following it with The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), a picture about a
maverick drifter who stumbles onto a watering hole and turns it into a profitable stage-
coach relay station. Peckinpah next traveled to England to make Straw Dogs (1971),
which starred Dustin Hoffman as an astrophysicist hero who must repel home invad-
ers; the bloody struggle that ensued between hero and villains rekindled the pyrotech-
nics of The Wild Bunch. Surprisingly, nobody died in Peckinpah’s next film, the rodeo
epic Junior Bonner (1971), which featured the laconic Steve McQueen in the lead role.
Although Junior Bonner proved unsuccessful, Peckinpah scored a hit when he again
teamed with McQueen to make the contemporary bank robbery saga The Getaway
in 1972.
The failure of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in 1973 marked a turning point in
Peckinpah’s career, one from which he never recovered. He would go on to helm the
spy film The Killer Elite and a World War II epic about German soldiers on the Russian
Front, Cross of Iron, but the irascible Peckinpah would succumb to a heart attack on
December 28, 1984, at only 59. Although he never won an Oscar, Peckinpah looms
as a seminal figure in American cinematic history, largely because of The Wild Bunch;
despite the inconsistent quality of his films, he nevertheless left behind a body of work
that continues to inspire other filmmakers.

Selected Filmography
The Osterman Weekend (1983); Convoy (1978); Cross of Iron (1977); The Killer Elite (1975);
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974); Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973); The Getaway
(1972); Junior Bonner (1972); Straw Dogs (1971); The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970); The Wild
Bunch (1969); The Glory Guys (1965); Major Dundee (1965); Ride the High Country (1962);
The Deadly Companions (1961)

References
Bliss, Michael. Justified Lives: Morality & Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.
Seydor, Paul. Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration. Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1997.
Simmons, Garner. Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.

—Van Roberts

PENN, ARTHUR. Despite not having garnered as much critical praise as some of
his contemporaries, Arthur Penn is arguably the quintessential figure of what came to
be called the era of the New Hollywood, roughly from the late 1960s through the early
1970s. Indeed, it may be that more than any other film, Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde

773
Penn, Arthur

(1967) was representative of the era it helped ignite; and Penn’s entire corpus of work
during this renaissance is more generically diverse—and offers perhaps the greatest histori-
cal and social scope—than that of any of his contemporaries. His was not the only work to
suffer as the renaissance made way for the blockbuster aesthetics of Steven Spielberg and
George Lucas, but it did so remarkably swiftly and Penn was never able to return to form.
Born in Philadelphia on September 27, 1922, Penn had already acquired extensive
experience prior to his film career, both in television, like Robert Altman, and in the-
ater, like Mike Nichols. In fact, his second film and first success was an adaptation of
his Tony Award-winning stage production of William Gibson’s play The Miracle
Worker. Although the film was critically acclaimed and received Academy Awards for
its two leading ladies, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, it is something of an anomaly
in Penn’s career as it harkens back to the aesthetics of the old Hollywood era. (While
The Chase [1966] might be said to embrace classical Hollywood traditions in terms
of form, it is thematically and politically the perfect opposite of the Hollywood of
old.) Even his low-budget debut western The Left Handed Gun (1958) is much more
modern in comparison, expressing a certain self-reflexivity in both subject and form,
while Paul Newman’s portrayal of Billy the Kid prefigures the countercultural heroes
of the future. Penn’s most experimental film, Mickey One (1965), followed, and while
it never received the critical attention it deserved, it brought Penn together with
Warren Beatty, in a partnership that would catapult them both to fame.
Bonnie and Clyde opened in the fall of 1967 to mixed reviews and little box-office
success, but an eventual if belated critical interest in the film sparked a successful re-
release that culminated in 10 Academy Award nominations, with its cultural signifi-
cance extending well beyond the world of the movies. The film not only offered a
fresh retelling of the outlaw-couple Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, and one that
was compatible with the 1960s counterculture; it also ushered in the era of modern
representation of violence on the American screen, most vividly through its memorable
slow-motion carnage of the couple, while also introducing the aesthetics and attitude
of the French New Wave to mainstream Hollywood cinema. Interestingly, the script
was first offered to François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and it was quite appropri-
ate that it should end up in Penn’s hands, as perhaps no other American film is as
indebted to the French New Wave as his earlier Mickey One.
The 1960s countercultural movement was itself the subject of Penn’s next film,
Alice’s Restaurant (1969). Despite being based on a song by Arlo Guthrie, who also stars
in the film, it gently mocks rather than celebrates the movement. Some of the humor
of Alice’s Restaurant did carry into Penn’s next film, the western Little Big Man
(1970); the latter was, however, a much darker film that drew parallels between the
genocide of Native Americans and the current U.S. war against Vietnam. Completely
devoid of humor, the noirish thriller Night Moves (1975) was Penn’s darkest work, and
its bleakest of all endings seemed to reflect the impasse of a politically bankrupt
America in the mid-1970s. Penn’s final contribution to the renaissance, with its short
life span already drawing to a close, was another dreary western, The Missouri Breaks
(1976), in which two of the era’s greatest stars, Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando,
found themselves in a gruesome but pointless struggle to the death.

774
 Pickford, Mary

Although never a prolific director, a whole five years were to pass before Penn com-
pleted his next film, Four Friends (1981). The film offered one final look back to the
1960s, before Penn succumbed to the conservative ideology of the Reagan era with
the thriller Target (1985). He directed his last film, Penn and Teller Get Killed, in
1989, although he was to return occasionally to television. Perhaps Penn’s swift demise
in the blockbuster era helps explain the lack of critical recognition regarding his oeu-
vre, but there should be little doubt about his central role in the brief but celebrated
era of the Hollywood renaissance.

Selected Filmography
Lumière and Company (1995); Penn and Teller Get Killed (1989); Dead of Winter (1987); Target
(1985); Four Friends (1981); The Missouri Breaks (1976); Night Moves (1975); Little Big Man
(1970); Alice’s Restaurant (1969); Bonnie and Clyde (1967); The Chase (1966); Mickey One
(1965); The Miracle Worker (1962); The Left Handed Gun (1958)

References
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-‘n’-Roll Generation Saved
Hollywood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.
New York: Penguin, 2009.
Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3rd ed.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000.

—Björn Nordfjörd

PICKFORD, MARY. Mary Pickford became the most popular star of the silent era
as well as the most powerful woman in early Hollywood. Known as “America’s Sweet-
heart,” she typically portrayed good girls in dramatic roles. To obtain greater creative
control, she founded the United Artists film studio in 1919 with Douglas Fairbanks
Sr., Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith.
In later years, Pickford would claim that she came from a privileged background. In
truth, she had the same poverty-stricken background as many other early film actors.
She was born on April 8, 1892, as Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, to John Smith, a
ship’s steward, and Charlotte Hennessey. John Smith died in a shipboard accident in
1897, leaving his family in dire financial straits. Pickford’s mother held the family
together by permitting her children, including Jack and Lottie, to appear onstage.
From 1898 to 1907, the family toured with various theatrical companies, barely earn-
ing enough to survive. In 1908, Pickford, now using her stage name, landed a two-year
role on Broadway in a David Belasco play.
When the play closed, Pickford’s mother persuaded her to try her luck in the
motion picture industry that was emerging in New York City. At this point, appearing
in films did not have the same cachet as appearing onstage, so Pickford essentially took

775
Pickford, Mary

a step down when director D. W.

Griffith hired her in 1909 to per-
form roles in one- and two-reel
films. She averaged about 30 films
per year at Biograph, Griffith’s stu-
dio. Because the names of actors
were not publicized by film compa-
nies, Pickford became known as the
“girl with the curls” due to her long,
golden locks. Her hits at Biograph
included With the Enemy’s Help
(1912) and New York Hat (1912).
Always skillful in business matters,
Pickford realized that she could
use her popularity to demand pro-
gressively higher salaries.
In 1914, following a brief re-
turn to the stage, Pickford joined
Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players.
One of the biggest stars in Holly-
wood, she earned only slightly
less than Charlie Chaplin. Pick-
ford and her mother also forced
Zukor to pay her half of the
net profits from Famous Players
films, guaranteed to be no less
than $1.04 million. For a woman
Film star Mary Pickford, 1921. (The Illustrated London
in Hollywood, Pickford had
News Picture Library)
unprecedented creative control.
She had approval over directors
and actors as well as studio facilities designated only for use in her films. With this con-
trol, Pickford began to win critical as well as popular acclaim for her acting. She played
yet another “poor but cheerful girl” in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917); but in Stella
Maris (1918), Pickford began to show her considerable range, as she played both the
beautiful, naive Stella and the misshapen scullery maid. The film is widely acclaimed
as her best work.
Pickford married fellow actor and notorious drunk Owen Moore in 1910. Seven years
later, she fell in love with the also-married and enormously popular actor Douglas Fair-
banks Sr. The potential scandal threatened to derail both of their careers. When the couple
eventually married in 1920, the public embraced them. The home that they established,
Pickfair, became the social center of the Hollywood community. They divorced in
1932. Pickford married Buddy Rogers in 1927 and remained with him until her death.
Pickford joined with Fairbanks, Chaplin, and Griffith to form United Artists in
1919. The group had become dissatisfied with the assembly-line style of filmmaking.

776
 Poitier, Sidney

They wanted creative control and, just as importantly, control over the distribution
and marketing of their films. Pickford’s business skills were critical in making United
Artists into a success. She remained heavily involved with the company until she sold
her stock in 1956.
Pickford successfully made the transition to sound films. She won an Academy
Award for Best Actress for her first venture into sound, Coquette (1928). Now in her
thirties and feeling boxed in by the Victorian characters she was continually asked to
play, she sought out more adult roles. Her last film role came in Secrets (1933), which
did poorly at the box office, leading her to retire from the screen. She remained in the
movie business as a partner in United Artists, however. In 1935, Pickford published
her somewhat fictionalized biography, Sunshine and Shadow. She received an honorary
Oscar in 1976 and died on May 29, 1979, after years as a recluse.

References
Lee, Raymond. The Films of Mary Pickford. New York: Castle, 1970.
Whitfield, Eileen. Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood. New York: Faber & Faber, 2000.

—Caryn E. Neumann

POITIER, SIDNEY. Sidney Poitier has been much more than just a film actor; he
has been an influential figure in American cinema. In addition to starring in over
50 films, some of them seminal contributions to the industry, Poitier has also worked
as a director and critic, and, later in his life, served as a humanitarian, diplomat, and
author. A true Renaissance man, Poitier has helped to shape the perception of African
Americans during a crucial period in U.S. history.
Born in 1927, in Miami, Florida, Poitier grew up on Cat Island and then in Nassau
in the Bahamas. His father was a struggling tomato farmer, and his mother worked at
home, raising Sidney and his six siblings. Poitier was introduced to the cinema as a
young boy living in Nassau. Immediately struck by the possibilities offered through
film, he dedicated himself to learning about the medium, and once he established him-
self in the industry, used his celebrity to make a positive impact on the world.
Poitier was a serious student of the stage. When he was just 16, he moved to New
York and began working as a custodian at the American Negro Theater in exchange
for acting classes. Eventually, Poitier was chosen as the understudy to Harry Belafonte,
who was appearing in a production of Days of Our Youth at the theater. He sub-
sequently landed a role in Lysistrata, which marked the beginning of his professional
acting career. Poitier would return to the stage several times throughout his life, his
most notable role being that of Walter Lee Younger in the Broadway production of
A Raisin in the Sun (1959 and 1961).
In the 1950s, Poitier began his film career, quickly becoming known for playing
characters with strong convictions. He made two of his most controversial and power-
ful films during this period: Cry, the Beloved Country (1952), which examined

777
Poitier, Sidney

apartheid in South Africa, and

The Defiant Ones (1958), which
explored the challenges faced by
two escaped prisoners of different
races. Poitier was nominated for
his first Academy Award for the
latter film, and five years later he
won the Best Actor Oscar for his
role in Lilies of the Field (1963)—
he was the first African American
man to win the coveted award.
Poitier starred in the screen
adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun
in 1961, and went on to appear
in three important films that were
released in 1967: To Sir, with
Love; In the Heat of the Night;
and Guess Who’s Coming to Din-
ner—the latter two films were
nominated for 1968 Best Picture
Academy Awards alongside The
Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and
Doctor Dolittle. During the 1970s,
’80s, and ’90s, Poitier stepped
behind the camera, directing pic-
tures such as the blaxploitation
offering Buck and the Preacher
(1972), and comedies such as
Uptown Saturday Night (1974),
Stir Crazy (1980), and Ghost Dad
In 1958 Sidney Poitier became the first African American to (1990). After a decade-long hiatus,
be nominated as Best Actor by the Academy of Motion Pic- he returned to the screen in 1988
tures Arts and Sciences for his co-starring role in the Holly- to star in Shoot to Kill, in which
wood film The Defiant Ones. In 1963 he became only the he played an FBI agent. In 1997,
second African American actor ever to win an Oscar, for his he took on a role that dovetailed
performance in the film Lilies of the Field. He is credited with
with his humanitarian interests,
paving the way for public acceptance of African American
playing the South African antia-
men in American films, and such contemporary film figures
as Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee have him partially to thank partheid hero Nelson Mandela in
for their huge success. (AFP/Getty Images) the made-for-TV docudrama,
Mandela and de Klerk.
Throughout his eclectic career,
Sidney Poitier has been instrumental in helping to change many of the destructive
racial stereotypes that have long existed in the United States. Moreover, thanks to the
international popularity of his films and his wide-ranging humanitarian interests,

778
 Polanski, Roman

Poitier has given hope to and served as a role model for millions of oppressed people
around the world. In recognition of his myriad achievements in the arts and as a
humanitarian, Poitier was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President
Barack Obama in 2009.

Selected Filmography
The Jackal (1997); Sneakers (1992); Separate but Equal (1991); Little Nikita (1988); Shoot to Kill
(1988); A Piece of the Action (1977); Let’s Do It Again (1975); The Wilby Conspiracy (1975);
Uptown Saturday Night (1974); A Warm December (1973); Buck and the Preacher (1972); The
Organization (1971); Brother John (1971); They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (1970); The Lost
Man (1969); For Love of Ivy (1968); Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967); In the Heat of the
Night (1967); To Sir, with Love (1967); Duel at Diablo (1966); The Slender Thread (1965); A
Patch of Blue (1965); The Bedford Incident (1965); The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965); The Long
Ships (1964); Lilies of the Field (1963); Pressure Point (1962); Paris Blues (1961); A Raisin in the
Sun (1961); All the Young Men (1960); Porgy and Bess (1959); The Defiant Ones (1958); The
Mark of the Hawk (1957); Band of Angels (1957); Something of Value (1957); Edge of the City
(1957); Good-bye, My Lady (1956); Go, Man, Go! (1954); Red Ball Express (1952); Cry, the
Beloved Country (1952); No Way Out (1950)

References
Gates, Philippa. “Always a Partner in Crime: Black Masculinity in the Hollywood Detective
Film.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32(1), 2004.
Miller, Chris. “The Representation of the Black Male in Film.” Journal of African American
Studies 3(3), 1998.
Poitier, Sidney. The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography. San Francisco: Harper, 2007.

—Jen Westmoreland Bouchard

POLANSKI, ROMAN. Director Roman Polanski has left his imprint on the silver
screen by creating filmic characters that are often caught in intensely claustrophobic
and unfamiliar settings. Known as much for the personal turmoil that he has suffered,
Polanski has become an enigmatic figure in American cinema.
Born August 18, 1933, in Paris to Polish parents, Polanski was taken to Krakow
when he was just three years old. By 1940, the family home had become part of the
larger Krakow ghetto that had been created by German soldiers at the start of World
War II. Shortly after this, his parents, both Jews, were taken to concentration camps.
Polanski escaped the ghetto and survived the war thanks to Catholic peasant families
who harbored him. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz; his father survived.
After the war, Polanski grew into a budding actor and director; he was eventually
accepted into the prestigious State Film School at Lodz in 1954. He studied the dark,
character-driven dramas directed by Orson Welles, whom Polanski claims as his film-
making inspiration (Vezzoli, 2009). Polanski directed short films while in school and

779
Polanski, Roman

Polish-born filmmaker Roman Polanski, husband of slain actress Sharon Tate, is seen in this 1970
photo. (AP/Wide World Photos)

also after he graduated. He gained international attention with his first feature film,
Knife in the Water (1962). Restricted in his filmmaking pursuits by Polish Communist
authorities, he relocated to France and England.
Polanski burst onto the U.S. film scene in 1968 with Rosemary’s Baby. The picture,
starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, tells the story of a woman who gives birth
to the devil’s child. Polanski was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
That same year, Polanski married actress Sharon Tate, who had appeared in his 1967
film The Fearless Vampire Killers. Tragedy struck in 1969, when, while he was working
in London, members of the Charles Manson cult entered his Los Angeles home and
killed Sharon, their unborn baby, and four of the couple’s friends. Devastated by the
tragic experience, Polanski made a number of mediocre films in the early 1970s. He
reestablished himself as one of the most important filmmakers in Hollywood with
Chinatown in 1974. The picture, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, earned
Polanski a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for Best Director.
In 1977, Polanski’s personal life once again took the spotlight. He admitted to hav-
ing sex with a 13-year-old girl and later pleaded guilty to one count of having sexual
relations with a minor. He spent several weeks in prison undergoing psychiatric evalu-
ation. The night before he was to be sentenced, Polanski, who had been released pend-
ing the court’s decision on his case, fled to Europe, where he has remained in exile from
the United States (Wakeman, 1987). Making his home in Paris, Polanski took a short
break from filmmaking before returning to the screen with an adaptation of Thomas

780
 Pollack, Sydney

Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1979; the film would bring him another Best Direc-
tor nomination. He won both critical and box-office acclaim with 1988’s Frantic, star-
ring Harrison Ford, and once again provided audiences with a troubled protagonist
plagued by isolation and paranoia in Death and the Maiden (1994).
The highlight of Polanski’s late career came in 2003, when he made The Pianist.
The movie is based on the memoir of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a successful Jewish-
Polish pianist living through the early years of World War II. Szpilman, played by
Adrien Brody, is forced into a Warsaw ghetto but manages to hide from German sol-
diers. The picture finally earned Polanski the much-coveted Best Director Oscar,
although he was unable to travel to the United States to collect it; it also won the Palme
d’Or at Cannes.
Questions about Polanski’s 1977 charges resurfaced in 2008, when documentary
filmmaker Marina Zenovich released Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. The film
raised questions about whether or not Polanski received a fair trial. Polanski’s lawyers
have asked that the charges be dropped, which would allow him to return to the
United States; as late as 2009, however, their requests have been denied (Cieply,
2009). Polanski continues to live in Paris, now with his second wife, Emmanuelle
Seigner, and their two children; he remains actively involved in filmmaking.

Selected Filmography
The Ghost Writer (2010); Oliver Twist (2005); The Pianist (2002); The Ninth Gate (1999);
Death and the Maiden (1994); Bitter Moon (1992); Frantic (1988); Pirates (1986); Tess (1979);
The Tenant (1976); Chinatown (1974); What? (1972); Macbeth (1971); Rosemary’s Baby
(1968); The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967); Cul-de-sac (1966); Repulsion (1965); Knife in the
Water (1962)

References
Cieply, Michael. “Judge Won’t Dismiss Polanski Case (For Now).” New York Times, February 18,
2009: C2.
Rafferty, Terrence. “Polanski and the Landscape of Aloneness.” New York Times, January 26,
2003: Section 2, 1.
Vezzoli, Francesco. “Roman Polanski.” Interview 39, February 2009: 98–124.
Wakeman, John, ed. “Roman Polanski.” World Film Directors, Vol. 2. New York: H. W. Wilson,
1987.
—Rachael Hanel

POLLACK, SYDNEY. Sydney Irwin Pollack, born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette,

Indiana, developed a love of drama while he was in high school and eventually enrolled
at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City, rather than
go to college. He studied under Sanford Meisner for two years and then took up the
post of teaching assistant, which he held for five years. Pollack had a brief flirtation

781
Pollack, Sydney

with Broadway stage-acting when

he was young, and would go on
to establish himself as a successful
character actor in Hollywood
films. At the suggestion of Burt
Lancaster, however, whom he
had met while acting in John
Frankenheimer’s Playhouse 90 tel-
ecasts in 1959, he turned to
directing in 1965. Lancaster
introduced Pollack to the enter-
tainment mogul Lew Wasserman,
who in turn found Pollack a
directing job on the television
series Shotgun Slade. Pollack went
on to direct episodes of celebrated
television series, such as The Fugi-
tive, and won an Emmy in 1966
for an episode of Bob Hope
Presents the Chrysler Theatre.
In 1965, Pollack made his
directorial film debut with The
Slender Thread, starring Anne
Bancroft and Sidney Poitier. Four
years after this, he won his first
Academy Award nomination for
Best Director, for They Shoot
Horses, Don’t They? (1969), a
Portrait of 20th-century film director Sydney Pollack. (Getty Depression-era tale of love and
Images)
death. The first of many literary
adaptations on which Pollack
would work, Horses starred Jane Fonda and was nominated for nine Academy Awards,
with Gig Young winning for Best Supporting Actor. Although he did not earn the cov-
eted Best Director Oscar for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Pollack’s work on this film
did not go unrecognized, as he was awarded the Directors’ Guild of America Award for
Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film; he would also win this award
for Tootsie (1982) and Out of Africa (1985).
After forging a firm friendship with Robert Redford, whom Pollack had met when
the actor made his screen debut in War Hunt (1962), he went on to direct Redford
in numerous films, including Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Way We Were (1973) and
Out of Africa. When filming Jeremiah Johnson, about a flatlander who leaves his life
behind and becomes a “mountain man,” Pollack battled with Warner Bros. executives
to be allowed to shoot on location. He won the argument, and the studio allowed him
to film in Utah; they issued the proviso, however, that he was not to spend a penny

782
 Pollack, Sydney

more than if he were shooting on a studio lot in Hollywood. Despite the difficulties of
filming high in the snow-covered peaks of Utah, Jeremiah Johnson proved a success for
Pollack, grossing over $22 million. It also established him as a director who, while
committed to making commercially successful pictures, was still willing to wrangle
with studio executives in order to maintain the artistic integrity of his films. Although
critics were less than enthusiastic about The Way We Were, the engaging romance,
which paired Redford with Barbra Streisand, was warmly received by audiences. Once
again nominated as Best Director for Tootsie, Pollack would win his only Academy
Award for direction three years later for Out of Africa, a lushly romantic literary adap-
tation, which this time paired Redford with Meryl Streep.
Tootsie was important to Pollack’s career for any number of reasons. Plagued by on-
set conflicts between Pollack and lead actor Dustin Hoffman, the project fell behind
schedule and went over budget. Hoffman, who was powerful enough to be demanding
by the time he was cast as Tootsie, insisted that the picture should be shot as a broadly
comic look at a struggling actor; Pollack, however, argued that the focus of the film
should be on the ill-fated romance between Tootsie and Julie Nichols, played by Jessica
Lange. Fortunately, Pollack prevailed, and in his hands, Tootsie became a tender, heart-
warming look at love, loss, and redemption. The film also became a critical and box-
office success, garnering 10 Academy Award nominations—Lange would win for Best
Supporting Actress—and taking in $177 million in the United States alone.
Pollack would never again achieve the success he had enjoyed with Tootsie and Out
of Africa. Although he made popular films such as The Firm (1993), adapted from
John Grisham’s runaway bestseller of the same name and starring Tom Cruise, offer-
ings such as Sabrina (1995) and Random Hearts (1999), both of which starred
Harrison Ford, were not embraced by audiences. By the 1990s, younger audiences,
whose members preferred special-effects-laden extravaganzas, generally turned
away from Pollack’s more character-driven films. Seeking to continue to make high-
quality pictures, Pollack united with Anthony Minghella to create the production
company Mirage Enterprises. Mirage eventually backed the Minghella-directed The
Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Cold Mountain (2003). Both were literary adaptations
starring major movie stars, and both earned multiple Academy Award nominations.
Other critical successes for the company included The Quiet American (2002), Michael
Clayton (2007), and The Reader (2008).
In his later years, Pollack became an elder statesman of the film industry; in 2000,
he was honored with the John Huston Award by the Directors Guild of America as a
leading advocate for film artists’ rights. Pollack died from cancer on May 26, 2008;
he was posthumously nominated for an Academy Award for producing The Reader.

Selected Filmography
Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005); The Interpreter (2005); Random Hearts (1999); Sabrina (1995);
The Firm (1993); Havana (1990); Out of Africa (1985); Tootsie (1982); Absence of Malice
(1981); The Electric Horseman (1979); Bobby Deerfield (1977); Three Days of the Condor (1975);
The Yakuza (1974); The Way We Were (1973); Jeremiah Johnson (1972); They Shoot Horses, Don’t

783
Preminger, Otto

They? (1969); Castle Keep (1969); The Scalphunters (1968); This Property Is Condemned (1966);
The Slender Thread (1965)

References
Cieply, Michael. “Sydney Pollack, Film Director, Dies at 73.” New York Times, May 26, 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/movies/26cnd-Pollack.html?_r=1
Directors Guild of America. “DGA Statement Regarding the Sad Passing of Sydney Pollack.”
May 26, 2008. http://www.dga.org/news/pr_expand.php3?557.
Hirschhorn, Clive. The Warner Bros. Story. London: Octopus, 1980.
Katz, Ephraim. The Macmillan International Film Encyclopaedia, 3rd ed. London: Macmillan,
1998.
—Victoria Williams

PREMINGER, OTTO. Otto Preminger was an innovative and pioneering Austrian-

American filmmaker active during the middle part of the twentieth century. One of the
first great independent producer-directors of Hollywood, he was known for his unique
film style, one that consistently challenged established industry practices.
Preminger’s birth was a case in contradiction. Two sets of documents exist. One
states that he was born in Vienna, on December 5, 1905, while another lists his grand-
father’s farm in Austria one year later on the same day (Wilson, 1987). Despite this,
Preminger enjoyed a happy middle-class childhood and was close to his father, Markus
Preminger—a prominent chief prosecutor for the government and military (highly
unusual positions for a Jew in Austria at this time). The father wanted the son to follow
in his footsteps, but instead Otto turned to the theatre with an apprenticeship under
Max Reinhardt at the Josephstadt Theatre in Vienna. For the next decade, Preminger
acted and directed in productions in Vienna, Prague, and Zurich before eventually
returning to Vienna as an assistant director in 1931. It was also during this time that
he made his directorial debut in film with Die Grosse Liebe (The Great Love, 1931)
(Philips, 1998).
In 1935, Preminger’s career changed course when he was interviewed in Vienna by
Joseph Schenck of Twentieth Century-Fox. Preminger would later state that his deci-
sion to move to the United States had more to do with an “old dream” he had rather
than the rising Nazi influence in Central Europe. Regardless of the reason, Preminger
landed in New York in October 1936, and worked briefly on Broadway before moving
to Hollywood.
Preminger’s initial time at Fox was brief. His first film, Under Your Spell (1936), was
a minor musical comedy. It was while directing Danger, Love at Work (1937) that he
began to butt heads with Darryl F. Zanuck. The conflict peaked during the production
of Kidnapped, when the two men engaged in a shouting match that ended with Pre-
minger being fired and told that he would never direct in Hollywood again.
Exiled from Hollywood, Preminger returned to Broadway, where he became the
“resident Nazi” in plays such as Margin for Error and The Pied Piper. It was his work,

784
 Preminger, Otto

however, in Margin for

Error that led to his return
to Twentieth Century-
Fox to direct a film ver-
sion in 1943. For the
remainder of the decade,
Preminger was a promi-
nent Hollywood director,
helming two major noir
pictures, Laura (1944)
and Fallen Angel (1945),
which stand out as major
works in the genre. He
did a number of other
movies for Fox during this
period, including his only
western—and last film
for Fox—River of No
Return in 1954.
In 1953 (after starring
as the camp commandant
in Billy Wilder’s Stalag
17 ), Preminger became
an independent producer-
director. He assaulted Hol-
lywood’s rigid censorship
Austrian-born film director Otto Preminger poses before a rules in a series of films.
model of the set for the drama he’s re-producing and staging, The Moon Is Blue (1953),
Full Circle, in 1973. (AP/Wide World Photos) for instance, dealt with vir-
ginity and seduction and
proved controversial because it used forbidden words such as “pregnant,” “seduce,” and
“virgin”; shocking for the time, his 1954 film Carmen starred an all-black cast; and The
Man with the Golden Arm (1955) focused on the volatile issue of drug addiction, graphically
portraying the lead character, played by Frank Sinatra, attempting to break his heroin habit
cold turkey. Pushing the censorship limits even further with Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Pre-
minger became the first director to deal uncompromisingly with the topic of rape in a major
film. A powerful courtroom drama, Anatomy, like The Moon is Full, proved controversial for
its use of racy language, most notably “sperm” and “penetration.”
Preminger also focused on national institutions in his films. The Court Martial of
Billy Mitchell (1955), for instance, focused on the Army’s case against the famous
World War I general, while the realism of naval warfare was reflected in his 1965 film
In Harm’s Way. The church came under scrutiny in The Cardinal (1963), while the
relationship among politics, religion, and the Holocaust was explored in Preminger’s
epic 1960 film Exodus. The issue of having and raising a child out of wedlock was

785
Preminger, Otto

dramatically portrayed in Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), and in Advise & Consent
(1962), Preminger fused his interest in social institutions and taboo topics by portray-
ing a battle between the president and the Senate underscored with questions of homo-
sexuality (until this time an issue largely avoided in film).
Preminger’s last major film, The Human Factor (1979), while not considered one of
his best, serves as a reflection of what was a diverse, controversial, and influential career.
He died of cancer in New York on April 23, 1986.

Selected Filmography
The Human Factor (1979); Rosebud (1975); Such Good Friends (1971); Tell Me That You Love
Me, Junie Moon (1970); Skidoo (1968); Hurry Sundown (1967); Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965);
In Harm’s Way (1965); The Cardinal (1963); Advise & Consent (1962); Exodus (1960); Anatomy
of a Murder (1959); Porgy and Bess (1959); Bonjour Tristesse (1958); Saint Joan (1957); The
Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955); The Man with the Golden Arm (1955); Carmen Jones
(1954); River of No Return (1954); The Moon Is Blue (1953); Angel Face (1952); The 13th Letter
(1951); Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950); Whirlpool (1949); The Fan (1949); That Lady in
Ermine (1948); Daisy Kenyon (1947); Forever Amber (1947); Centennial Summer (1946); Fallen
Angel (1945); A Royal Scandal (1945); Laura (1944); In the Meantime, Darling (1944); Margin
for Error (1943)

References
Phillips, Gene. Exiles in Hollywood: Major European Film Directors in America. Bethlehem, PA:
Lehigh University Press, 1998.
Tibbetts, John C. “Otto Preminger.” In The Encyclopedia of Filmmakers, Vol. 2, L-Z. New York:
Facts on File, 2002.
Wilson, Ron. “Otto Preminger.” In Wakeman, John, ed. World Film Directors. Vol. I, 1890–
1945. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1987: 888–98.

—Charles Johnson

786
 v
R
RAY, NICHOLAS. Born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in Galesville, Wisconsin, on
August 7, 1911, Nicholas Ray is best known for directing the film Rebel Without a
Cause (1955). Although he is little remembered by most moviegoers, many contempo-
rary directors and filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch, credit Ray
as an important influence. As French director Jean-Luc Godard wrote, “Cinema is
Nicholas Ray.”
Ray spent a short time in Chicago, New York City, and Mexico, as well as some
months working with Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1930s, before settling in New
York City and joining the left-wing theater movement there. After several years with
the Theater of Action, Ray became theater director for the Socialist, union-run univer-
sity Brookwood Labor College. By 1937, however, Ray was working for the New Deal
Resettlement Administration running the theater arts division in which he organized
community theaters and taught people to present their stories in theatrical terms. In
1940, Ray took over production of Back Where I Came From, a folk music radio show.
After the U.S. entry into WWII, he went to work for the Office of War Information
(OWI) producing folk music and propaganda shows for Voice of America radio. Ray
did not move into film until 1944, when he went to Hollywood to work with director
Elia Kazan on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ray worked on various film and early TV
projects with John Houseman, former director of the OWI. Houseman hired him as
his assistant at RKO, and put Ray to work adapting the novel Thieves Like Us. Ray
directed the film, his first feature (retitled They Live by Night), in 1947, but it was
not released until 1949.
During his tenure with RKO, Ray directed six feature films, including Flying Leather-
necks (1951) and On Dangerous Ground (1952). His connection with Howard Hughes
saved him, in spite of his leftist politics, from the blacklisting that killed so many careers
in the early 1950s, and when Hughes left RKO, Ray, ever uncomfortable in the studio sys-
tem, wriggled out of his contract, as well. After leaving RKO, Ray bounced from one stu-
dio to another, directing, among other films, the noirish western Johnny Guitar in 1954.
Ray’s career highpoint came in 1955 when he made Rebel Without a Cause for
Warner Bros. Although initially uninterested in directing a movie that focused on

787
Robeson, Paul

juvenile delinquency, a topic very much in vogue at the time, he became intrigued with
the project as he began to envision the main characters as neither psychopaths nor par-
ticularly “at risk” children, but rather as perfectly normal kids. During filming, Natalie
Wood, then only 16, had an affair with Ray, and later with Dennis Hopper, who
played a gang member in the picture. But the more surprising sexual tension in the
film comes in the character of Plato, who may or may not have been written as the first
openly gay teenager. Ray himself was bisexual, having had various affairs with men in
addition to his four marriages.
Ray was fundamentally dissatisfied with the Hollywood studio system; he and
James Dean had planned to create a production company that would have freed both
men from it. Unfortunately, Dean died in a tragic car accident on September 30,
1955. Devastated, Ray never recovered from the psychological effects of the accident—
personally, artistically, or professionally. He bounced between the United States and
Europe during the 1960s and ’70s, finally dying of cancer on June 16, 1979. He had
struggled for years with drug addiction, alcoholism, and obsessive gambling, at times
virtually homeless and economically dependent on those who continued to admire
his work.

Selected Filmography
Lightning over Water (1980); Marco (1978); We Can’t Go Home Again (1976); 55 Days at Peking
(1963); King of Kings (1961); The Savage Innocents (1960); Party Girl (1958); Wind across the
Everglades (1958); Bitter Victory (1957); The True Story of Jesse James (1957); Bigger Than Life
(1956); Hot Blood (1956); Rebel Without a Cause (1955); Run for Cover (1955); Johnny Guitar
(1954); The Lusty Men (1952); On Dangerous Ground (1952); Flying Leathernecks (1951); Born
to Be Bad (1950); In a Lonely Place (1950); They Live by Night (1949); Knock on Any Door
(1949)

References
Andrew, Geoff. The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall. London: Letts, 1991.
Kashner, Sam. “Dangerous Talents.” Vanity Fair, March 2005.
Lane, Anthony. “Only the Lonely: A Nicholas Ray Retrospective.” New Yorker, March 24, 2003.
Ray, Nicholas, and Susan Ray. I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1995.
—Molly K. B. Varley

ROBESON, PAUL. Paul Robeson, who made his mark on the nascent movie indus-
try by portraying strong African American characters, became increasingly political
throughout his life to the point where his communist beliefs derailed his entertainment
career in the United States.
Robeson was born April 9, 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey, the youngest of eight
children. His mother died of burns sustained in a household accident when he was

788
 Robeson, Paul

Paul Robeson, world-famous stage and film performer, leads workers in singing “The Star-Spangled
Banner” at the Moore shipyard in Oakland, California, in September 1942. Robeson entertained
Allied forces during World War II. (National Archives)

six, and he was subsequently raised by his pastor father. Robeson’s high grades earned
him a scholarship to Rutgers College, where he was the third African American student
in the school’s history (Paul Robeson, 1976). At Rutgers, he displayed immense ath-
letic talent as a member of the football, baseball, track, and basketball teams. Robeson
graduated in 1919.
He moved to Harlem, New York, and parlayed his excellent oratorical skills into
theatrical roles. In 1920, Robeson acted in his first play, Simon the Cyrenian. At the
same time, he continued his academic career by entering Columbia Law School, from
which he graduated in 1923. He worked briefly as a lawyer but resigned because of the
lack of opportunity and respect provided to African Americans in that field.
From that point on, Robeson focused entirely on entertainment. With his boom-
ing, rich baritone voice, his singing career soared. He and a friend, pianist Lawrence
Brown, made recordings and went on tour. Robeson also continued his stage work.
In 1924, he debuted what would become one of his signature roles: Brutus Jones in
The Emperor Jones. The play took him to London. In Europe, Robeson and his wife,
Essie, marveled at the warm welcome they received even though they were African
Americans.
In 1928, Robeson played another of his signature roles, Joe, in a London produc-
tion of Show Boat. He sang “Ol’ Man River,” a song that audiences would identify with
him for generations. He also played the title role in a London production of Othello in
1930, a role he would later reprise on Broadway in 1943. In the late 1920s and early

789
Robeson, Paul

1930s, Robeson transferred his acting and singing talents to the movie industry. He
starred in film versions of his theatrical work: The Emperor Jones (1933) and Show Boat
(1936). Robeson declined roles that portrayed African Americans in stereotypical fash-
ion, instead favoring strong, intellectual characters.
In 1933, Robeson performed a benefit play for Jewish refugees, which he said was
the beginning of his political activism (Stewart, 1998). He also visited Russia several
times, impressed with the gains earned by that country’s minorities. He enrolled his
son in Soviet schools, hoping Paul Jr. would escape the racial discrimination that was
so rampant in the United States.
Robeson voluntarily ended his movie career with 1942’s Tales of Manhattan. Dis-
pleased with the final cut, he claimed that the picture portrayed poor, black sharecrop-
pers in a demeaning light. He announced that he would no longer work in an industry
that did not offer well-rounded roles for African Americans (Stewart, 1998). Robeson
put other restrictions on his career. He announced in 1942 that he would not perform
at venues that demanded audiences be segregated. In 1947, he ended concert perfor-
mances altogether, saying that he would only sing for unions and for college friends
(Stewart, 1998).
He did not keep his communist views secret, and support for his career in the
United States waned. On August 27, 1949, rioters injured several people before one
of his concerts, and it was cancelled. Robeson finally performed on September 4, but
a melee after the show injured 140 people (Stewart, 1998).
In 1950, the State Department revoked Robeson’s passport, declaring that his trav-
els abroad were not in the best interests of the United States. Officials would return the
passport if Robeson signed an affidavit denying that he was a communist. He refused.
For eight years, the case languished in the courts. The inability to perform overseas sig-
nificantly harmed his career. The passport restrictions were finally lifted in 1958, and
Robeson immediately left the United States. He performed as Othello in London.
But his health declined, and he spent several months in and out of hospitals and sana-
toriums.
Robeson returned to the United States in 1963, but retreated mostly to private life.
He gave speeches and attended benefit dinners, but did not perform. In 1973, a “Salute
to Paul Robeson” packed Carnegie Hall on his 75th birthday. Robeson was too ill to
attend. He died on January 23, 1976, at the age of 77.

References
“Paul Robeson.” In Current Biography. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1976.
Stewart, Jeffrey C., ed. Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press and the Paul Robeson Cultural Center, 1998.
—Rachael Hanel

790
 v
S
SARRIS, ANDREW. Andrew Sarris, considered by many the most influential critic
in American film history, was born on October 31, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York.
Sarris received his BA and MA from Columbia University, and was awarded an honor-
ary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Emerson College in Boston, in 2008. He has
taught at Columbia, Jiulliard, Yale, and New York University. Sarris has worked exten-
sively as a film critic and commentator in various media. He edited Cahiers du cinéma
between 1965 and 1967 and worked as a film critic for the Village Voice from 1960
until 1989; since 1989, Sarris has been writing criticism for the New York Observer.
A member of the Society of Cinema Studies and of the American Film Institute, Sarris
also served on the editorial board of the Journal of Popular Film and Television and was
a founding member and chairman of the National Society of Film Critics.
Sarris has written several books, including a seminal work on film studies, The
American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1925–1968. Other of his books include
The Films of Josef von Sternberg; The St. James Film Director’s Encyclopedia; Hollywood
Voices: Interviews with Film Directors; Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955–
1969; The Primal Screen: Essays on Film and Related Subjects; Politics and Cinema;
and You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet: The American Talking Film, History, and Memory
1927–1949. Sarris’s work has had an impact on every aspect of the film world. Indeed,
his alternative history of American movies made viewers and readers aware of the real
artistic value of American cinema.
Sarris imported to the United States the post-WWII French notion that the director
was the author of a film. Labeled la politique des auteurs in the 1950s by French film
critics André Bazin, Erich Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and François
Truffaut—the last four also directors—in the avant-garde film journal Cahiers du Cin-
éma, auteur theory was adopted in the United States during the early 1960s. Sarris
introduced the notions of the auteur and mise-en-scène—literally to “place in the
scene,” related to the idea of framing the filmic image—into the critical discourse on
cinema that was emerging in America at the time. In an extremely important essay
titled “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Sarris discussed the importance of the
director in creating a film; he also set down a list of what he took to be the preeminent

791
Sarris, Andrew

directors of the “first century” of filmmaking, many of whom, interestingly, were

Americans, and all of whom were men: Max Ophüls, Jean Renoir, Kenji Mizoguchi,
Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Orson Welles, Carl Theodore Dreyer,
Roberto Rossellini, F. W. Murnau, D. W. Griffith, Joseph von Sternberg, Sergei Eisenstein,
Erich von Stroheim, Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Robert
Flaherty, and Jean Vigo. “In time,” suggested Sarris in “Notes on the Auteur Theory,”

some of these auteurs will rise, some will fall, and some will be displaced either by
new directors or rediscovered ancients. Again, the exact order is less important than
the specific definitions of these and as many as two hundred other potential auteurs.
I would hardly expect any other critic in the world fully to endorse this list, especially
on faith. Only after thousands of films have been reevaluated, will any personal pan-
theon have a reasonably objective validity. The task of validating the auteur theory is
an enormous one, and the end will never be in sight. Meanwhile, the auteur habit of
collecting random films in directorial bundles will serve posterity with at least a ten-
tative classification. (Braudy and Cohen, 1999)

Following the guidelines laid out by the Cahiers critics who first articulated the
politique des auteurs, Sarris laid out three criteria that he believed could be used to dis-
tinguish an auteur from other, pedestrian directors. The first criterion defined what
Sarris called “the outer circle.” This implied that the auteur possessed knowledge of
the technical end of filmmaking—related to the idea of mise-en-scène, he was literally
a metteur-en-scène, a “placer of the scene,” who was able to employ a specific, generally
recurrent style in his work. The second criterion defined a “middle circle,” the explicit
personal style or “stylistic consistency” of a filmmaker. In contrast to average directors,
whose skills are largely dependent upon their working within a system of filmmaking,
the auteur is able to infuse his work with a certain discernable artistic personality by
way of his unique treatment of the filmic material. Sarris even went so far as to argue
that the “stylistic consistency” of certain American directors—Welles and Hitchcock,
for example—often made them superior to foreign directors.
The third criterion set down by Sarris defined an “inner circle,” or “interior mean-
ing,” that resulted from “the tension between a director’s personality and his material.”
Sarris’s notion of interior meaning is complicated, at best—in fact it is not altogether
clear exactly what he means by the phrase—but he nevertheless suggests that it repre-
sents the “ultimate glory of the cinema as an art.” Basically, “interior meaning” seems
to define a complex conglomerate of constituting elements that interact: technical
competence, artistic talent, and presence of spirit; as well as the sum of communicative
skills and other spontaneous attitudes a director needs to overcome diverse obstacles
during the often convoluted process of filmmaking.
Significantly, auteur theory was sharply criticized by the highly regarded American
film critic Pauline Kael. In a review titled “Circle and Squares,” which appeared in Film
Quarterly in 1963, Kael questioned Sarris’s central idea concerning the supremacy of
the director in the filmmaking process—especially the uniquely male film director—
arguing that the auteur theory, with its rigid formulation, obscured the collaborative

792
 Schoonmaker, Thelma

nature of filmmaking. Contemporary theories of the filmic auteur, while still according
an elevated status to certain directors, have sought to decenter the totalitarian notion of
the director as dictatorial author and to replace the male-dominated, monolithic view
of the auteur with the more inclusive concept of the auteur function. Although contro-
versial, Sarris’s auteur theory did succeed in drawing attention to little-known directors
and their films.
In 2001, Scarecrow Press published a collection of 39 essays in Andrew Sarris’s
honor entitled Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic. Sarris lives in New York City with
his wife, Molly Haskell, who is also a film critic and scholar.
See also: Auteur Theory; Film Criticism; French New Wave; Truffaut, François

References
“Andrew Sarris.” Columbia University. School of the Arts. Department of Film Studies. Faculty
Biography. http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/art/app/arts/film/faculty-bio.jsp?faculty=10.
“Andrew Sarris.” New York Film Critics Circle. http://www.nyfcc.com/members.php
?member=24.
Cristian, Réka M. “Cinema and Its Discontents: Auteur, Studio, Star.” In Cristian, Réka M. and
Zoltán Dragon. Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories. Szeged, Hungary:
JATEPress, 2008: 63–81.
Jones, Kent. “Hail the Conquering Hero.” Film Comment, May/June 2005, http://
www.filmlinc.com/fcm/5-6-2005/sarris.htm.
Powell, Michael. “A Survivor of Film Criticism’s Heroic Age.” New York Times, July 9, 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/movies/12powe.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all.
Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” In Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen,
eds. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press,
1999: 515–18.
—Réka M. Cristian

SCHOONMAKER, THELMA. One of the most recognizable motion picture edi-

tors of our time, Thelma Schoonmaker has been in the film industry for over 30 years.
Her longtime partnership with director Martin Scorsese has helped shape her
acclaimed career. She has edited every one of Scorsese’s feature films since Raging Bull,
and has been recognized by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences (Academy Awards), Emmy Awards, American Cinema Editors, British
Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), and other highly regarded organiza-
tions in the industry.
Schoonmaker was born in Algiers, Algeria, on January 3, 1940. She spent most of
her childhood in Aruba, and as a teenager, her parents, who were originally from the
United States, moved to New Jersey. Later, she attended Cornell University, where
she studied political science and Russian. Her goal was to be a diplomat, but upon
graduating in 1961, she interviewed with the Foreign Service and was told that she
was not suited for diplomatic service. Instead, she decided to enroll at Columbia

793
Schoonmaker, Thelma

University to study primitive art,

which she still considers a hobby.
In looking for employment
opportunities to pay the bills,
she responded to a classified ad
in the New York Times advertising
a position for an assistant film
editor trainee. She was hired for
the position, and this resulted in
her decision to enroll in a six-
week course in film editing at
New York University (NYU). It
was during this time that she
met Scorsese. The six-week
course turned out to be the only
formal training in film editing
she ever received.
Schoonmaker’s collaboration
with Scorsese would not begin
until many years later. Her first
attempt at film editing was in
1965, when she signed on to
edit Finnegan’s Wake, directed by
Thelma Schoonmaker poses with the Oscar for achievement Mary Ellen Bute. After that
in film editing for her work on The Departed during the attempt, she continued to experi-
79th Academy Awards, February 25, 2007. (AP/Wide World ment and form her now distinc-
Photos) tive style by editing commercials,
industrial films, and short films
about celebrities for The Merv
Griffin Show. Her first encounter with Scorsese—other than when she helped save a
short film he had made after another editor had done a horrible job cutting it—came
in 1968, when she helped edit his first feature film, Who’s That Knocking on My Door?
Her first big break in the industry came when she worked with fellow NYU student,
Michael Wadleigh, editing and acting as assistant director on the 1970 documentary
Woodstock. Eschewing orthodox methods for presenting the 1969 concert on-screen,
Schoonmaker and Wadleigh experimented with the use of split screens, freeze frames,
and other disjointed and fluid techniques in an attempt to capture the mood and feel
of the iconic Woodstock Music Festival. Although the film’s distributor, Warner Bros.,
had concerns about releasing the nontraditional concert documentary, Woodstock
received a great deal of critical acclaim and was embraced by audiences. Based on her
work on the film, Schoonmaker received the first of her six Academy Award nomina-
tions for editing. The nomination also marked the first time a documentary was recog-
nized in the Academy’s film editing category.

794
 Schoonmaker, Thelma

Ironically, Schoonmaker was unable to join the Motion Picture Editors Guild at
this point in her career, as she had not gone through the normal process of training
as an apprentice and slowly working her way up to the position of film editor. There
was also the fact that the exclusive guild was predominantly an old boys’ network. Nat-
urally, Schoonmaker felt that she was more than qualified to edit feature films, espe-
cially after having been nominated for an Academy Award. Unfortunately, her lack of
formal training and gender prevented her from editing such early Scorsese films as
Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976). Her patient stand eventually paid off,
however, and she was finally admitted to the editor’s union. This allowed her to col-
laborate with Scorsese on his seminal 1981 film Raging Bull. Both Scorsese and
Schoonmaker received enormous critical acclaim for their work on the film—Scorsese
was nominated as Best Director and Schoonmaker for Editing Achievement, with
Schoonmaker taking home her first Oscar.
In addition to editing Scorsese’s films, she also edited the music video for Michael
Jackson’s Bad, which Scorsese directed, and worked with other directors on the follow-
ing films: Rockshow (1980), Grace of My Heart (1996), and The McCartney Years (2007).
This collaboration between Scorsese and Schoonmaker not only produced Academy
Award–winning films, but also led to Schoonmaker meeting the love of her life,
Michael Powell. Powell, whom Schoonmaker married in 1984, and with whom she
lived happily until his death in 1990, was a British filmmaker who was one of Scorse-
se’s inspirations. He had directed classics such as Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red
Shoes (1948), and in the late 1970s, Scorsese brought him to the United States. Since
Powell’s death, Schoonmaker has devoted a great deal of her time working to preserve
and promote Powell’s films and writings in order to keep his legacy alive.
To date, Schoonmaker has been nominated for six Academy Awards for Editing
Achievement. In addition to being nominated for her work on Woodstock and Raging
Bull, she was also nominated for editing Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Aviator,
and The Departed. In addition to Raging Bull, she won Oscars for The Aviator and
The Departed.
See also: De Niro, Robert; Goodfellas; Raging Bull; Scorsese, Martin

Selected Filmography
Shutter Island (2010); The Departed (2006); The Aviator (2004); Gangs of New York (2002);
Bringing Out the Dead (1999); My Voyage to Italy (1999); Kundun (1997); Grace of My Heart
(1996); Casino (1995); The Age of Innocence (1993); Cape Fear (1991); Goodfellas (1990); The
Last Temptation of Christ (1988); The Color of Money (1986); After Hours (1985); The King of
Comedy (1982); Raging Bull (1980); Woodstock (1970); Who’s That Knocking at My Door?
(1967); Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1966)

References
Debruge, Peter. “Thelma Schoonmaker.” Daily Variety, July 31, 2007: A34.
Schoonmaker, Thelma.” Current Biography 58(3), March 1997: 43. Academic Search Complete,
EBSCOhost.

795
Scorsese, Martin

Talty, S. “Invisible Woman.” American Film 16(9), September 1991: 42. Academic Search Com-
plete, EBSCOhost.

—Tinamarie Vella

SCORSESE, MARTIN. While his name is synonymous with Italian American New
York culture, Martin Scorsese’s impact reaches beyond the boundaries of the Big
Apple, as his directorial portfolio contains biographical and historical pieces that
explore complex figures and groups as diverse as the Dalai Lama, Howard Hughes,
Bob Dylan, the American Mafia, Jake La Motta, and Jesus Christ.
Growing up in New York City, Scorsese’s love for film grew out of necessity, as
asthma kept him from enjoying most outdoor activities. He attributes his education
to film and television, as his parents kept no books or magazines around the house
(AFI, 2000). Living in Italian American neighborhoods, Scorsese experienced a stark
contrast between authority figures—wise guys and Catholic priests. Interestingly, as
he grew up, Scorsese, although drawn toward the wise guys, thought seriously about
becoming a priest. Though he obviously joined neither group, his fascination with
both shines through in his films.
Scorsese went to college at New York University, working under Professor Haig
Manoogian (Kelly, 1980). It was at NYU that his career as a writer/director really
began. While there, he produced three short pieces: What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing
in a Place Like This? (1963), It’s Not Just You Murray! (1964), and The Big Shave
(1967). His first feature film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1967), also made
while he was studying at NYU, explores personal struggles with spirituality and Italian
American misogyny—themes that would become paramount in his later work. Scorsese
earned an MFA in film and taught at NYU in the late 1960s, as the turmoil of the war
in Vietnam came to a head. He made his antiwar sentiments known in his films, most
notably in The Big Shave (1967), also titled Viet ’67, which depicts a man shaving his face
until it is a bloody mess. He also directed his first documentary of note during this period,
Street Scenes (1970), which chronicles antiwar rallies in Washington, D.C., and New York
City.
The success of Who’s That Knocking at My Door? inspired Scorsese to move to
Hollywood, where he worked with influential and innovative filmmakers such as
Roger Corman and John Cassavetes. It was Corman who took a chance on Scorsese,
hiring him to direct his first Hollywood film, Boxcar Bertha (1972). Dissatisfied with
the original treatment for the picture, which did not fit well with his own cinematic
style, Scorsese altered the script significantly, adding a fast-talking New York City
con man and heightening the metaphor of the male protagonist as a Christlike figure
(LoBrutto, 2008). Even with these changes, Boxcar Bertha was unsuccessful, and Scors-
ese returned to his urban roots with a follow-up to Who’s That Knocking at My Door?
called Mean Streets (1973). Like his previous neighborhood films, this picture probed
Italian American male camaraderie in Little Italy. While his early films are all woven
through with ethical threads, Mean Streets went so far as to depict the Catholic Church
as an ever-watchful, moral specter hanging over the heads of its wise-guy characters.

796
 Scorsese, Martin

The film met with critical acclaim,

and its gritty portrayal of small-
time, neighborhood criminals
stood in marked contrast to the
spectacle of Francis Ford Coppo-
la’s Godfather, which was released
around the same time.
Capitalizing on the success of
Mean Streets, Scorsese was able to
choose his next project, the road
story Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
(1974). Though it departed from
the avant-garde style Scorsese was
developing, the picture was very well
received, earning an Oscar for Ellen
Burstyn and inspiring a spin-off tele-
vision sitcom. For Scorsese, the pic-
ture laid the groundwork for an
ambitious run of experimental pro-
ductions in the late 1970s and early
1980s that spanned a range of gen-
res: documentary, musical, biogra-
phy, comedy, and neo-noir thriller.
Perhaps the two most notable
films of Scorsese’s early period in
Hollywood are Taxi Driver
(1976) and Raging Bull (1980),
both of which served as profile
pieces that follow their protago- Film director Martin Scorsese gestures during a news
nists (each played brilliantly by conference in Rome to promote his movie New York, New
Robert De Niro) as they spiral York, on October 14, 1977. (AP/Wide World Photos)
down into an abyss of brutal and
perverse self-destruction. De Niro began working with Scorsese on Mean Streets, and
would star in a number of his most successful pictures, becoming a kind of filmic
alter ego for the director. In Taxi Driver, Scorsese explored the role of an isolationist
Vietnam veteran working in New York City, creating a dark and violent world of
vigilantism based on the growing disdain for what the lead character, Travis Bickle,
perceives as a morally reprehensible city-of-the-night.
After directing the post–World War II musical New York, New York (1977), Scorsese
went on to direct two feature-length documentaries in 1978 (American Boy: A Profile of
Steven Prince and The Last Waltz) before he made what many consider his best film,
Raging Bull, an unsympathetic biopic about boxer Jake La Motta. The coarse black-
and-white feature was nominated for a slew of Oscars, including those for Best Picture,
which went to Robert Redford’s Ordinary People; Best Director, an award that would

797
Scorsese, Martin

elude Scorsese until 2006 when he made The Departed; and Best Actor, which went to
De Niro for his disturbingly powerful portrayal of La Motta.
After completing the dark comedy The King of Comedy (1982), which again took
place in New York City with the now customary Robert De Niro in the lead role,
Scorsese made the little-known piece After Hours (1985) and another interesting but
limited character study, The Color of Money (1986). Star Paul Newman won his only
Best Actor award for his portrayal of the older incarnation of “Fast Eddie” Felson, a
role he had made famous in Robert Rossen’s dazzling 1961 film The Hustler.
By the late 1980s, Scorsese had earned a reputation for gratuitous violence and lan-
guage, but his most controversial picture was yet to come. The Last Temptation of
Christ (1988) was an adaptation of the widely banned book of the same name by Nikos
Kazantzakis. Departing from the Biblical portrayal of the life of Jesus Christ, the story
suggests that the Messiah gave into the temptation of being married to and having chil-
dren with Mary Magdalene. Despite its unfavorable reception by many religious
groups, the film earned Scorsese his second Best Director Academy Award nomination.
After directing a short piece in New York Stories (1989) and a short documentary on
Giorgio Armani called Made in Milan (1990), Scorsese returned to his natural élan
with Goodfellas (1990). Based on the nonfiction book Wiseguy, by Nicholas Pileggi, this
candid, innovative, and more Coppolaesque exploration of the mob is among Scorsese’s
most critically acclaimed films.
During the 1990s, Scorsese showed how diverse his examinations of culture and his-
tory could be when he made the noir thriller Cape Fear (1991) and the nineteenth-
century period piece The Age of Innocence (1993). In 1995, he directed the companion
piece to Goodfellas, an adaptation of another nonfiction Nicholas Pileggi book by the
same name, Casino. While some portions of both films are fictionalized, Scorsese mixes
enough actual events into these pictures to expose the wide-ranging presence of under-
world crime organizations in America. Toward the end of the 1990s, Scorsese directed
two spiritual exploration pieces, Kundun (1997) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999).
The first was a biopic of the Dalai Lama, chronicling his childhood, spiritual journey,
and exile to India in 1959. Bringing Out the Dead was a more personal story about a para-
medic in Manhattan who must deal with visions of those who have died under his care.
Although a number of Scorsese’s early films are based on true stories, his twenty-
first-century offerings stand out as touchstones of his work as an historian. In Gangs
of New York (2002), which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems to have replaced
the aging De Niro as Scorsese’s alter ego, he meticulously recreated the Five Points area
of 1860s New York City and the gang culture and anti-immigrant sensibilities that
existed there. He then directed two documentary histories: an episode for the PBS
series The Blues (2003) and Lady by the Sea: The Statue of Liberty (2004). His next pic-
ture, a biopic about Howard Hughes called The Aviator (2004), with DiCaprio in the
lead role, offered audiences a provocative portrait of the iconic figure’s entrepreneurial
endeavors, film career, and debilitating personal struggles. Scorsese followed The Avia-
tor with another biographical documentary, No Direction Home, which explores the life
of Bob Dylan and is, perhaps, the most revealing work about the notoriously circum-
spect performer.

798
 Scott, Ridley

Scorsese’s most recent feature film, The Departed (2006), was a remake of the Hong
Kong crime thriller Mou gaan dou (2002). Set in Boston and featuring an A-list ensem-
ble cast, including DiCaprio, The Departed not only won the Oscar for Best Picture,
but finally garnered him the long elusive Best Director Academy Award. Since The
Departed, Scorsese has made the spoof short The Key to Reserva (2007), in which he
is supposed to be directing a lost Alfred Hitchcock film. His last picture to be released
was the documentary Shine a Light (2008), which chronicled the career of the Rolling
Stones and featured concert footage from the band’s 2006 tour.
During his long cinematic career, Scorsese has never been afraid to take chances
with his films. Although his work has been of uneven quality, his successes have defined
him as one of America’s most important directors.

Selected Filmography
Shutter Island (2010); The Departed (2006); The Aviator (2004); Gangs of New York (2002);
Bringing Out the Dead (1999); Kundun (1997); Casino (1995); The Age of Innocence (1993);
Cape Fear (1991); Goodfellas (1990); The Last Temptation of Christ (1988); The Color of Money
(1986); After Hours (1984); The King of Comedy (1982); Raging Bull (1980); The Last Waltz
(1978); New York, New York (1977); Taxi Driver (1976); Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
(1974); Mean Streets (1973); Boxcar Bertha (1972); Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1967)

References
Bliss, Michael. Martin Scorsese and Michael Cimino. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985.
Emery, Robert J. The Directors: Martin Scorsese. Los Angeles: American Film Institute (AFI),
WinStar Productions. DVD. 2000.
Friedman, Lawrence S. The Cinema of Martin Scorsese. New York: Continuum, 1998.
Kelly, Mary Pat. Martin Scorsese: The First Decade. Pleasantville, NY: Redgrave, 1980.
LoBrutto, Vincent. Martin Scorsese: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008.

—Adam Dean

SCOTT, RIDLEY. Ridley Scott, born on November 30, 1937, has been one of the
most successful directors of large-scale films, combining aesthetics with the needs of the
marketplace. Although he has made horror, crime, political, war, and romantic films,
he is best known for his science fiction films Alien and Blade Runner, and epics such as
Gladiator (2000). Most of Scott’s films, which feature distinctive cinematography and pro-
duction design, find his protagonists coping with unusual, often violent circumstances.
Scott studied graphic design, advertising, and filmmaking at London’s Royal
College of Art. While there he made a short film, Boy and a Bicycle (1965), starring his
father and younger brother, future director Tony Scott. After studying design with a
New York advertising agency, Scott returned to London as a set designer for the BBC.
He also directed a handful of television episodes for programs such as Z Cars. Beginning
in 1968, Scott made hundreds of television commercials, eventually forming Ridley Scott

799
Scott, Ridley

Associates, which made thousands more. Scott’s commercials have a recognizable style,
especially in regard to his use of atmospheric lighting. He continued making commercials
after becoming a film director; perhaps the most famous of these is one he made for Apple
computers inspired by George Orwell’s 1984.
Scott’s successful advertising work led to his film career, beginning with The Duel-
lists (1977). Based on a Joseph Conrad short story, the costume drama depicts a series
of duels between two military officers (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel). Named
the best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival, The Duellists is notable for its beauti-
ful cinematography—Frank Tidy shot the film—recalling landscapes in French paint-
ings produced during the Napoleonic era.
Scott moved quickly from this relatively modest beginning to making two of his most
popular and critically acclaimed films. Alien (1979) follows the crew of the commercial
spaceship Nostromo, named after the Joseph Conrad title, which lands on a distant planet
where the crew members discover the hive of a strange creature. Seemingly safely back
aboard the ship, their calm is shockingly interrupted when a small, angry creature erupts
from the stomach of one of the crewmen (John Hurt). Soon, a large, even angrier mon-
ster is stalking the crew throughout the labyrinthine ship. Alien, which won an Academy
Award for its groundbreaking special effects, became a franchise, with the subsequent
entries helmed by other directors. It also introduced Ripley—and Sigourney Weaver—
as one of the strongest and most admired female characters in film history.
Blade Runner (1982), adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?, blends the conventions of science fiction and film noir. Set in a futuristic
Los Angeles, Blade Runner focuses on the efforts of Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) to track
down four fugitive replicants—(very) humanlike robots—led by the violent Roy Batty
(Rutger Hauer). Production design is often the central element of Scott’s films, and Blade
Runner is no exception. Designer Lawrence G. Paull created a dark, dank, bleak cityscape,
both in homage to the film’s noir antecedents and also to underscore the extreme dangers
faced by Deckard. This Los Angeles—so full of decay one can almost smell the rot waft-
ing off the screen—plays on viewers’ fears of an unknown future and the possibility that
technology may backfire.
Scott’s directorial career has been uneven, and his films immediately after Blade Runner
were less than successful. Legend (1985), a medieval sword-and-sorcery adventure starring
Tom Cruise, was a major box-office disappointment. Although lovely to look at, its story,
featuring a princess, elves, and unicorns, is spare and unoriginal. Similarly, although Some-
one to Watch over Me (1987), which focuses on a love triangle among a New York police-
man (Tom Berenger), his working-class wife (Lorraine Bracco), and a sophisticated heiress
(Mimi Rogers), looks splendid, it did not achieve the emotional impact Scott sought to
impart. He followed the film with an even darker cop tale, Black Rain (1989), which
starred Michael Douglas as a New York police detective pursuing a yakuza boss (Yusaku
Matsuda) in Japan. Although Scott seemed sincere in his attempts to explore cultural
differences, some found Black Rain jingoistic—perhaps because it too often slipped into
being little more than a slick thriller whose characters are merely caricatures.
With the critical and commercial success of Thelma and Louise (1991), Scott finally
proved he could make an effective contemporary drama. Friends Thelma (Geena

800
 Scott, Ridley

Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) decide to take a break from the men (Chris
McDonald and Michael Madsen) in their lives by going on the road in the American
Southwest. After Louise kills a would-be rapist, the two, soon joined by a young
criminal (Brad Pitt), are on the run from the law. With an Academy Award–winning
screenplay by Callie Khouri, Thelma and Louise broke new ground as an entertaining,
violent female buddy/road film. Because of his emphasis on visual style, Scott
often does not get sufficient credit for his direction of actors, but in Thelma and Louise
he was able to elicit excellent performances from Davis, Sarandon, Pitt, and, as a
sympathetic cop, Harvey Keitel. The film’s ending, with the women gleefully commit-
ting suicide, provoked the most controversy associated with any Scott film, especially
among feminist film critics, who found the film’s suggestion that the only way for
women to overcome patriarchal oppression is either to act just like men or to kill
themselves.
True to form, Scott followed the successful Thelma and Louise with a series of
uninspired offerings. 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), with Gérard Depardieu as
Christopher Columbus, is considered by many to be Scott’s weakest film. White Squall
(1996), which follows a no-nonsense sea captain (Jeff Bridges) as he leads a group of
prep school boys on a fateful schooner journey, was ignored by audiences. G. I. Jane
(1997), in which a young woman (Demi Moore) becomes the first female participant
in the Navy SEAL program, proved dull and heavy-handed in its attempt to ask serious
questions about the issue of women in combat.
Once again, though, Scott rebounded from his slump with a big—his biggest—
box-office success, Gladiator, which demonstrated that the talented director possessed
a deft hand in shaping large-scale historical epics. Maximus (Russell Crowe) is a gen-
eral in the Roman army and close advisor to Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard
Harris). When the emperor dies and is replaced by his devious son, Commodus
(Joaquin Phoenix), Maximus is sentenced to be executed; he escapes, is captured by slave
traders, and becomes a gladiator. The film portrays its protagonist, Maximus, as a far
more complex figure than have the vast majority of action spectacles, prompting compar-
isons between Gladiator and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). Indeed, Maximus joins
Ripley and Deckard—but probably not Thelma and Louise—in the growing line of Scott
characters whose lives are disrupted by violent circumstances but who bear up and
become stronger individuals for their trouble. A critical and box-office success, Gladiator
earned $187 million in American theaters and won five Academy Awards, including those
for Best Picture and Best Actor.
Scott has made some odd choices during his long career, none more unusual than
following the triumph of Gladiator with a sequel to an earlier Oscar-winning film
made by another director. Hannibal (2001) continues the story of the relationship
between serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and FBI agent Clarice Star-
ling (Julianne Moore), first seen in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs
(1991), in which Jodie Foster played Starling. Lecter resurfaces after a decade in hiding
to torment Starling, while one of his former victims (Gary Oldman) plots revenge.
Despite lukewarm reviews, with most critics considering it inferior to its predecessor,
Hannibal did surprisingly well at the box office.

801
Scott, Ridley

Critics and audiences alike responded with enthusiasm to Black Hawk Down (2001),
which was based on real-life events that occurred in 1993 when an elite team of American
soldiers was dropped into Somalia with orders to kidnap two lieutenants of a vicious war-
lord, only to become engaged in a lengthy, and costly, battle. Perhaps Scott’s grittiest film,
Black Hawk Down successfully conveys the chaos of war; it also has the feel of the countless
combat-crew-as-heroic-band-of-brothers-oriented WWII films that preceded it, even
though it is obviously not set during that earlier conflict. Matchstick Men (2003) was
Scott’s first comedy and his smallest-scale film. Neurotic con man Roy (Nicolas Cage) is
so overcome by panic attacks that he resists the pleas of his partner (Sam Rockwell) to pull
off the “big job.” Everything changes when Angela (Alison Lohman), the daughter Roy has
never met, enters the picture. Regardless of their scale, the best of Scott’s films are always
character studies, and Matchstick Men works as a charming, offbeat look at three quite
different, yet equally quirky characters.
Scott returned to epics with Kingdom of Heaven (2005). During the crusades of the
twelfth century, a knight (Liam Neeson) informs a blacksmith (Orlando Bloom) that
he is the young man’s father and convinces him to accompany the knight’s forces to
Jerusalem. Reviewers compared Kingdom of Heaven unfavorably to Gladiator, and the
audience response was tepid. The 145-minute theatrical version suffered from the
inclusion of an overwhelming number of characters and situations that were not prop-
erly developed; a problem resolved, somewhat, in the 194-minute director’s cut.
Scott reunited with Crowe for another modest film, the romantic comedy A Good
Year (2006), in which a ruthless British financial trader (Crowe) inherits a Provençal
vineyard from his uncle (Albert Finney) and discovers his humanity with the help of
a local café owner (Marion Cotillard). This pleasant diversion was followed by Scott’s
most brutally violent film, American Gangster (2007), in which a Harlem drug lord
(Denzel Washington) and an ambitious cop (Russell Crowe again) begin as adversaries
only to discover that, ironically, they have much in common. In addition to offering
two powerful performances, American Gangster recalled the murky morality tales that
marked 1960s New York.
Arriving at a time when audiences were demonstrating a pronounced indifference
to films related to the war in Iraq, Body of Lies (2008) was greeted with shrugs; it
may, however, be Scott’s most underrated film. Body of Lies is built around the contrast
between CIA agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stateside boss Ed Hoffman
(Russell Crowe again). While Ferris dodges bullets in the Middle East, paunchy Hoffman
barks orders into his cell phone while watching his daughter play soccer and eating junk
food. Such attention to detail and interest in character make Body of Lies much more than
a thriller about terrorism. The subsequent Scott-Crowe collaboration, Robin Hood
(2010), was a critical and commercial failure, dismissed, seemingly even before it was
released, as a warmed-over reimagining of Gladiator.
In 1995, Scott and his brother formed Scott Free Productions, through which they
have been able to produce not only their own films, but those of others, most notably
Andrew Dominick’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).
The company has also involved itself in producing television series, the most recent,
the popular Julianna Margulies vehicle, The Good Wife—another strong female

802
 Sinatra, Frank

character, this one forced to negotiate the shoals of marital betrayal and the enormous
pressures of high-priced criminal law. Scott became Sir Ridley in 2003 when he was
knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions to the British film industry.
Consistently drawn to explorations of human ambiguity—strength expressed in the
midst of horrible weakness—Scott has demonstrated that he is much more than just a
Cecil B. DeMille-like showman interested only in ostentatious spectacle. Sometimes
dismissed as a director more concerned with the look of his films than he is with their
content, Scott has nonetheless added a great deal to the cinematic conversation.
See also: Blade Runner; Gladiator; Science Fiction Film, The; Thelma and Louise

Selected Filmography
Robin Hood (2010); Body of Lies (2008); American Gangster (2007); A Good Year (2006); King-
dom of Heaven (2005); Matchstick Men (2003); Black Hawk Down (2001); Hannibal (2001);
Gladiator (2000); G.I. Jane (1997); White Squall (1996); 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992);
Thelma and Louise (1991); Black Rain (1989/I); Someone to Watch Over Me (1987); Legend
(1985); Blade Runner (1982); Alien (1979); The Duellists (1977)

References
Clarke, James. Ridley Scott. London: Virgin, 2002.
Knapp, Laurence F., and Andrea F. Kulas, eds. Ridley Scott: Interviews. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2005.
Raw, Lawrence. The Ridley Scott Encyclopedia. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009.
Sammon, Paul. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. New York: HarperPrism, 1996.

—Michael Adams

SINATRA, FRANK. One of the icons of twentieth-century American pop culture,

Francis Albert Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Of
Italian American descent, he was both a gifted singer and a talented actor who attracted
legions of fans and received critical acclaim during a career that remained vital from
the 1940s until his death in 1998.
Sinatra’s earliest film roles were largely cameos or thinly disguised versions of him-
self, and were little more than attempts to cash in on his notoriety as a singer and teen
idol. This began to change with his role as Clarence Doolittle in the 1945 film Anchors
Aweigh. Sinatra plays a naive and virginal sailor who, along with the self-professed
“wolf ” Joseph Brady (Gene Kelly), is granted a five-day leave—in Hollywood of all
places. The role, like many of this early period in his career, found Sinatra playing
the wide-eyed, rail-thin kid learning to find love, expressing a sense of longing and
wistfulness through song, and sometimes dance. In On the Town—which again starred
Kelly, who also co-directed—Sinatra plays Chip, a rube from Peoria who is awestruck
by the sights and sounds of New York City. Hints of the dramatic, and often socially
conscious roles that were to come, can be seen in The House I Live In, a 10-minute

803
Sinatra, Frank

short in which Sinatra, playing

himself, teaches a group of ruffi-
ans a lesson about religious toler-
ance and the significance of the
defeat of the Nazis in World
War II; Sinatra won an Honorary
Academy Award for his perfor-
mance.
The arrival of the 1950s saw
near-ruin for Sinatra in both his
singing and acting careers. While
a throat ailment put his singing
career in jeopardy—and ended
his contract with Columbia
records—Sinatra’s own actions
almost derailed his acting career.
Bad publicity from an extramar-
ital affair with Ava Gardner and
declarations of his disdain for act-
ing, as well as an off-color joke he
made about a horse-riding acci-
dent involving studio head Louis
B. Mayer, resulted in the termina-
tion of Sinatra’s contract with
Frank Sinatra as Pfc. Angelo Maggio in a scene from the 1953 MGM. Following a period in
film From Here to Eternity. Sinatra received an Academy which he would dabble in radio
Award for Best Supporting Actor in the film. (AP/Wide and television, Sinatra’s acting
World Photos) career was reborn in 1953 when
he accepted the role—after being
required to audition—of Pvt. Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity. The film starred
Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, and Montgomery Clift, who took Sinatra under his
wing, becoming his de facto acting coach. Sinatra earned an Oscar for his supporting
performance as a world-weary soldier who understands the importance of loyalty to
his friends and family. During the next 15 years, Sinatra would accept a number of
roles in what turned out to be extremely popular and critically significant films. Per-
haps the most important of these came in 1962, when Sinatra played Major Ben
Marco in The Manchurian Candidate, a Cold War political thriller that critic Greil
Marcus has called a quintessential American film that ranks alongside Citizen Kane
and The Godfather (Marcus, 1989).
As Sinatra’s popularity as a singer grew to unprecedented heights, he emerged as the
“Chairman of the Board” of the so-called “Rat Pack,” a group of performers including
Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop who became as
well known for their onstage antics as they were for their connections to famous
politicians—including the Kennedys—and Mafia bosses. Sinatra would ultimately

804
 Singleton, John

transpose his musical stage role as Chairman of the Board onto the big screen, leading
his crew in lighthearted romps such as Ocean’s Eleven (1960) and Robin and the Seven
Hoods (1965).
Significantly, although Sinatra played a wide range of parts during his acting
career, his place in American cinema was particularly important because of the Italian
American characters he played. Although in some instances Sinatra did play characters
on the wrong side of the law, most of his performances were far removed from the
stereotypical mafioso or mustached paisan restaurateur. Indeed, instead of reinforcing
the disturbing stereotypes of Italian Americans as criminal or cartoonish figures,
Sinatra used his popularity and influence as a musical and screen performer to enhance
the status of thousands of Americans who shared his ethnic heritage.
Frank Sinatra died on May 14, 1998, in Los Angeles.

References
Janosik, Mary Ann. “ ‘Do You Take Sinners Here?’ Family, Community Ritual, and the
Catholic Imagination in the Films of Frank Sinatra.” U.S. Catholic Historian 17(3), Summer
1999: 67–92.
Marcus, Greil. “The Last American Dream.” Threepenny Review 38, Summer 1989: 3–5.
Santopietro, Tom. Sinatra in Hollywood. New York St. Martin’s, 2008.

—Kenneth Shonk

SINGLETON, JOHN. John Singleton is an African American director, writer, and

producer living in Los Angeles. With his acclaimed debut film Boyz N’ the Hood
(1991), which he both wrote and directed, as well as subsequent films such as Poetic
Justice (1993) and Higher Learning (1995), Singleton soon reached a position as one
of the most prominent and respected black filmmakers of the 1990s.
The socially conscious, semiautobiographical Boyz N’ the Hood won many fans and
received a great deal of critical praise for its unflinching depiction of black youths
struggling in the ghettos of south central Los Angeles. The film’s significance was rec-
ognized with a 1991 New York Film Critics Circle award for Best New Director and
two Oscar nominations in 1992. It also helped initiate the sub-genre of “hood films.”
Even into the present day, Singleton continues his involvement with films that focus on
contentious aspects of the black experience in America, including the historical drama
Rosewood (1997) and the remake of the blaxploitation classic Shaft (2000). Over the
years, Singleton has occasionally departed from making social problem or message
films, including the Michael Jackson music video Remember the Time (1995) and the
action film 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003).
John Singleton was born on January 6, 1968, in Los Angeles. He grew up in pre-
dominantly black south central Los Angeles, a place of seemingly endless dramatic
potential that would inform each of his future works. Singleton wished to be a film-
maker from his childhood and thus steeped himself in the films and television shows
of the 1970s. His plans for involvement in the film industry, though, began to

805
Singleton, John

Director John Singleton poses for a portrait at the Television Guide Channel Studios on August 24,
2007 in Hollywood. (Getty Images)

materialize in his early twenties. It is during this time that he met his inspiration Spike
Lee; attended the University of Southern California Filmic Writing Program, where he
won two Jack Nicholson writing awards; and served an internship at Columbia Pic-
tures, which provided him the exposure necessary to secure a film deal for Boyz N’
the Hood while still a student at USC (Barboza, 2009).
From his start as a filmmaker, Singleton has consciously striven to bring a black cul-
tural presence to the film industry. One way he has achieved this end is by employing
ensemble casts primarily comprised of black actors. As part of this approach, he has
cast rappers and R&B singers in a number of his films. Ice Cube (Boyz N’ the Hood),
Tupac Shakur (Poetic Justice), Janet Jackson (Poetic Justice), and Tyrese Gibson (Baby
Boy, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and Four Brothers) have all figured prominently in his works.
He also infuses his soundtracks with rap and R&B music, further reinforcing his ties
to the black artistic community and providing his films with a contemporary urban
feel that is entirely in keeping with his settings.
Singleton’s works are populated with archetypes drawn from the black community
who represent different aspects of black thought and culture. These archetypes range
from characters espousing Black Nationalist views to unwitting Uncle Toms, adding
great tension to his films. Oftentimes, in fact, such tensions spring as much from
competing perspectives in the black community, including those defined by class
and gender, as they do from the problems still haunting black/white relations in
America. In this way, Singleton repeatedly examines issues involving race, including
the nature of black on black violence and separatism in films such as Boyz N’ the Hood
and Rosewood.

806
 Spielberg, Steven

Notions of duty and violence go hand-in-hand in many of Singleton’s films. In his

later films, such as Shaft, Baby Boy (2001), and Four Brothers (2005), Singleton focuses
on violence as a masculine, retributive force, featuring protagonists who are fueled by
righteous anger and a will to see justice meted out by any means necessary, including
murder. In fact, as one scholar contends, Singleton’s suggestion that murder may be a
credible way to fight injustice underscores a distrust of official forms of redress that
exists among some members of the black community (Massood, 2004). Given this
persistent thematic focus, then, several of Singleton’s films clearly advocate self-
sufficiency and militancy rather than legal mediation and nonviolence.
Currently, Singleton is taking part in the documentary Lost Forever and directing a
feature film, Luke Cage. Luke Cage focuses on a street smart, black superhero that suf-
fers an injustice at the hands of the police, acquires super powers, and becomes a hero
for hire, a story undoubtedly ripe for Singleton’s vision. Since 2005, the film has had
several tentative release dates, but it has yet to reach theaters.

Selected Filmography
Four Brothers (2005); 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003); Baby Boy (2001); Shaft (2000); Rosewood (1997);
Higher Learning (1995); Poetic Justice (1993); Boyz N’ the Hood (1991)

References
Barboza, Craigh, ed. John Singleton: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009.
Massood, Paula J. “From Homeboy to Baby Boy: Masculinity and Violence in the Films of John
Singleton.” In Schneider, Steven Jay. New Hollywood Violence. New York: University of
Manchester Press, 2004.
Singleton, John, and Veronica Chambers. Poetic Justice: Filmmaking South Central Style. New
York: Delta, 1993.
—Caleb Puckett

SPIELBERG, STEVEN. By the age of 35, Steven Spielberg, a self-proclaimed

“moviemaker,” became one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in the film indus-
try after producing 4 of the 10 most lucrative pictures ever made. He has consistently
created thoughtful, imaginative, and sometimes disturbing films since he started his
career in the 1950s.
Steven Allan Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on December 18, 1947, but
was largely raised in Haddonfield, New Jersey, Scottsdale, Arizona, and various loca-
tions in California. His father, Arnold, was a computer engineer and his mother, Leah
Adler (née Posner), a restaurateur and a concert pianist. While Spielberg was spending
the late 1950s and early 1960s in Scottsdale schools, his father allowed him to start
making home movies to help boost his confidence. After graduating from Arcadia
High School, Spielberg applied to some of the top film programs in the country, but
was rejected by all of them. He eventually enrolled at California State University, Long

807
Spielberg, Steven

Beach, near Los Angeles, as an

English major. As an ambitions
undergraduate, Spielberg took a
tour of Universal Studios, where
his dreams of becoming a film-
maker would soon be realized
when he signed a seven-year con-
tract with Universal in 1969.
Excited by both television and
movies from an early age, Spiel-
berg was particularly influenced
by Disney films. Frightened but
innocently moved by the “Night
on Bald Mountain” scene in Fan-
tasia, he realized that he wanted
to become a moviemaker. Years
later, he would use his childhood
fears as foundational elements in
many of his films. By the time
he was 12 years old, Spielberg
had become an expert at making
home movies and began to
expand his imaginative vision.
Starting his filmmaking career
in television, Spielberg began to
gain notoriety as an uncredited
Steven Spielberg, perhaps the most financially successful film- assistant editor on the popular
maker of all time. Spielberg has received international western Wagon Train (1957). He
acclaim and has had an incalculable effect on American popu- went on to direct short films and
lar culture. (AFP/Getty Images) television shows such as The Last
Gun (1959), Escape to Nowhere
(1961), and Amblin’ (1968), the
latter title subsequently becoming the name of his first production company. Other
television spots included Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969), Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery”
(1970), and Columbo: Murder by the Book (1971).
Spielberg made his directorial debut in feature films with The Sugarland Express
(1974), marking him as a rising star in the industry. It was his next directorial effort,
however, the iconic Jaws (1975), that brought him worldwide attention. Adapted from
Peter Benchley’s novel of the same title, the now-classic, Moby Dick-like tale of a mas-
sive, Great White shark that preys on innocent human victims not only grossed over
$100 million and initiated the tradition of the summer blockbuster, it kept thousand
of beachgoers out of the water during the summer of 1975. Spielberg continued to
showcase his talent with a story of alien invasion in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977), which brought him his first Best Director Oscar nomination. Enjoying the

808
 Spielberg, Steven

process of producing science fiction films, he went on to make Poltergeist (1982) and
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the latter picture garnering him a second Academy
Award nomination for Best Direction. He spent the remainder of the 1980s working
on what would become cinematic classics: the Indiana Jones series (Raiders of the Lost
Ark [1981]; Temple of Doom [1981]; and The Last Crusade [1989]); Gremlins (1984);
The Goonies (1985); An American Tail (1986); the Back to the Future trilogy; and the
literary adaptation The Color Purple (1985).
Spielberg spun off in a new direction in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he
tried his hand at producing animated films. He 1988, he made Who Framed Roger
Rabbit. He went on to work with Warner Bros., producing animated series such as
Tiny Toon Adventures (1990), Animaniacs (1993), and Pinky and the Brain (1995), as
well as the feature film The Land before Time (1988). Animation ultimately lead to ani-
matronics in the summer movie blockbuster Jurassic Park (1993), a cautionary tale
about the dangers of human attempts to control nature.
The 1990s would also mark the point at which Spielberg, along with colleagues
Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, created the enormously successful film studio
DreamWorks SKG. In 2004, Spielberg and company would create DreamWorks
Animation SKG in order to create, produce, and distribute animated features. Dream-
Works was sold in 2005 to Paramount Pictures for $1.6 billion, but Spielberg
remained connected to the studio. After entering into and then breaking off negotia-
tions with Universal Studios, DreamWorks agreed to a six-year, 30-picture deal with
the Walt Disney Company in early 2009.
Harkening back to the dramatic material he explored when he adapted The Color
Purple for the screen, Spielberg turned his attention to the subject of the Holocaust
in 1993 when he decided to make Schindler’s List. Embraced by critics and viewers
alike, this poignant, disturbing film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and gar-
nered Spielberg his first Academy Award as Best Director. (Two years later, in 1995, he
was honored by the American Film Institute with the Life Achievement Award for his
contribution to the motion picture industry.)
Spielberg’s war-related productions—such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), the mini-
series Band of Brothers (2001), Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima
(2006) (the latter two directed by Clint Eastwood)—have also had a major impact
on American audiences. In addition to these films, he has attracted a new audience of
younger, adventure-seeking viewers by producing and distributing films such as Trans-
formers (2007) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009).
Although Spielberg has been accused, rightly, of being unable to resist a turn toward
what may be described as redemptive sentimentality in even his most serious films—
Schindler’s List, Artificial Intelligence: AI, Minority Report, Saving Private Ryan—few
deny that he is an extraordinary and immensely popular filmmaker who continues to
inspire audiences with his unique brand of cinematic genius.
Selected Filmography
Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull (2008); War of the Worlds (2005); Catch Me If
You Can (2002); Minority Report (2002); Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001); Saving Private Ryan

809
Stone, Oliver

(1998); Amistad (1997); Schindler’s List (1993); Jurassic Park (1993); Hook (1991); Always
(1989); Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989); Empire of the Sun (1987); The Color Purple
(1985); Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984); E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982); Raiders
of the Lost Ark (1981); Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); Jaws (1975); Sugarland Express
(1974)

References
Brode, Douglas. The Films of Steven Spielberg. New York: Citadel, 1995.
Friedman, Lester D., and Brent Notbohm, eds. Steven Spielberg: Interviews. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2000.
Morris, Nigel. The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. London: Wallflower, 2007.
Powers, Tom, and Martha Cosgrove. Steven Spielberg (Just the Facts Biographies). Minneapolis:
Lerner, 2005.
Taylor, Philip, and Daniel O’Brien. Steven Spielberg: The Man, His Movies, & Their Meaning,
3rd ed. London: Continuum, 1999.

—Katherine Ann Fridirici

STONE, OLIVER. Oliver Stone is an American screenwriter and director best

known for his controversial historical dramas. His most critically acclaimed films are
those included in his “Vietnam Trilogy”: Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July
(1989), and Heaven and Earth (1993). He is the winner of three Academy Awards,
two for Best Director and one for his screenplay for Midnight Express (1978).
Stone was born in New York City, September 15, 1946. In 1967, he enlisted in the
U.S. Army, requesting combat duty. After serving one tour in Vietnam, he returned to
New York and enrolled at New York University, ultimately earning a bachelor’s degree
in film in 1971.
During his early career, he was primarily a writer, contributing film critiques to
publications such as the Village Voice. Although he directed some “B” horror films,
his breakthrough moment came when he wrote the screenplay for Midnight Express.
He went on to write screenplays for Conan the Barbarian (1982), Scarface (1983),
and Year of the Dragon (1985). These latter three scripts earned him a reputation
among some critics as a shallow-minded and exploitative writer. This changed, how-
ever, when he co-wrote (with Rick Boyle) and directed Salvador, a movie sympathetic
to the left-leaning revolutionaries of the Salvadoran Civil War. Although it was not a
box-office success, it did help define Stone as a more serious filmmaker.
In 1986, he directed Platoon, based on his experiences in Vietnam. A financial and
critical success, it won four Oscars, including those for Best Picture and Best Director.
Considered a serious antiwar film, Platoon was heralded for its realistic portrayal of
Vietnam. The second of Stone’s Vietnam films, Born on the Fourth of July, was a bio-
graphical treatment of the postwar experiences of Ron Kovic, a combatant who was
severely wounded in battle and left paralyzed. In Heaven and Earth, the last picture
in his trilogy, Stone explored the true story of a Vietnamese girl who marries an
American soldier and is brought by him to the United States.

810
 Stone, Oliver

With the release of Wall Street

in 1987, a picture in which he
excoriated the greed and excesses
of the Reagan era, Stone began
to be seen as one of America’s
most popular filmmakers; soon
after, however, he also was viewed
as one of the nation’s most con-
troversial “issue” filmmakers.
While Wall Street was well re-
ceived, Stone’s 1991 picture JFK,
although a box-office success,
was derided by critics and most
historians as a paranoid, conspira-
torial assessment of the Kennedy
assassination. Natural Born Killers
(1994), his attempt to satirize the
media’s exploitation of violence,
was criticized for being exces-
sively brutal and, ironically, for
glorifying violence instead of con-
demning it. And his attempt to
portray the disgraced Richard
Nixon as a complex, tragic figure Director Oliver Stone poses following an interview in New
in Nixon (1995), was ridiculed York in 1991. (AP/Wide World Photos)
by critics and largely ignored by
audiences.
For almost a decade, Stone turned away from making overtly political pictures, pro-
ducing a series of provocative films that did little to lift him back to cinematic promi-
nence. In 1997, for instance, he offered audiences a noir thriller, U Turn, an intriguing
film with a wonderful ensemble cast that was roundly rejected by both audiences and
critics. In 1999 he released On Any Given Sunday, a sports film that sought to expose
the darker side of American masculinity, but was hampered by a woefully miscast Al
Pacino as a professional football coach. And in 2004, stretching himself to his directo-
rial breaking point, he released his overlong historical epic Alexander (2004), which
was ridiculed for its homoeroticism even as Stone insisted that his portrayal was histor-
ically accurate.
W (2008) marked the return of Stone the political filmmaker. Released only weeks
before the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, the film attempted, as Nixon had, to
disclose the psychological complexity of a failed political figure. The film garnered sub-
stantial press coverage, sparked widespread dialogue, and received a good number of
very positive reviews.
Interestingly, while most critics agree that Stone is a talented filmmaker, many of
them accuse him of using his movies to rewrite history in order to express his own

811
Streisand, Barbra

distorted ideological vision. In response, Stone has either denied the charge—claiming,
for instance, that a film such as JFK represented solid historical research and forced a
government reexamination of the Warren Commission Report—or he has insisted,
rather incongruously, that he is merely a dramatist and thus his political “histories”
should not be subject to the same sort of vetting brought to bear on the work of aca-
demic scholars.

Selected Filmography
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010); W (2008); Alexander (2004); Any Given Sunday (1999);
U Turn (1997); Nixon (1995); Natural Born Killers (1994); Heaven and Earth (1993); JFK
(1991); The Doors (1991); Born on the Fourth of July (1989); Talk Radio (1988); Wall Street
(1987); Platoon (1986); Salvador (1986); The Hand (1981)

References
Crowdus, Gary. “Personal Struggles and Political Issues: An Interview with Oliver Stone.” Cin-
easte 16(3), 1988.
“Oliver Stone Biography.” Filmmakers.com. http://www.filmmakers.com/artists/oliverstone/
biography/.
Silet, Charles L. P., ed. Oliver Stone: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

—Alan C. Abbott

STREISAND, BARBRA. Barbra Streisand is an American actor, director, singer,

composer, and political activist. Besides being one of Hollywood’s most successful per-
formers, she has earned the reputation for being among its most talented. Streisand is
also known for breaking down barriers for women in the cinematic and recording
industries, from changing traditional standards of beauty to becoming the first female
film director to receive the Kennedy Center Honors.
Barbara Joan Streisand was born on April 24, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York (she
dropped the “a” from her first name early in her career). After being turned down
by every major record label for being “too Jewish”—for having a nose that was too
prominent—Streisand started singing in a New York gay bar, the Lion Club, before
moving to venues such as Bon Soir. She eventually earned a reputation that landed
her guest spots on the nation’s biggest television shows, such as The Jack Paar Show
in 1961. In 1962, she made her Broadway debut in a supporting role as a homely sec-
retary in I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Streisand was singled out for her performance,
earning various awards and enough praise to convince Columbia Records to give her a
contract in 1962—as well as unprecedented creative control for a female recording
artist. Her self-titled first album appeared in 1964, earning Streisand two Grammy
awards (one for Album of the Year). She is currently the top-selling female recording
artist of all time (and second only to Elvis Presley for overall album sales). In the
1960s, she also created a series of critically acclaimed television specials.

812
 Streisand, Barbra

Always intent on becoming an

actor, in 1964 Streisand accepted
the role of legendary Jewish
comic Fanny Brice in the Broad-
way musical Funny Girl. The film
adaptation allowed Streisand to
make her cinematic debut in
1968—one of the most auspi-
cious in Hollywood’s history.
Her character’s first lines ad-
dressed the fact that she did not
look like Hollywood’s typical
leading lady: “Hello, Gorgeous.”
Gorgeous or not, the film made
her a bona fide star. She followed
with two more musicals: Hello
Dolly! (1969) and Vincente Min-
nelli’s On a Clear Day You Can
See Forever (1970).
Streisand’s first nonmusical
vehicle, The Owl and the Pussycat
(1970), altered her burgeoning
persona (as a wholesome musical
star) by casting her as a foul- Barbra Streisand poses after being crowned Miss Ziegfeld of
mouthed call girl. Peter Bogdano- 1965 at the Ziegfeld Club Ball at New York’s Waldorf Astoria
vich then provided Streisand with Hotel in 1964. (AP/Wide World Photos)
another nonsinging role in his
homage to Howard Hawks’s
Bringing Up Baby (1938), What’s Up, Doc? (1972). The farce was a blockbuster success
and cemented Streisand’s status as a box-office titan. She went on to star as the bookish
and outspoken Katie Morosky opposite Robert Redford’s big-man-on-campus
Hubbell Gardner in the romantic classic The Way We Were (1973). After a couple of
forgettable, though profitable, films (For Pete’s Sake [1974] and Funny Lady [1975]),
Streisand decided to put her own spin on a Hollywood classic with her rendition of
A Star Is Born (1976). In the film, Streisand plays Esther Hoffman, an up-and-
coming singer who meets, and falls in love with, an established rocker (Kris Kristofferson)
whose career is on the decline. The film was a box-office smash, as was its soundtrack.
Streisand composed the music for the film’s love theme, “Evergreen.”
In 1983, Streisand became the first woman in Hollywood to direct, star in, write,
and produce a film when she released Yentl, a project she had worked on for 15 years.
She adapted the narrative about an orphaned Jewish girl who poses as a man in order to
study Torah (rather than simply marry) from a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Although the film is technically a musical, the songs are reflections of Yentl’s inner
thoughts, and thus are all sung by Streisand.

813
Sturges, John

After her dramatic turn as the high-class prostitute verging on madness in Nuts
(1987), Streisand returned to directing with The Prince of Tides (1991), the story of a
troubled Southern family that unfolds as Tom (Nick Nolte) falls in love with his suici-
dal sister’s therapist (Streisand). Adapted from Pat Conroy’s novel of the same name,
the film was a critical and commercial success, garnering multiple nominations and
awards, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture—though Streisand
herself was snubbed. Several critics called Streisand narcissistic for performing in her
own films—even though male stars such as Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood would
do the same—and implied that she was miscast as an attractive therapist.
Nevertheless, Streisand cast herself in her third directorial feature, The Mirror Has Two
Faces (1996), though here she plays a frumpy, unattractive Columbia professor, Rose,
who meets an attractive man (Jeff Bridges), who has sworn off beautiful women and is
looking for a companion. The film is notable for reinvigorating the career of Lauren
Bacall (who played Rose’s mother). After almost a decade away from the big screen, Strei-
sand returned as Rozalin Focker, a sex therapist and mother in Meet the Fockers (2004).
Streisand has won two Academy Awards; the first in 1968 for Best Actress in Funny
Girl (which she shared with Katharine Hepburn) and the second as the composer of
“Evergreen” in 1976. She was nominated for her performance in The Way We Were
and for the music of The Mirror Has Two Faces. She has earned 3 Emmy Awards,
10 Grammies, and 10 Golden Globes (more than any other artist). Streisand has also
been presented France’s Legion of Honour and been named a Commander of the
Order of Arts and Letters by that nation. Through her Barwood production company,
Streisand oversees film and television productions that foster awareness of social issues;
and her Streisand Foundation is an active force for human and civil rights, environ-
mental protection, AIDS research, and issues of women’s health.

Selected Filmography
Little Fockers (2010); Meet the Fockers (2004); The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996); The Prince of
Tides (1991); Nuts (1987); Yentl (1983); All Night Long (1981); The Main Event (1979); A Star
Is Born (1976); Funny Lady (1975); For Pete’s Sake (1974); The Way We Were (1973); Up the
Sandbox (1972); What’s Up, Doc? (1972); The Owl and the Pussycat (1970); On a Clear Day
You Can See Forever (1970); Hello, Dolly! (1969); Funny Girl (1968)

References
Riese, Randall. Her Name Is Barbra: An Intimate Portrait of the Real Barbra Streisand. New York:
Birch Books, 1993.
Winnert, Derek. Barbra Streisand: Quote Unquote. New York: Crescent, 1996.
—Kyle Stevens

STURGES, JOHN. In a certain sense, the legendary films that John Eliot Sturges
(born January 3, 1911) directed—including Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Gunfight
at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Great Escape

814
 Sturges, John

(1963)—eclipsed his career. Indeed, sifting the scholarly literature about Hollywood’s
“forgotten” maestro of big action movies yields barely more than a modicum of infor-
mation. Although many books about John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock,
Sam Peckinpah, and Stanley Kubrick have appeared, only one has been written about
Sturges. Sturges’s biggest collaborators, producer Walter Mirisch and assistant pro-
ducer Robert Relyea, have contributed their memories of him, but these qualify more
as peripheral than definitive information. Nevertheless, Sturges left behind a body of
films that commands respect and critical recognition. Acknowledged as a specialist in
big event movies about men in life-and-death predicaments, Sturges and his work lie
concealed like a treasure beneath the shifting sands of film scholarship. He wrote no
autobiography, and he did not conclude his life on the lecture circuit discussing his
films. Figuratively, he vanished at sea doing what he enjoyed most, fishing. Shortly
after finishing his last film, The Eagle Has Landed, in 1977, he turned into the “old
man and the sea,” effectively living the life of a recluse.
Sturges’s career unfolded in three phases. First, he worked as a contract director at
Columbia and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Second, he became an independent, produc-
ing and directing films that the Mirisch brothers (Walter, Marvin, and Harold)
released through United Artists. Third, after the expensive failure of The Hallelujah
Trail (1965), he worked as a freelancer for major producers. Sturges learned his craft
at Columbia and honed it at MGM. Before he began directing movies at Columbia,
he served as an editor at RKO under George Stevens, John Ford, and Garson Kanin.
World War II erupted and Sturges entered the U.S. Army Air Corps. He produced
training films, and eventually co-directed the documentary Thunderbolt (1947), with
William Wyler, about the 1944 Italian campaign. During the war, Sturges rose to the
rank of captain.
The first movie Sturges directed at Columbia, The Man Who Dared (1946), a
remake of the 1935 mystery-thriller Circumstantial Evidence (1935), concerned a cru-
sading journalist investigating murder convictions based on flawed circumstantial evi-
dence. He made two more movies in 1946, Shadowed and Mr. Twilight. He wrote off
his Columbia pictures as “twelve day movies . . . about old ladies and dogs.” In 1949,
he made his first western, The Walking Hills. This modern-day Randolph Scott oater
focused on a group of greedy treasure seekers searching the desert for a lost wagon train
that had vanished with a fortune in gold. The Walking Hills ranked as Columbia’s big-
gest moneymaker of 1949. After making another contemporary western, The Capture,
for RKO, Sturges joined MGM, where he remained until 1960, helming a variety of
films with bigger budgets. He made biographies, such as The Magnificent Yankee
(1950), an adaptation of the Broadway play about the famous jurist Oliver Wendell
Holmes. He made Mystery Street, a police procedural with evocative film noir lighting
that foreshadowed the CBS-TV crime show CSI in its elaborate reconstruction of the
murder of a B-girl. Significantly, Sturges displayed his enlightened attitude toward
minorities when he cast Ricardo Montalban as Mystery Street’s Portuguese American
police lieutenant who headed up the investigation. He made his first and only musical,
Fast Company, in 1953, and demonstrated his knack with suspense thrillers in the
Barbara Stanwyck film Jeopardy (1953). He also demonstrated his logistical flair for

815
Sturges, John

staging big action scenes in the Civil War cavalry western Escape from Fort Bravo
(1953). Sturges’s first major movie, Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), a searing social-
consciousness indictment of racism in postwar America, garnered him an Oscar nom-
ination, his one and only, as Best Director.
Sturges found his niche in westerns. He made Backlash with Richard Widmark in
1956. MGM loaned him to Hal Wallis at Paramount, where he directed the box-
office blockbuster Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas
as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Critics praised Sturges for his choreography of the
title showdown. He then reunited with Wallis and Douglas on the suspenseful western
Last Train from Gun Hill (1959), about the rape of the hero’s Indian wife. Afterward,
he bailed out the troubled Ernest Hemingway fishing yarn The Old Man and the Sea
after High Noon director Fred Zinnemann abandoned it. Sturges’s last big MGM film
was the Frank Sinatra. World War II combat epic Never So Few. Sturges gave Steve
McQueen his big break when Sammy Davis Jr. left the production.
Sturges’s second phase began after he left MGM and signed on as a producer and
director with Walter Mirisch and United Artists. The Mirisch brothers sought to give
prestigious directors an opportunity to work without studio interference but with the
backing of United Artists. Sturges’s first project, The Magnificent Seven, benefited from
his casting of Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn as
gunslingers defending a small Mexican village from the depredations of ruthless ban-
dits, led by Eli Wallach. An exhilarating western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven
Samurai (1954), The Magnificent Seven has been cited as a model for the spaghetti
westerns of the 1960s, with their mercenary heroes. In and around the time he made
The Magnificent Seven, Sturges experimented with women’s pictures such as the James
Gould Cozzens bestseller By Love Possessed (1961), which starred Lana Turner, and
A Girl Named Tamiko (1962), featuring France Nuyen.
Sturges swung back into the saddle for Sergeants Three (1962), a Frank Sinatra and
Dean Martin western comedy remake of George Stevens’s Gunga Din (1939). The
1963 release of The Great Escape, about a prison-camp escape from a German concen-
tration camp by Allied prisoners, marked the zenith of his career. Nurtured for 11 years
before the Mirisches agreed to produce it, the film was recalled by Sturges as his most
personal project. Meanwhile, his adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s best-selling dooms-
day thriller The Satan Bug (1965), one of the first science fiction nail-biters about bio-
logical warfare, scored with European audiences. All the kudos and clout Sturges
acquired after The Great Escape collapsed, however, with the failures of the big-
budgeted western spoof The Hallelujah Trail and his revisionist Wyatt Earp versus
Ike Clanton epic Hour of the Gun (1967). After these failures, Surges and the Mirisch
brothers went their separate ways.
During his third phase, Sturges made a variety of films with different studios. He
directed the Alistair MacLean Cold War blockbuster Ice Station Zebra (1968), with
Rock Hudson, and helmed the NASA disaster epic Marooned, which anticipated Ron
Howard’s Apollo 13. Clint Eastwood invited him to helm Joe Kidd (1971), and Charles
Bronson requested that he supervise his spaghetti western The Valdez Horses (1973). In
1974, Sturges directed McQ, a Dirty Harry-cloned police-procedural-mystery about

816
 Sturges, Preston

stolen narcotics and corruption with John Wayne careening through Seattle in a Trans
Am. Sturges concluded his career with the international World War II thriller based on
Jack Higgins’s bestseller, The Eagle Has Landed (1977), which featured Michael Caine
and Donald Sutherland. This “what if ” action film depicted a top-secret assassination
attempt on Winston Churchill. Thereafter, Sturges devoted his time to films that never
materialized. He was preparing Das Boot, for instance, but dropped out of the production.
Sturges became one of the earliest directors to embrace CinemaScope. After Bad
Day at Black Rock, he never made a film that did not utilize wide-screen lenses. He
admitted a “definite like for low set-ups where there is something effective to shoot
against.” Although he began his career as an editor, Sturges printed most scenes on
the first take, relied on little editing, and indulged in panning shots and crane move-
ments. A past master at cultivating suspenseful situations and orchestrating complex
shoot-outs, Sturges died on August 18, 1992.

Selected Filmography
The Eagle Has Landed (1976); Joe Kidd (1972); Ice Station Zebra (1968); Hour of the Gun
(1967); The Great Escape (1963); The Magnificent Seven (1960); The Old Man and the Sea
(1958); Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957); Backlash (1956); Bad Day at Black Rock (1955);
Escape from Fort Bravo (1953); Fast Company (1953); The Magnificent Yankee (1950); Mystery
Street (1950); The Capture (1950); Walking Hills (1949); The Man Who Dared (1946)

References
Lovell, Glenn. Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2008.
Roberts, Van Thomas. “John Sturges and the Western Film.” Master’s thesis. University of
Mississippi, 1978.
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968. New York:
Dutton, 1968.

—Van Roberts

STURGES, PRESTON. Renowned for penning some of the most highly regarded
dialogue ever produced for American movies, Preston Sturges, born August 29,
1898, was the first writer to rise through the Hollywood studio ranks to become a
director, inspiring later figures such as John Huston and Billy Wilder, who followed
the same path. In a four-year blaze of glory he created seven classic comedies before
falling from the studios’ grace. Once trumpeted as a genius, one of the highest-paid
men in America, and one of the few directors besides Hitchcock and DeMille recog-
nized by the filmgoing public, he spent the last years of his life broke and neglected.
Possessing a “French point of humor expressed through an American vocabulary,”
thanks to a childhood divided between a cosmopolitan mother who dragged him
through the high culture dens of Europe and a beloved, stockbroker stepfather in

817
Sturges, Preston

Chicago, Sturges focused in most

of his films on the notion of suc-
cess in America—though skepti-
cal about how it is won, his
characters display a deathless
optimism and quintessentially
American entrepreneurial spirit.
Sturges first gained notoriety in
Hollywood by writing and selling a
script to Fox in return for sole credit
and a share of the film’s profits, both
unheard of in a system that assigned
multiple writers to a picture. The
Power and the Glory (1933) re-
counted the rise and fall of a rail-
road magnate (Spencer Tracy)
through flashbacks deployed in
chronologically asynchronous order,
mimicking the subjective order of
memory and ironically contrasting
contradictions between the past
and present. Sturges became a star
screenwriter for Paramount, where
he wrote Easy Living (1937), the first
true Sturges comedy—a tale of cir-
cumstance determining success
Preston Sturges, screenwriter, director, and producer, arrives when a fur coat falls on a working
at work on the set of his current production, June 5, 1942, girl—and the melodramatic ro-
on the motor scooter he uses for travel between studio and mance Remember the Night (1940),
home. (AP/Wide World Photos) in which a district attorney, in the
process of reforming a thief, ends
up becoming corrupt himself.
Determined to protect his work, Sturges offered to sell a script for a mere $10—on
the condition that he direct it. Paramount accepted, and The Great McGinty (1940)
became the first Hollywood film bearing the credit “Written and Directed by”; the pic-
ture earned Sturges the first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. A political
satire about a bum (Brian Donlevy) who uses a political party machine to rise to the
ranks of the governor’s mansion, only to be undone when he tries to go straight, it
defied the ideologies of both Horatio Alger and Frank Capra, suggesting that success
may depend on something other than virtue and hard work. Christmas in July
(1940), starring Dick Powell as an office boy duped into thinking he has won an adver-
tising contest, portrays an America where talent is validated only by one’s success in
business, itself a result of fortuitous circumstances.

818
 Sturges, Preston

The Lady Eve (1941), regarded by many as Sturges’s best film, is a screwball comedy that
stars Barbara Stanwyck as a cardsharp who twice romances millionaire ophiologist—an
expert on snakes and reptiles—Henry Fonda, the first time for love and money and
the second for vengeance. The film’s success provided Sturges with the industry clout
to make Sullivan’s Travels (1941). Shot as the country slowly emerged from the Great
Depression, and on the eve of its entry into World War II, the film is a self-reflexive
examination of Sturges’s attitudes on art and success. The narrative centers on the
experiences of a widely successful director (Joel McCrea) who makes frivolous com-
edies but yearns to create serious films. Disguising himself as a hobo, he sets out on
a cross-country trek in order to gather material for what he believes will be his cin-
ematic masterpiece. What he discovers, though, humbles him, and he realizes that
laughter can be the recipe that allows people to cope with a world that seems hope-
lessly out of control. He followed Sullivan’s Travels with The Palm Beach Story
(1942), a satirical celebration of the largesse of the rich. Featuring Claudette Colbert
as a married adventuress, the production was also a showcase for Sturges’s personal
company of performers, an eclectic collection of talented actors who appeared in many
of his films. The Great Moment (1944), a biopic of pioneering anesthesiologist William
Morton, bucked the genre’s usual pomposity by inserting comedic moments and
returning to the scrambled flashback technique of The Power and the Glory. Unfortu-
nately, the picture was clumsily edited by Paramount, and it turned out to be Sturges’s
first commercial failure.
Turning his attention to the war, Sturges made two community-based comedies
starring Eddie Bracken, both satires of small-town Americana at its most neurotic.
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) had Betty Hutton impregnated by an unknown
soldier departing for the front. A manic, tortuous, and warm-hearted satire of the
Nativity and the war effort, it was Sturges’s biggest hit and showcased his directorial
mastery of filming dialogue in fluid, unbroken takes and long tracking shots. Hail
the Conquering Hero (1944)—with Bracken as a rejected Marine who returns home
as the hero he actually is not—satirized mother and war hero worship and the
democratic irrationality of crowds.
Fed up with Paramount’s continuing interference, Sturges made the ill-fated deci-
sion to enter into a partnership with Howard Hughes. Casting silent comedian Harold
Lloyd in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947), Sturges used the inspiring final scenes of
Lloyd’s own The Freshman (1925) to open his picture. From there, the film went on to
examine the life of the character some 20 years later, as he copes with one stultifying
day after another functioning as a hopeless office drone and self-betrayer of his own
all-American go-getter persona. Hughes ruined the film’s chance of success by demand-
ing cuts with which Sturges did not agree, and the director decided to move on to
Twentieth Century-Fox. There he made Unfaithfully Yours (1948), which starred Rex
Harrison as a symphony conductor who becomes suspicious of his wife and has three
fantasies of revenge while conducting Rossini, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky. A sophisti-
cated black comedy about male paranoia, class anxiety, and the irony of base emotions
inspiring great art, the noirish, semiautobiographical film was a departure for Sturges

819
Sturges, Preston

and turned out to be another commercial failure. So too The Beautiful Blonde from
Bashful Bend (1949), a dispirited comic western that was little more than a vehicle
for Betty Grable.
Out of step with the studios’ artistically conservative postwar mood, Sturges moved
to France and directed his last film, The French They Are a Funny Race (1955), a gentle
study of the Anglo-Franco cultural divide. Sustained in his bleakest years by the belief
that he would eventually recapture the glory of his halcyon days in Hollywood,
Sturges, much like many of his characters, died on August 6, 1959, before that final
dream could be realized.

Selected Filmography
The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949); Unfaithfully Yours (1948); The Sin of Harold
Diddlebock (1947); The Great Moment (1944); Hail the Conquering Hero (1944); The Miracle
of Morgan’s Creek (1944); The Palm Beach Story (1942); Sullivan’s Travels (1941); The Lady
Eve (1941); Christmas in July (1940); The Great McGinty (1940)

References
Curtis, James. Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1982.
Farber, Manny. Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies. New York: Da Capo, 1998.
Harvey, James. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges. New York: Da Capo,
1987.
Jacobs, Diane. Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992.
—Ihsan Amanatullah

820
 v
T
TARANTINO, QUENTIN. Born March 27, 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, Quentin
Tarantino is the only American filmmaker (so far) who has devoted himself exclusively
to the nature of American violence as filtered through America’s media. Essentially a
film critic with a camera, Tarantino has positioned himself atop the growing pile of
American independent filmmakers who have found success with audiences and critics
alike.
After spending many years working in a Los Angeles area video store, and even
more years watching and assimilating movies and television into his bloodstream,
Tarantino debuted most auspiciously with Reservoir Dogs in 1992. The smart dia-
logue, precision casting, and iconographic depictions of violence separated this film
from the rest of the pack. Hungry for more Tarantino, Hollywood turned two of
his scripts—True Romance and Natural Born Killers (which was drastically rewritten)—
into high-profile films for which he received as much attention as their respective
directors, Tony Scott and Oliver Stone. The release of Pulp Fiction, however, rocketed
Tarantino into superstardom. After winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Pulp Fiction
became a critical favorite (even earning the adoration of those same critics who
dismissed Reservoir Dogs as too violent), found a wide audience, revitalized the career
of 1970s star John Travolta, and redirected the career of 1980s star Bruce Willis.
The question remains whether or not Tarantino (like Hawks, Kubrick, Godard, or
anyone else he’s been compared to) can find success outside this particular genre. As
with Scorsese, the most unfortunate aspect of Tarantino’s success is the plethora
of talentless imitators who will follow. “Far from succumbing to easy cynicism,
Tarantino achieves the remarkable feat of remaining a genre purist even as his films
critique, embarrass, and crossbreed genre” (Gavin Smith, Film Comment, July-
August 1994).

Selected Filmography
Inglourious Basterds (2009); Sin City (2005); Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004); Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003);
Jackie Brown (1997); Pulp Fiction (1994); Reservoir Dogs (1992) Four Rooms (1995)

821
Taylor, Elizabeth

References
Bernard, Jami. Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies. New York: Harper Perennial,
1996.
Clarkson, Wensley. Quentin Tarantino: Shooting from the Hip. New York: Overlook, 1995.
Dawson, Jeff. Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool. New York: Applause, 1995.
—Daniel Curran

TAYLOR, ELIZABETH. An award-winning, British-American actress, Elizabeth

Taylor was one of the most popular movie stars in the United States during the
1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Her success in the movie industry, as both a talented actress
and a popular subject of the tabloid media, earned her superstar status and solidified
her role in American film history.
Born in London on February 27, 1932, Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was the daugh-
ter of American-born parents, Francis Lenn Taylor and Sara Viola Warmbrodt. In
1941, at the start of World War II, the family relocated to Los Angeles. On September 18,
1941, a nine-year-old Taylor obtained her first movie contract with Universal Pictures for
her film debut in There’s One Born Every Minute. On October 15, 1942, she signed a con-
tract with MGM to star as Priscilla in the box-office hit Lassie Come Home. In 1944, she
appeared in the MGM movies Jane Eyre and The White Cliffs of Dover. It was her leading
role as Velvet Brown, however, in the critically acclaimed National Velvet that catapulted
Taylor to superstar status. Taylor starred in several additional movies during the 1940s
that included Courage of Lassie (1946), Life with Father (1947), Cynthia (1947), A Date
with Judy (1948), and Julia Misbehaves (1948). In 1949, she ended the decade with her
last performance as a child actor in Little Women.
In 1949, Taylor also made her film debut as an adult actress in the drama Conspir-
ator. In 1950, she co-starred with Spencer Tracy in the romantic comedy Father of the
Bride. The success of the movie led to starring roles in several additional comedies,
including The Big Hangover (1950), Father of the Bride (1950), Father’s Little Dividend
(1951), Callaway Went Thataway (1951), and Love Is Better Than Ever (1952). By
1955, Taylor had added seven additional starring movie roles to her acting credentials.
These included A Place in the Sun (1951), Ivanhoe (1952), The Girl Who Had Every-
thing (1953), Rhapsody (1954), Elephant Walk (1954), Beau Brummel (1954), and
The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954). Then in 1956, the actress starred opposite Rock
Hudson in the epic drama Giant. It was her portrayal of Susanna Drake in the Civil
War drama Raintree County (1957), however, that earned Taylor her first Academy
Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. In 1958, she co-starred along-
side Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Her portrayal of Maggie in the megahit
also earned her a second Academy Award nomination.
In 1960, she won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as
Gloria Wandrous in Butterfield 8. In 1963, Taylor co-starred with Richard Burton in
Cleopatra, which eventually made a substantial profit after initially failing to attract
audiences. Her $1 million salary for her role in the movie made Taylor the highest-paid

822
 Towne, Robert

actress in the United States during

the 1960s. In 1966, she again
teamed up with Burton in Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? The
movie earned her a second Acad-
emy Award for Best Actress.
During the 1970s, Taylor con-
tinued collect an average salary of
$1.25 million per picture. Some
of her most notable movie roles
during that decade included
Night Watch (1973), Ash Wednes-
day (1973), A Little Night Music
(1977), and The Mirror Crack’d
(1980). Taylor also starred in sev-
eral television movies during this
period, including Divorce His,
Divorce Hers (1973) and Malice
in Wonderland (1985). In 1994,
she returned to the big screen in
The Flintstones.
Taylor’s career as a movie star
spanned six decades and included
more than 50 motion pictures.
Her personal life became as Actress Elizabeth Taylor in 1965. (Library of Congress)
popular with the public as her
movies. For decades, her superstar image and personal exploits overshadowed her act-
ing talents. The public found Taylor’s beauty, movie star lifestyle, and her eight mar-
riages intriguing news items. Today, Taylor is considered an American movie star
legend. Elizabeth Taylor passed away on March 23, 2011, after a long illness.

References
Amburn, Ellis. The Most Beautiful Woman in the World: The Obsessions, Passions, and the Cour-
age of Elizabeth Taylor. New York: Cliff Street, 2000.
Spoto, Donald. A Passion for Life: The Biography of Elizabeth Taylor. New York: HarperCollins,
1995.
Taraborrelli, J. Randy. Elizabeth. New York: Warner Books, 2006.
—Bernadette Zbicki Heiney

TOWNE, ROBERT. Almost every book on the subject of screenwriting points to

Robert Towne’s Academy Award-winning script for Chinatown (1974) as one of the
best examples of this sort of work: a masterpiece of structure, character, and dialogue.

823
Towne, Robert

In addition to writing Chinatown,

Towne also wrote screenplays for a
number of other iconic films of the
1970s, including The Last Detail
(1973) and Shampoo (1975), and
script-doctored other well-known
films of the late 1960s and 1970s,
such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967),
The Godfather (1972), and The
Parallax View (1974). In 1974,
Newsweek declared Towne the hot-
test writer in Hollywood, sug-
gesting that he was able to
transform Hollywood genres by
capturing the nation’s sense of
Watergate-era disillusionment.
By the late 1950s, Towne had
tried college and had floated
through a variety of uninspiring
jobs before finding his way into
an acting class. Significantly, his
classmates included Jack Nicholson
and Roger Corman, who would
become the king of the low-
budget Hollywood film. At the
age of 21, Towne wrote and acted
in The Last Woman on Earth
(1960), a Corman production that
Towne called a “dreadful science
Screenwriter Robert Towne poses at the Regency Hotel in fiction movie.” During the 1960s,
New York on March 7, 2006. (AP/Wide World Photos) Towne suffered from persistent
and debilitating allergies, and he
worked infrequently. He did
rewrite work for Corman, however, and also wrote for television shows such as The Lloyd
Bridges Show, The Richard Boone Show, The Outer Limits, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
In 1965, Corman hired Towne to write the script for his film adaptation of Edgar Allan
Poe’s The Tomb of Ligeia. Impressed by an unproduced script that Towne had written
for Corman, Warren Beatty brought him in to do rewrites for Bonnie and Clyde; Towne
successfully reordered scenes, building into the picture a rising feeling of suspense as
the film moved toward its startling conclusion.
Towne’s first draft of Chinatown, completed for the producer Robert Evans, was res-
onant with Watergate-type themes. Evans, however, wanted Roman Polanski to direct
the picture, and Polanski, deeply affected by the 1969 murder of his wife, Sharon Tate,
by members of the Mason Family, saw something different in the material. In Towne’s

824
 Towne, Robert

first draft of Chinatown, the mythic L.A. locale remained hidden away, as the film’s
characters never actually arrived there; and the female protagonist, Evelyn Mulwray
(Faye Dunaway), kills her father, Noah Cross (John Huston), who has raped and
impregnated her. Polanski had something else in mind for the film, however; and, it
seems, with his wife’s murder still haunting him, insisted that the evil Noah Cross
should live on while the abused and innocent Evelyn should die on the streets of
Chinatown. Although the Watergate-like themes of political intrigue remained in the
screenplay, Polanski finally prevailed and Towne’s script was changed to reflect the
director’s vision. Two decades after the film was completed, and Towne had won his
Oscar for his script, he finally admitted in a Los Angeles Times interview that Polanski
was right about the ending.
During the 1980s, Towne became increasingly interested in directing. In 1982, he
got his chance to move behind the camera with Personal Best, a film for which he also
wrote the screenplay. An exploration of the physical and emotional pain experienced
by world-class athletes—here, Olympic hopefuls training for the 1980 Moscow
Games, which the United States boycotted—Personal Best proved to be controversial due
to its depiction of the film’s female lead, played convincingly by Mariel Hemmingway,
as bisexual. Towne was plagued by problems on the set, and at one point actually ran
out of money before garnering alternative financing. Although Personal Best was eventu-
ally released, working on the picture cost Towne the opportunity to direct the film he
really wanted to make: Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). Although
he wrote the screenplay for the latter film, directorial responsibilities were turned over to
Hugh Hudson, and the picture ended up being very different from the one that Towne
had envisioned.
Although he had struggled to finish Personal Best, Towne nevertheless went on to
write and direct what turned out to be four more unremarkable films: Tequila Sunrise
(1988); The Two Jakes (1990); Without Limits (1998); and Ask the Dust (2006). He also
continued to write screenplays for major Hollywood pictures, however, and to work as
a script doctor on different projects. Towne, for instance, was brought in on four Tom
Cruise vehicles: Days of Thunder (1990), The Firm (1993), Mission: Impossible (1996),
and Mission: Impossible II (2000).

Selected Filmography
Mission: Impossible II (2000); Without Limits (1998); Mission: Impossible (1996); Love Affair
(1994); The Firm (1993); Days of Thunder (1990); Tequila Sunrise (1988); Frantic (1988);
Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987); 8 Million Ways to Die (1986); Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan,
Lord of the Apes (1984); Personal Best (1982); Heaven Can Wait (1978); Orca (1977); The
Missouri Breaks (1976); Shampoo (1975); The Yakuza (1974); Chinatown (1974); The Parallax
View (1974); The Last Detail (1973); The New Centurions (1972); Cisco Pike (1972); Drive,
He Said (1971); Villa Rides (1968); Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

References
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drug-and Rock-‘n’-Roll Generation Saved
Hollywood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.

825
Truffaut, François

Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New
York: Penguin, 2008.
Towne, Robert. “A Screenwriter on Screenwriting: Robert Towne.” In Pirie, David, ed. Anatomy
of the Movies. New York: MacMillan, 1981: 150–53.

—Robert Arnett

TRUFFAUT, FRANÇOIS. François Truffaut was an award-winning director, a

member of the French New Wave, advocate of the auteur theory, a movie critic, screen-
writer, producer, and occasional actor. In a film career spanning a quarter of a century,
he directed 25 films, some of the most lyrical and beloved of his generation.
François Roland Truffaut was born on February 6, 1932, to Janine de Montferrand
and Roland Lévy, whom Truffaut never met. His mother’s husband, Roland Truffaut,
adopted him, but Truffaut spent his infancy mostly with others, especially with his
grandmother, who died when he was ten. Rejected by his parents, he often escaped
to stay with his friends and to go to the cinema.
Truffaut became an ardent moviegoer at an early age. He dropped out of school at
age 14, and at 15, he founded a film club, Cercle cinémanie. He eventually came to
the attention of the French critic André Bazin, who became his friend and protector.
Bazin rescued Truffaut when, at 18, he tried to desert from the French army and was
imprisoned. Bazin arranged for his release and gave him a job at the film magazine
Cahiers du cinéma, where Truffaut published his first movie critique in 1953.
Truffaut’s apprenticeship in the cinema came from watching movies and writing
reviews—passionate, sometimes brutal, critiques. In what turned out to be a seminal
essay in Cahiers du cinéma (no. 31, January 1954), entitled “A Certain Tendency of
French Cinema,” Truffaut denigrated the majority of French films, describing them
as “your father’s cinema.” He praised visionary directors such as Jean Renoir, Roberto
Rossellini, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, and Alfred Hitchcock, declaring them
auteurs—literally “authors” of their cinematic works—who had created distinctive
filmic texts on which they had stamped their indelible signatures.
Truffaut’s idea of the director as auteur proved inspirational to colleagues such as
Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer, who sought to make films like
their cinematic heroes. Along with Truffaut, directors like these—influenced by the
grittiness of Italian neorealism, the invisible editing style of classical Hollywood cin-
ema, and the philosophical Parisian culture of existentialism—began to produce what
came to be called French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) films: iconoclastic, artistically
experimental pictures produced in the 1950s and ’60s.
Truffaut’s criticism of French cinema led to his banishment from the Cannes Film
Festival in 1958; but his first feature-length film, Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows),
won him a Best Director award there the next year. The film begins a series of semiau-
tobiographical pictures that paired Truffaut with actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who por-
trayed Antoine Doinel, the alienated, rebellious adolescent who would become
Truffaut’s cinematic alter ego. For Truffaut, the narrative that traced its way through
his Antoine Doinel cycle of films (The 400 Blows [1959], Antoine and Colette [1962],

826
 Truffaut, François

Love at Twenty, Stolen Kisses [1968], Bed and Board [1970], and Love on the Run
[1979]), gave existential expression to the attendant pleasures and pitfalls of his own,
sometimes tortured coming-of-age experiences.
Two of Truffaut’s most important, and well received, films followed The 400 Blows
in the early 1960s. Shoot the Piano Player (1960) was Truffaut’s homage to American
detective films; a quirky and disturbing picture that mixes drama and dark comedy.
Unpredictable and unexpected, Shoot the Piano Player offers the viewer flashbacks,
extended voice-overs, out-of-sequence shots and startling jump cuts, brilliant use of
music, and exquisite performances.
Truffaut had his first major commercial success with Jules and Jim (1962), a film
that thoroughly charmed audiences. Focused on a trio of protagonists—two men
who fall in love with the same ineffable women, the embodiment of the eternal, enig-
matic, mutable feminine—the picture explores moments of youthful abandon, love,
and freedom.
Later in the 1960s and early 1970s, Truffaut made a series of films that did not have
the critical appeal of his first three films. Adapted from a 1953 Ray Bradbury science
fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1966) explores themes of censorship and book burning,
and the conflagration of society that ensues when these things are allowed to happen.
The next two films combine genres: the suspense thriller complicated by the love story.
In The Bride Wore Black (1968), a woman who is widowed by five men on their wed-
ding days, takes methodical revenge on each of them. In Mississippi Mermaid (1970), a
woman fakes the identity of a mail-order bride who has been sent for by a rich planta-
tion owner, who quickly falls in love with the imposter.
With The Wild Child (1970), Truffaut returned to the filmmaking style of his ear-
lier films. The picture is based on an historical incident in which a child is found living
in the wild; Truffaut cast himself in the role of the doctor who patiently tries to tame
and socialize the child. Reminiscent of The 400 Blows in its black-white austerity and
documentary approach, The Wild Child presents viewers with an unsentimental
examination of the pain and pleasures of human contact. Described as a poem in praise
of making movies, Day for Night (1973) is a self-referential picture about the working
processes and ephemeral communities that are formed during the making of a film.
Truffaut plays the director of the film-within-the film to Jean-Pierre Léaud’s tempera-
mental young “star.”
François Truffaut left an indelible mark on cinema, both as a writer/film critic and
as a director who created some of the most luminous and humanistic films of the
twentieth-century. He died of a brain tumor on October 21, 1984, and is buried in
Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.

Selected Filmography
Confidentially Yours (1983); The Woman Next Door (1981); The Last Metro (1980); Love on the
Run (1979); The Green Room (1978); The Man Who Loved Women (1977); Small Change
(1976); The Story of Adele H (1975); Day for Night (1973); Bed & Board (1970); The Wild Child
(1970); Mississippi Mermaid (1969); Stolen Kisses (1968); The Bride Wore Black (1968); Fahren-
heit 451 (1966); Jules and Jim (1962); The 400 Blows (1959)

827
Truffaut, François

References
Baecque, Antoine de, and Serge Toubiana. Truffaut: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1999.
Stam, Robert. François Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation. Piscat-
away, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Truffaut, François, with Dominique Rabourdin. Truffaut by Truffaut. New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1987.
Truffaut, François. The Films in My Life. New York: Da Capo, 1994.
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock/Truffaut: A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1967.

—Arbolina L. Jennings

828
 v
V
VALENTINO, RUDOLPH. Probably the most famous film star of the silent era,
Rudolph Valentino was the classic leading man whose good looks attracted millions
of female fans and whose untimely death sparked an outpouring of grief unmatched
in his day. Although he had a relatively short career, Valentino’s persona and his screen
presence made him a true Hollywood icon whose influence was felt for generations.
Born Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi in Castellaneta, Italy, on
May 6, 1895, Valentino immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island in 1913.
Speaking little English, he rented a small room in an Italian neighborhood and took a
number of mundane jobs in order to survive, including work as a busboy, waiter, and
gardener. A talented dancer, he found employment in New York nightclubs, where
he achieved a modest degree of local fame. Trading on his good looks, Valentino also
reportedly worked as a gigolo, entertaining lonely New York society women. Eventu-
ally the young dancer took a job with a traveling musical production that toured the
western United States, and after the outfit disbanded he lived briefly in San Francisco
before moving to Hollywood, where, on the advice of a friend, he decided to pursue
a career in the emerging film industry. His first film appearance was as an extra in
Alimony (1917), followed by a number of small roles for Metro Pictures with directors
usually casting him as a villain. Valentino’s big break came in 1921 when he was cast in
a lead role in Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1921), one of the top money-making
films of the silent era. In the film, Valentino famously dances the tango with an actress
in one of the most notable and scandalous movie sequences of the period. The scene
made Valentino famous and helped create the “Latin lover” screen persona that would
win him legions of fans. Valentino soon established himself as a new type of leading
man: an irresistible combination of sex appeal and sensitivity that left female movie-
goers of the Roaring Twenties spellbound. For Valentino, more success followed, as
he landed starring roles in Camille (1921) and The Conquering Power (1921).
After arriving in Hollywood, and especially after his fame began to spread, Valentino’s
personal life became more tumultuous. Unfounded rumors dating from his days as a
New York gigolo suggested that America’s leading sex symbol might be homosexual
or bisexual, and the star was married in 1919 to actress Jean Acker, who turned out

829
Valentino, Rudolph

to be a lesbian. Valentino eventu-

ally divorced Acker and in
1923 married set designer and
part-time actress Natacha Ram-
bova, but since he did not wait a
year after his divorce to remarry,
as required by California law, he
was forced to fight off charges of
bigamy. The ambitious Rambova
also tried to take charge of Valen-
tino’s career, which ultimately led
to a great deal of controversy.
Unhappy with his salary at
Metro, Valentino left the studio
and signed with Famous Players-
Lasky, which would eventually
evolve into Paramount Pictures.
There, Valentino starred in The
Sheik (1921), the landmark film
that transformed him from a
popular star into an international
film icon. Public reaction to the
movie, which cast Valentino as a
great lover, also exposed the
nature of his massive appeal.
Silent film actor Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926), consid- Male moviegoers, many of whom
ered the first male sex symbol of the motion picture industry. felt threatened by Valentino, hated
(Library of Congress)
The Sheik, ridiculed Valentino and
his flamboyant costumes, and rou-
tinely questioned the star’s masculinity. In contrast, female fans swooned over him, watch-
ing the film again and again. For Valentino, The Sheik was a doubled-edged sword that
brought him worldwide fame but also left him forever typecast. He made several more
films with Famous Players-Lasky, including Beyond the Rocks (1922), where he played
opposite screen siren Gloria Swanson, and Blood and Sand (1922), a critically acclaimed
picture in which he played a Spanish bullfighter. For his entire career Valentino, with
some justification, felt financially underappreciated by the studios, and was in almost con-
stant conflict with producers over his salary. At one point he walked out on Famous
Players-Lasky, which led to the studio filing a lawsuit against him. Shortly before his
death, Valentino signed with United Artists, where he made his last film, Son of the Sheik,
in 1926.
Valentino’s untimely demise contributed to his legend. On August 15, 1926, he col-
lapsed at a New York hotel and was hospitalized with a perforated ulcer. After success-
ful surgery to repair the problem, he developed peritonitis and died on August 23,
1926, at the age of 31. Valentino’s death was one of the most significant American

830
 Van Peebles, Melvin

cultural events of the 1920s. More than 100,000 fans almost rioted at the star’s New
York City funeral, and afterwards his body was taken by train to California for a second
memorial service. Valentino was laid to rest in Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery.
One of Hollywood’s most cherished legends holds that for decades on the anniversary
of Valentino’s death, a mysterious female admirer visited the cemetery to leave a single
red rose on the star’s grave.

References
Botham, Noel. Valentino: The First Superstar. London: Metro, 2002.
Bret, David. Valentino: A Dream of Desire. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.
Ellenberger, Allan R., and Edoardo Ballerini. The Valentino Mystique: The Death and Afterlife of
the Silent Film Idol. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005.
Leider, Emily Worth. Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino. London: Faber &
Faber, 2004.

—Ben Wynne

VAN PEEBLES, MELVIN. Melvin Van Peebles can claim many titles but is best
known as the creator of the film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). As a market-
ing master with a knack for infiltrating arenas wherein he has had no previous experi-
ence, he has always insisted upon his own vision. Both celebrated as “the father of
American independent film” and vilified as the progenitor of blaxploitation, his posi-
tion in film history is as undeniable as it is contested (Alexander, 2003).
Melvin Peebles was born on August 21, 1932, on the South Side of Chicago. After
receiving a degree in literature from Ohio Wesleyan University, he joined the Air
Force. He moved to San Francisco following his military service, where he worked as
a streetcar operator and married Maria Marx, a white woman from an affluent family
with whom he fathered three children.
Van Peebles made two short independent films in 1957, Three Pickup Men for
Herrick and Sunlight. Unable to secure opportunities in Hollywood, however, he moved
his family to Holland and studied astronomy at the University of Amsterdam. While
his marriage dissolved, Van Peebles’s passion for filmmaking returned while in Holland,
and he joined the Dutch National Theatre. His earlier shorts were discovered by Henry
Langlois, an associate of the Cinémathéque Française based in Paris, and Van Peebles
eventually left Holland for the magically French city (Chaffin-Quiray, 2002).
While in Paris, Van Peebles learned French and became a novelist, ultimately pub-
lishing five books, including La Permission, which later became his first feature film,
The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967) (originally released in France as La permission).
The film, about a black army soldier who has a weekend romance with a white woman
while on leave in Paris, won the Critic’s Choice Award at the 1967 San Francisco Film
Festival (Taft, 1999); it also opened the door to Hollywood for the director.
Following the success of Three-Day Pass, Columbia Pictures tapped him to
direct the racial satire Watermelon Man (1970); although he eventually completed the

831
Van Peebles, Melvin

project, he quarreled with studio

heads throughout the production
(Angio, 2005). It may be that
the best decision Van Peebles
made in regard to Watermelon
Man was the casting of black
actor Godfrey Cambridge, who
most critics felt delivered a trium-
phant performance despite the
film’s limitations (Donaldson,
2003).
Desiring more autonomy, and
wanting to make films that were
culturally relevant, Van Peebles
set about making the picture that
many feel is his most significant
one, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss
Song. Made without major studio
support, the picture was shot in
Southern California in just three
weeks on a $500,000 budget; it
went on to make $10 million by
the end of its first theatrical run,
despite, or, perhaps because of,
its X-rating from the MPAA
(Lawrence, 2008). Van Peebles
performed most of the key cre-
ative duties on the project, in-
Actor Melvin Van Peebles at MoMA’s 41st Annual Party in
cluding playing the lead role of
the Garden at the Museum of Modern Art on May 26,
“Sweetback,” a black sex performer
2009 in New York City. (Getty Images)
who murders two policemen and
goes on the run. Although a box-
office success, the film was largely condemned by the black intelligentsia (Guerrero, 1993).
Many film historians and critics have argued that, along with Cotton Comes to Harlem
(1970) and Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971), Sweetback established the paradigm for
the blaxploitation wave of the 1970s as well as the “hood film cycle” of the early 1990s
(Watkins, 1998).
A true Renaissance man, Van Peebles went on to create several plays including the
musicals Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971), which was nominated for seven
Tony Awards and was eventually adapted for the screen, as well as Don’t Play Us Cheap
(1972). He also recorded several music albums and worked as a New York City stock
trader for a short time. He directed four more feature-length films: Identity Crisis
(1989), Gang in Blue (1996/co-directed with his son Mario), Bellyful (2000), and Con-
fessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchyfooted Mutha (2008). Although he has remained busy

832
 Varda, Agnès

writing, acting, and performing, none of his creative ventures have matched the success
of Sweetback.

Selected Filmography
Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchyfooted Mutha (2008); Bellyful (2000); Identity Crisis (1989);
Don’t Play Us Cheap (1973); Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971); Watermelon Man
(1970); The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968); Cinq cent balles (1963); Three Pickup Men for Her-
rick (1957); Sunlight (1957)

References
Alexander, George. “Melvin Van Peebles.” Interview. Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers
Talk About the Magic of Cinema. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.
Chaffin-Quiray, Garrett. “ ‘You Bled My Mother, You Bled My Father, but You Won’t Bleed
Me’: The Underground Trio of Melvin Van Peebles.” Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking
beyond the Hollywood Canon. Mendik, Xavier, and Stephen Jay Schneider, eds. New York:
Wallflower, 2002.
Donaldson, Melvin. Black Directors in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1993.
Lawrence, Novotny. Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2008.
Taft, Claire A. “Melvin Van Peebles.” Notable African American Men. Smith, Jesse Carney, ed.
Detroit: Gale Research, 1999.
Watkins, S. Craig. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998.

—Mikal Gaines

VARDA, AGNÈS. One of the most influential female directors in France, Agnès
Varda has been an innovative voice in fiction and documentary filmmaking since the
mid-1950s. Winner of the 1985 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion (for Vagabond,
1985) and the 2001 National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Non-Fiction Film
(for The Gleaners and I, 2000), Varda has directed over 30 films, ranging from a docu-
mentary short on the Black Panthers (Black Panthers, 1968) to a character study of her
friend, the actress Jane Birkin (Jane B. par Agnès V., 1987–1988). Varda’s irreverent
style has been characterized over the decades by avant-garde techniques, a rich art-
historical vocabulary, and a concern for women’s experiences.
Born Arlette Varda on May 30, 1928, in Ixelles, Belgium, Varda took an indirect
path to a directing career. While studying art history at the École du Louvre, she began
to take night classes in photography. In 1951, Varda found work as a photographer
under Jean Vilar at the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP). Varda’s first film, La Pointe
Courte (1954), is widely considered a precursor to the French New Wave. Made on a
shoestring budget with TNP actors and nonprofessional residents from the seaside

833
Varda, Agnès

village where the shooting took place, the film intertwines the story of a troubled cou-
ple with the villagers’ struggles to stay afloat. Varda’s economical production strategy, as
well as the film’s attention to everyday life, won praise from critics like Cahiers du cin-
éma founder André Bazin, who championed parallel tendencies in the Italian neorealist
masterworks of the previous decade.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Varda maintained an ambiguous relationship with the
crowd at Cahiers, the institutional center of the New Wave. Film historians typically
place Varda in the looser Left Bank Group along with Pointe Courte collaborator Alain
Resnais, Chris Marker, and Varda’s husband Jacques Demy, pointing to the Left Bank
directors’ shared interest in modernist literature and left-wing politics in order to dis-
tinguish them from François Truffaut and other critic-directors at Cahiers. In Varda’s
case, differences also stemmed from her background in art history rather than at the
cinema clubs and film journals cropping up in postwar Paris. Having completed La
Pointe Courte, Varda later remarked that she had not seen 25 films to that point in
her life. Yet her collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard indicate a creative energy shared
across the Seine. Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), Varda’s next feature film, starred Godard in a
film-within-a-film—a wink, perhaps, at Godard’s quoting of other directors in his own
New Wave efforts.
The relationships between women, visual representation, and image culture stimu-
lated Varda from the outset. The short L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958), which Varda made while
pregnant, intercut shots of the bustling markets on Paris’s Rue Mouffetard with visual
treatments of fertility. Cléo from 5 to 7 dramatized 90 tense minutes in the life of a glam-
orous singer as she awaits the results of a cancer test. Some critics have interpreted Cléo’s
meandering journey around Paris as mirroring a psychic transition from male-guided
involvement with her own image (she gazes frequently at her reflections in mirrors) to
an outwardly focused interest in the people she meets. However, Varda also disrupts
the idea that we can easily access the protagonist’s psyche: Cléo’s continually changing
costume and affect complicate the possibility of capturing singular truths about her.
In line with her complex feminism, the filmmaker has explored the possibilities—
and difficulties—of representing marginalized subjects. Vagabond retraces the wander-
ings of a young vagrant, discovered frozen to death early in the film, through a series of
interviews with the people she has encountered on the road. Varda reprised her atten-
tion to France’s “new poor” in The Gleaners and I (2000). The documentary inter-
weaves footage of present-day gleaners salvaging harvest leftovers, a robed magistrate
in a field explaining the sixteenth-century law that established the right to glean in
France, eco-radicals who live out of the trash, and nineteenth-century paintings of
gleaners. Varda plays with the idea of gleaning as a metaphor for creation, but the
director has insisted that the film’s artistic meditations are not more central to its mes-
sage than the cases of subsistence gleaning it documents.
Varda continues to work against the grain of the French film industry by producing
her own films. She has coined the term cinécriture, or cine-writing, to encompass the
variety of editorial decisions undertaken during the creative process of making a film.
From the crest of the New Wave to the present, an interplay of formal experimentation
and social engagement has fueled Varda’s vital and inventive filmmaking.

834
 Vidor, King

Selected Filmography
The Beaches of Agnès (2008); Quelques veuves de Noirmoutier (2006); Cinévardaphoto (2004);
Ydessa, les ours et etc. (2004); Le lion volatil (2003); The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later
(2002); The Gleaners & I (2000); The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967); Jacquot de Nantes
(1991); Jane B. for Agnes V. (1988); Le petit amour (1988); T’as de beaux escaliers tu sais
(1986); Vagabond (1985); The So-called Caryatids (1984); Ulysse (1982); Documenteur (1981);
Mur murs (1981); One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977); Daguerréotypes (1976); Plaisir d’amour
en Iran (1976); Women Reply (1975); Lions Love (1969) Huey (1968); Far from Vietnam
(1967); Oncle Yanco (1967); The Creatures (1966); Le bonheur (1965); Elsa la rose (1965); Salut
les cubains (1963); Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962); Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald ou (Méfiez-vous des
lunettes noires) (1961); O saisons, ô châteaux (1958); Du côté de la côte (1958); La cocotte d’azur
(1958); Diary of a Pregnant Woman (1958); La Pointe Courte (1955)

References
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996.
Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema, 2nd ed. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2007.
Smith, Alison. Agnès Varda. New York: Manchester University Press, 1998.

—Diana Lemberg

VIDOR, KING. Less venerated than John Ford or Howard Hawks, it may be
argued that King Vidor was their equal as a chronicler of America’s national character.
He considered his three great subjects to be war, wheat, and steel; his overriding con-
cern was with the place of the individual in American society, navigating between pop-
ulism and solipsism and unity and disillusionment in regard to community and land.
A Texan with Hungarian roots born February 8, 1894, Vidor was an early indepen-
dent filmmaker, his first features influenced by Christian Science and D. W. Griffith’s
rural lyricism. His eventual affiliation with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bore fruit with
The Big Parade (1925), the film that established the studio, the highest grosser of the
1920s, and the first Hollywood effort to treat World War I realistically from an average
soldier’s perspective. The film conveyed the horror of conflict with visionary scenes—
such as the death march through Belleau Wood—timed with a metronome to achieve
what Vidor called silent music.
He used his clout to make a less commercial masterpiece, The Crowd (1928), a por-
trait of an average man hoping to make it big in the city. Unprecedented in documenting
quotidian routines, frustrations, and despair, the picture would ultimately inspire the
filmmakers of the neorealist movement. Vidor seamlessly merged realism (including
hidden-camera footage of street life) and German-derived Expressionism, as in his
famous tracking shot in which the camera traveled up and through an office building
to reveal the protagonist seated at one of an endless, rigidly arrayed collection of desks.
Asked by William Randolph Hearst to make films for Hearst’s mistress Marion
Davies, Vidor switched gears to make three comedies, including Show People (1928),

835
Vidor, King

a genial satire of Hollywood pre-

tentiousness that included an
appearance by the director him-
self. Furthering his reputation
for artistic risk-taking, he entered
the sound era by deferring his
salary to assemble an all-black
cast for the groundbreaking
semimusical Hallelujah! (1929),
which centered on the rural
southern intersection of sin,
revivalist religion, and family life,
and earned praise for its (at the
time) sensitive portrayal of African
American culture.
His later films alternated
between innovation and what he
considered banal assignment.
Rather ironically, the naturalist
tenement drama Street Scene
(1931) preceded a loose trilogy
of films devoted to urban charac-
ters who relocate to farms seeking
revitalization through rural life.
Bookended by the heartland
King Vidor’s prodigious career as a film director began in the
affection of The Stranger’s Return
era of the American silent movie and continued at a furious
pace into the age of the “talkies.” Over the 41 years of his (1933) and the assimilation
career he made 56 feature films. (Hulton Archive/Getty struggles of The Wedding Night
Images) (1935), Our Daily Bread (1934)
displayed Vidor’s almost panthe-
istic faith in the land. Made out-
side the studio system with Vidor’s own money, Daily Bread details the formation of
a farming co-op that rejects both democracy and socialism, and thus shows the elusive-
ness of Vidor’s politics: he was instrumental in forming both the Directors Guild of
America and the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.
Vidor ranged across genres in a way that was unusual among directors. His feel for
agrarian life anchored the Kansas sequences of The Wizard of Oz (1939). One of a
number of directors who worked on the picture, Vidor set the camera and Judy
Garland in flowing motion for her exquisite, iconic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
scene. He demonstrated his mastery of melodrama in the male weepie The Champ
(1931) and the remake of Stella Dallas (1937); and he won critical acclaim with The
Citadel (1938), a British medical drama, and H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), which fol-
lowed an unremarkable, businessman protagonist as he looks back over his routine,
conformist life.

836
 Von Stroheim, Erich

Vidor’s dynamic faith in American progress was expressed in diverse ways—its bru-
tal consequences depicted in images of Indian massacres in Northwest Passage (1940)
and its glorious affirmation characterized in An American Romance (1944), the direc-
tor’s contribution to the war effort. Vidor went on to direct the western romance Duel
in the Sun (1946); and adopting noir elements he created the cinematic version of Ayn
Rand’s Nietzschean, anti-Socialist, radically individualistic The Fountainhead (1949), a
film that reflected his own struggles with studio heads to get his pictures made. Inter-
estingly, Vidor explored this notion of the individual battling against the tyrannical
force of the collective in the melodramas Beyond the Forest (1949) and Ruby Gentry
(1952), both of which followed female protagonists (Bette Davis as a disgruntled
small-town housewife and Jennifer Jones confronting corrupt tidewater high society)
striving to fulfill their desires from within the boundaries of their own stifling com-
munities. Lacking the advantages of Vidor’s male heroes, they have no choice but to
make themselves into monsters.
Vidor ended his commercial career with the epics War and Peace (1956) and Solomon
and Sheba (1959). Unable to find backing for his more personal projects, Vidor’s last
films were the independent documentaries Truth and Illusion: An Introduction to Meta-
physics (1964) and The Metaphor (1980), two pictures that expanded on his notion that
America operated under a peculiar divine mandate: the divinity of self—the only place
where Vidor believed God could be found. Vidor died on November 1, 1982.

Selected Filmography
Solomon and Sheba (1959); War and Peace (1956); Man without a Star (1955); Ruby Gentry
(1952); Japanese War Bride (1952); Lighting Strikes Twice (1951); Beyond the Forest (1949);
Fountainhead, The (1949); Duel in the Sun (1946); An American Romance (1944); The Wizard
of Oz (1939); The Citadel (1938); Stella Dallas (1937); Texas Rangers (1936); Bird of Paradise
(1932); Billy the Kid (1930); The Crowd (1928); The Big Parade (1925); Wild Oranges (1924;
Dusk to Dawn (1922); The Sky Pilot (1921); The Turn in the Road (1919); Grand Military
Parade (1913)

References
Durgnat, Raymond, and Scott Simmon. King Vidor, American. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988.
Vidor, King. King Vidor: Interviewed by Nancy Dowd and David Shepard. Hollywood: Directors
Guild of America. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988.
Vidor, King. King Vidor on Film Making. New York: McKay, 1972.

—Ihsan Amanatullah

VON STROHEIM, ERICH. Erich von Stroheim was a prominent—and contro-

versial—figure during the early years of Hollywood. For five decades he was a director
and actor as well as “The Man You Love to Hate.” In great part a creation of his own
imagination, Stroheim reflected in real life the myth machine that is Hollywood.

837
Von Stroheim, Erich

Stroheim was born Erich

Oswald Hans Carl Maria Stro-
heim in Vienna on September 22,
1885. Although the product of a
Jewish middle-class family, he
never fit into that lifestyle (his
father was a hat maker), nor did
he do well in the Austrian mili-
tary (deserting). In 1909, he
arrived at Ellis Island, New York,
where he added the “von” to his
name in order to impress the offi-
cials there (Koszarski, 1987). For
the next three years he worked in
a series of odd jobs before head-
ing west to San Francisco. In
1913, he married Margaret Knox,
but the marriage did not last. He
eventually moved to Hollywood
as the reinvented Erich von Stro-
heim, the son of a German bar-
oness and Austrian count. The
myth of his own background
Erich von Stroheim elevated the genre of silent film, laboring would remain secret until uncov-
over descriptive and psychological detail while ignoring pro- ered years later by two of his
duction and budgetary constraints. (Hulton Archive/Getty biographers (Koszarski, 1983;
Images) and Lennig, 2000). Beginning in
1915, he appeared as an extra in
several films, including D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. During World War I, Stroheim
was cast as the “horrible Hun” in several American films, including The Hun Within
and The Heart of Humanity.
His career took a turn in 1919 when he convinced Universal Studios head Carl
Laemmle to let him star and direct in his own film, The Pinnacle, later renamed Blind
Husbands. During the next 10 years, Stroheim directed a total of nine films, for both
Universal and Goldwyn. His uncompromising style—which triggered constant con-
flicts with powerful people—led to the end of his career as a director in 1929, while
simultaneously cementing his legacy.
Stroheim’s films were characterized by lavish sets, historical backdrops, obsessive
attention to detail, and innovative use of lighting and film composition, as well as a
no-holds-barred attitude toward production. It was this later trait that caused him
the most trouble as he consistently went well over budget on his films. In essence he
was the consummate artist—producing art for art’s sake regardless of the consequences.
Two films stand out during this period. Foolish Wives (1921) is a dark satire set in
Vienna just before and during the Great War. It was during this production that

838
 Von Stroheim, Erich

Stroheim’s obsessive attention to detail manifested itself when he was arrested by

Treasury agents for printing French currency to add realism to casino scenes set in
Monte Carlo. Stroheim’s second major work during this time is considered by film
critics to be his masterpiece. Greed (1924) was filmed for the Goldwyn Company.
Set in San Francisco, the movie is an excellent example of 1920s cinematic naturalism.
Originally nine hours long, the film was reduced—over Stroheim’s strenuous objec-
tions—to just over two hours in length, when the Goldwyn Company merged with
Metro Pictures in 1924. Considered an intensely graphic film for its time, it disturbed
audiences and critics with its frank depiction of the corrupting influence of money and
greed on the American way of life (Tibbetts, 2002).
Stroheim’s last studio film was The Merry Widow (1925). Once again production
cost overruns plagued the film. Despite this, the movie was a box-office hit, and Stro-
heim parlayed its success into a contract to direct The Wedding March (1927), with in-
dependent producer Pat Powers. Stroheim again ran well over budget, and the picture
was released in an abbreviated form. During the filming of his last movie Queen Kelly,
financed by Joseph P. Kennedy, Stroheim’s obsession with realism and graphic por-
trayals of brothels and incest led actress Gloria Swanson to demand that Kennedy fire
him. He did, and Stroheim’s directing career was over.
For the remaining years of his life Stroheim acted in numerous films, carefully culti-
vating the image of “The Man You Love to Hate.” Most notable during this time were
his roles in The Lost Squadron (1932) and La Grand illusion (1937). After World War II
ended, Stroheim moved to France with his companion Denise Vernac and spent the rest
of his life acting and writing. He died of cancer on May 12, 1957, in Maurepas France.
His legacy as a founder of American realist cinema, as well as his passion and commit-
ment to film, cement Stroheim’s place as one of the great directors of the 1920s.

Selected Filmography
Napoléon (1955); The Infiltrator (1955); Alert in the South (1953); The Other Side of Paradise
(1953); Sunset Blvd. (1950); Devil and the Angel (1946); One Does Not Die That Way (1946);
The Mask of Diijon (1946); Scotland Yard Investigator (1945); The Great Flamarion (1945);
Storm over Lisbon (1944); The Lady and the Monster (1944); The North Star (1943); Five Graves
to Cairo (1943); Gambling Hell (1942); So Ends Our Night (1941); I Was an Adventuress (1940);
Thunder over Paris (1940); Threats (1940); Personal Column (1939); Immediate Call (1939); The
World Will Shake (1939); It Happened in Gibraltar (1938); Ultimatum (1938); Boys’ School
(1938); The Lafarge Case (1938); Under Secret Orders (1937); The Alibi (1937); The Grand Illu-
sion (1937); Marthe Richard (1937); The Crime of Doctor Crespi (1935); Crimson Romance
(1934); Fugitive Road (1934); As You Desire Me (1932); The Lost Squadron (1932); Friends
and Lovers (1931); Three Faces East (1930); The Great Gabbo (1929); The Wedding March
(1928); The Honeymoon (1928); Greed (1924); Foolish Wives (1922); Blind Husbands (1919);
The Heart of Humanity (1918); The Hun Within (1918); Hearts of the World (1918); The Unbe-
liever (1918); Who Goes There? (1917); Draft 258 (1917); Panthea (1917); The Social Secretary
(1916); Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916); The Flying Torpedo (1916); Old
Heidelberg (1915); Farewell to Thee (1915)

839
Von Stroheim, Erich

References
Koszarski, Richard. “Erich von Stroheim.” In Wakeman, John, ed. World Film Directors. Vol. I,
1890–1945. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1987. 1069–79.
Koszarski, Richard. The Man You Love to Hate. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Lennig, Arthur. Stroheim. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
Tibbetts, John C. “Erich von Stroheim.” In The Encyclopedia of Filmmakers. Vol. 2, L-Z. New
York: Facts on File, 2002. 605–07.

—Charles Johnson

840
 v
W
WASHINGTON, DENZEL. Happily married to Pauletta Washington and the
father of four children, Denzel Washington is among the most versatile Hollywood
actors working today. In his numerous films, he has demonstrated an ability to embody
character types as dissimilar as Malcolm X and a corrupt cop. Such versatility makes it
difficult to categorize him.
Denzel Washington was born on December 28, 1954, in New York, and took up
acting while attending Fordham University, performing in student productions and
landing a part as the 18-year-old boyfriend of Wilma Rudolph in the made-for-
television biopic Wilma (1977). After completing his BA, Washington went to San
Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre to study acting. After only a year, however,
he left for Hollywood. Unhappy there, Washington left shortly after he arrived,
returning to New York, where he took stage roles and appeared in the made-for-
television movie Flesh and Blood (1979).
The actor hoped Flesh and Blood would provide him with the break he needed to
leap to the big screen. His career remained stalled, however, and he considered giving
up, taking a job with the county recreation department. Before reporting to work, he
landed the role of Malcolm X in an Off-Broadway production of Laurence Holder’s
When the Chickens Come Home to Roost, a fictional account of a meeting between Elijah
Muhammad, the Nation of Islam leader, and Malcolm X. The production did not last,
but the job gave Washington the luxury of seeking more roles as an actor. He eventu-
ally landed parts in Carbon Copy (1981), a film comedy that explores the experiences
of a white businessman with an illegitimate African American son, and in a stage pro-
duction of Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, a World War II drama about racial conflict.
His performance in A Soldier’s Play earned Washington an Obie Award, while his turn
as Roger Porter in Carbon Copy caught the attention of Bruce Paltrow, who was looking
for someone to play Dr. Philip Chandler on the television series St. Elsewhere.
From 1982 to 1988, Washington appeared on St. Elsewhere while also pursuing a
movie career. Earning steady money from working on the television series, Washington
finally began to land parts in films. These included roles as Arnold Billing, a lobbyist
for Middle Eastern Oil, in Power (1986); as the South African freedom fighter Steve

841
Washington, Denzel

Denzel Washington, winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Glory,
from 1989. He would go on to become the first African American man to win an Academy Award as
Best Actor, for his performance in Training Day, 2001. (AP/Wide World Photos)

Biko in Cry Freedom (1987); and as Reuben James, the lead character in For Queen and
Country (1988). After leaving St. Elsewhere in 1988, Washington’s acting career contin-
ued to blossom: he accepted the lead role in The Mighty Quinn (1989) and a support-
ing part in Glory (1989), in which he played a former slave fighting for the Union
army. The latter performance won him an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
Washington now began to be cast in starring roles. In the comedy Heart Condition
(1990), he played a ghost who haunts the bigot who has received his heart in a trans-
plant operation; and in Mo’ Better Blues (1990), a Spike Lee production that Lee wrote
with Washington in mind, he played Bleek Gilliam, a man who becomes a popular
blues musician. It was his performance in the title role of Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), how-
ever, that proved that Washington could carry a film. Solidifying his reputation as one
of the best actors in Hollywood, and one of the most popular, Washington followed
Malcolm X with The Pelican Brief (1993), an action-adventure movie adapted from a
John Grisham novel and co-starring Julia Roberts; Philadelphia (1993), in which he
played an attorney who defends an AIDS victim (Tom Hanks) who is unfairly dis-
missed from his job; The Preacher’s Wife (1996), starring opposite Whitney Houston;
and The Hurricane (1999), a biopic about Rubin Carter, the middleweight boxer
who was unjustly convicted of murder in 1966.
The Hurricane was followed in 2000 by Remember the Titans, which deals with a
recently integrated southern high school and the reactions of players and townspeople
to the arrival of their new black head football coach. In 2001, he starred as a brutal,

842
 Waters, John

corrupt, and highly effective plainclothes cop in Training Day. His extraordinary per-
formance earned Washington a Best Actor Oscar; he was only the second African
American to win the award (Sidney Poitier was the first). In 2002, Washington turned
director for Antwone Fisher, in which he also co-starred as Dr. Jerome Davenport. He
continues to work in feature films, including The Manchurian Candidate (2004),
Inside Man (2006), American Gangster (2006), The Great Debaters (2007), and The
Taking of Pelham 123 (2009).

References
Brode, Douglas. Denzel Washington: His Films and Career. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing
Group, 1996.
Nickson, Chris. Denzel Washington. New York: Macmillan, 1996.
Washington, Denzel, and Daniel Paisner. A Hand to Guide Me. Des Moines, IA: Meredith,
2006.
—Albert Rolls

WATERS, JOHN. John Waters occupies a unique position in the pantheon of

American movie directors. From the start Waters wanted mainstream success, but to
reach his goal he filmed some of the most outrageously offensive scenes in the history
of cinema. Today, Waters is regarded as an iconic figure whose early films anticipate
the current popularity of the trash culture aesthetic.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 22, 1946, John Samuel Waters Jr. grew up
fascinated by car accidents and movie villains, while dreaming of a career in show busi-
ness. He attended Catholic schools, but frequently cut classes to see movies that the
nuns warned him to avoid. Through neighborhood friends Waters met the idiosyn-
cratic characters that would become the Dreamlanders, the cast and crew of his low-
budget films. Waters’s early efforts, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964), Roman Can-
dles (1966), and Eat Your Makeup (1968), showed the influence of underground film-
makers like Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and the Kuchar brothers. His
first feature-length film, Mondo Trasho (1969), starred the actor most closely associated
with Waters, the 300-pound transvestite Divine (née Harris Glenn Milstead).
During the 1970s, as Waters’s filmmaking skills and creative vision matured, he
gained national recognition for his increasingly outrageous X-rated comedies. Begin-
ning with Multiple Maniacs (1970), which featured Divine as the murderous leader
of a circus of sexual deviants, Waters’s films offered bizarre characters and perverse
plots to compensate for their lack of production values. His most notorious film, Pink
Flamingos (1972), played for years as one of the original “midnight movies,” attracting
audiences of college students and countercultural cinephiles who had become disen-
chanted with the idealism of the 1960s. A taboo-shattering film, Pink Flamingos fea-
tures acts of murder, cannibalism, bestiality, and incest, but the most memorable
scene occurs at the very end when Divine proves she is “the filthiest person alive” by

843
Waters, John

Actor/director John Waters attends a press conference to promote the movie This Filthy World
during the 57th Berlin International Film Festival on February 13, 2007 in Berlin. (Getty Images)

eating dog feces. Along with Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977), Pink
Flamingos comprised a trash trilogy that made Waters a cult star.
By the 1980s, Waters’s films began to take an increasingly mainstream turn, substi-
tuting more palatable gimmicks for the irreverent offenses of his earlier work. Waters
filmed Polyester (1981) in “Odorama,” distributing scratch-and-sniff cards to ticket
buyers so they could follow cues to smell what they saw on-screen. He also persuaded
1950s screen idol Tab Hunter to play opposite Divine, and, for the first time, received
an R-rating. This new, tamer Waters prompted some of his former fans to accuse him
of selling out. To that accusation Waters routinely quipped, “I’ve always wanted to sell
out . . . I just couldn’t find a buyer.” That changed with his next film, Hairspray (1988).
Set in 1962, Hairspray explores segregation in Baltimore through the lens of a televi-
sion show that features teenage dancers trying out new moves to popular songs of the
day. The only John Waters film to receive a PG-rating, Hairspray introduced Ricki
Lake to America, but was also Waters’s last film with Divine, who died shortly
after its release. Hairspray was eventually adapted to become a Tony Award-winning
Broadway musical, inspiring a 2007 film remake that featured a cross-dressing John
Travolta in the role originally created for Divine.
The success of Hairspray gave Waters access to bigger budgets and stars, but not
always bigger audiences for his subsequent films. Cry Baby (1990), a nostalgic look at
class divisions in the 1950s starring Johnny Depp, was also made into a Broadway
musical, but never achieved the success of Hairspray. Likewise, Serial Mom (1994),
with Kathleen Turner playing a homicidal housewife, proved sharp satire but lacked

844
 Wayne, John

the subversive edge of Waters’s low-budget Dreamland days. Other efforts, including
Pecker (1998), Cecil B. Demented (2000), and A Dirty Shame (2004), struggled at the
box office. Ironically, Waters’s brand of taboo-breaking humor has become so main-
stream that it has made it more difficult for him to get laughs.
Irrespective of his filmmaking, Waters continues to have an impact on American
popular culture. Sporting his trademark pencil-thin mustache, he makes frequent
cameo appearances on television and in movies, inspiring young eccentrics to believe
that a highly idiosyncratic vision can eventually find a place in the mainstream.

Selected Filmography
A Dirty Shame (2004); Hairspray (1988); Polyester (1981); Desperate Living (1977); Pink Fla-
mingos (1972); Multiple Maniacs (1970); Mondo Trasho (1969); Eat Your Makeup (1968);
Roman Candles (1966); Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964)

References
Hoberman, J., and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Midnight Movies. New York: Da Capo, 1983.
Levy, Emanuel. Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film. New York: New
York University Press, 1999.
Waters, John. Shock Value: A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste. Philadelphia: Running Press, 1981.

—Joseph Christopher Schaub

WAYNE, JOHN. John Wayne was an American film star, director, producer, and
cultural icon. Commonly referred to as “the Duke,” Wayne appeared largely in west-
erns and war films, where his characters and physical demeanor portrayed the sort of
rugged frontier individualism that has, for over a century, been an integral part of
American cultural identity. While Wayne’s roles typically perpetuated the values,
ideals, and stalwart image associated with classic western heroes, his characters were
often flawed in ways that complicated traditional understandings of those roles.
Hard-drinking, short-tempered, prone to brawling, and often inarticulate, Wayne’s
characters served as powerful symbols of American masculinity, both during World
War II and in the postwar period.
Born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa, Wayne and
his family relocated to California after his high school graduation. Funded by an ath-
letic scholarship, he attended the University of Southern California, where he was a
prelaw, undergraduate student. Interestingly, Wayne’s football coach, Howard Jones,
introduced him to film studio work, in the form of a summer job provided by western
actor Tom Mix in exchange for football tickets. From his initial job in the prop depart-
ment at William Fox Studios, Wayne gradually moved to playing bit parts as a fill-in
and stunt actor, including a role as an extra in The Great K & A Train Robbery
(1926), which starred Mix.

845
Wayne, John

The young Wayne was a

promising student, articulate and
well-read, but was forced to leave
the university when he was
dropped from the football team
and lost his scholarship. He
returned to Fox Studios, where
he met and was befriended by
director John Ford. Through
Ford, and later, actor George
O’Brien, Wayne continued to
receive small roles, including cast
credit for the films Words and
Music (1929), Rough Rider
(1930), and Cheer Up and Smile
(1930). That same year, Wayne
was recruited by director Raoul
Walsh for his first starring role,
in The Big Trail (1930). The
director, seeking to create a char-
acter that conveyed an authentic
pioneer spirit, was the first to rec-
ognize the image that would carry
Wayne to stardom. It was also
John Wayne became the quintessential screen cowboy and Walsh who insisted on a name
patriotic American in the more than 200 films he made during change, and Marion “Duke”
his long career. He was one of the biggest box office draws of Morrison became John Wayne.
the twentieth century, appealing to Americans who respected The Big Trail, Fox Studios’
his conservative values, which often clashed with those of his epic foray into the new 70mm
film industry colleagues. (AP/Wide World Photos)
wide-screen process known as
“Grandeur,” was a box-office
flop. Fox went bankrupt; the stu-
dio went into receivership; the volatile John Ford, angered that Wayne had aligned
his career with Walsh, shunned the young actor for years; and Wayne, after two more
pictures with Fox, was cast adrift. The actor spent the 1930s appearing in 39
B-westerns for a variety of studios, including Columbia, Warner Bros., and
Monogram/Lone Star. It was his relationship with the infamous Harry Cohn of
Columbia Studios that launched the actor’s descent into the Bs. While Cohn had been
eager to acquire Wayne, the young actor quickly ran afoul of Cohn’s renowned bad tem-
per, and after minor roles in two pictures in 1931 (Arizona and The Deceiver), Wayne
was demoted to the studio’s B division. Over the next year, he made four more films
for Cohn and Columbia, until his contract was terminated in 1932. Cohn attempted
to blacklist Wayne, declaring him a drunkard and a rebel, which led to a year of
unemployment for the discouraged actor.

846
 Wayne, John

That hungry stretch ended, however, with a role in Lady and Gent (1932), for
Warner Bros. Studios, one of Hollywood’s leading studios, which led to a six-picture
contract. The first film in this Warner Bros. series, Ride Him Cowboy (1932), also
introduced his horse, Duke. Wayne and Duke shifted to Monogram Studios in
1933, starring in the film Riders of Destiny. It was here that Wayne would begin honing
his craft, under the tutelage of seasoned actors such as Yakima Canutt and Paul Fix.
These early Monogram films, produced by Lone Star Productions, also marked the
appearance of Wayne’s cowboy crooner persona, Singin’ Sandy Saunders, developed
by Lone Star in response to the immense popularity of another singing cowboy star,
Gene Autry. Unable to carry a tune, Wayne lip-synched the songs in all of his Singin’
Sandy pictures; the vocals were provided by Smith Ballew, who would soon be a
western star in his own right. When Monogram/Lone Star joined Mascot and Consoli-
dated Film Laboratories to form Republic Pictures, Wayne continued to make
B-westerns as a Republic property. Wary of being pigeonholed in the Bs, Wayne
refused to be cast in singing roles after the 1935 Republic film Westward Ho. He finally
broke out of the B-western mold in 1936 with a move to Universal, where his six-
picture contract included roles as a Coast Guard commander, lumberjack, trucking
magnate, newsreel cameraman, hockey star, and pearl diver. While he would return
to westerns later in the 1930s, Wayne had begun to establish himself as an actor
capable of expanding into other genres.
The mid-1930s marked the point of another change that would forever alter the
actor’s career—his reunion with John Ford, who reentered Wayne’s life as unexpectedly
as he had left it. Ford provided Wayne with the role that made him a star, the Ringo
Kid in Stagecoach (1939). Between the end of World War II and Ford’s death in
1972, the two made a total of 12 films together, many of which number among
Wayne’s most memorable: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); The Quiet Man (1952)
(which earned Ford an Academy Award for Best Director); The Searchers (1956); The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); and Donovan’s Reef (1963). It was by way of
these films that Wayne became the quintessential American hero—the personification
of the nation’s idealized history—championing traditional mainstream values of patri-
otism and honor, while challenging the growing ills of postwar America—racism,
greed, complacency, and injustice.
Wayne was well on his way to establishing himself as a superstar in Hollywood
when the United States entered World War II at the end of 1941, after the bombing
of Pearl Harbor. Unlike other actors of his era, such as Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable
and Henry Fonda, Wayne chose not to enlist in the armed forces, reluctant to relin-
quish his hard-won fame and fearing that he would be too old to make a comeback
in movies after the completion of his service. He was actually exempt from the draft,
due to his age (34) and because he was the father of three children, which qualified
him for a family deferment. Although he claimed that he would nevertheless enlist,
Wayne repeatedly postponed joining the armed forces for the sake of making just
“one more picture.” Having already lost a number of their leading men to the war
effort, including Gene Autry, Republic Studios was also sharply opposed to Wayne’s
enlistment. In the end, Wayne’s decision elicited sharp criticism from the public, and

847
Wayne, John

also from the man who had become his close friend, John Ford, who had been quick to
enlist in the Navy and saw Wayne’s choice as self-serving and unpatriotic. Wayne, sen-
sitive to both this criticism and to the weight of social responsibility carried by his
screen persona, began to merge his politics and his career, a move that would further
distance him from Ford, as the two found themselves on opposing sides of Cold War
issues, with Wayne adopting an aggressive anticommunist stance and Ford battling
what he saw as industry witch hunts.
Wayne’s staunch Republican and anticommunist postwar views became apparent in
his film projects as well as in his political activities in the Hollywood community. In
1948, he became president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of
American Ideals (MPA), an organization of politically conservative members of the
film community who sought to uncover subversive elements within the industry.
MPA members, such as Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Adolph Menjou, and Wayne’s
longtime friend Ward Bond, worked in cooperation with the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative arm of the House of Representatives.
Wayne’s conservative sentiments led to his 1951 appearance in Big Jim McLain, which
expressed a favorable opinion of HUAC and its pursuit of American communists. In
1968, after critics suggested his career was at an end, Wayne co-directed and starred
in The Green Berets, one of the few films of the period to support openly the Vietnam
War. Critics deemed the film too political and lacking sensitivity in light of the war’s
high casualty rate; but Wayne was intent on displaying his support for the war and
making a statement about American ideals.
Wayne’s final film was the 1976 The Shootist. Directed by Don Siegel (Dirty Harry,
1971), the film told the story of the last stand of an aging gunfighter dying of cancer,
an ironic narrative twist as it turned out, as Wayne’s own health was failing at the time
he made the picture. Although the film received critical acclaim from Variety and the
Hollywood Reporter, it lagged at the box office and failed to be the comeback vehicle
Wayne hoped it would be.
By the end of his career, John Wayne had appeared in more than 250 films, starring
in 142 of them and dying in only four. Wayne, perhaps more than any other actor,
tapped into the folklore of the American West and the imagery of a new frontier. His
characters championed good over evil, overcame adversity at great odds, and gallantly
opposed all foes. Among his western classics, in addition to his films with John Ford,
are Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), Rio Bravo (1959), El Dorado (1966), and Rio
Lobo (1970); and Henry Hathaway’s North to Alaska (1960), The Sons of Katie Elder
(1965), and True Grit (1969), for which Wayne won the Academy Award for Best
Actor in a Leading Role.
During his lifetime, Wayne was the recipient of numerous other honors, as well: a
Golden Globe Award for True Grit; four People’s Choice Awards for most popular
motion picture actor from 1975–1978; and four Western Heritage Awards, for The
Alamo, The Comancheros, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and True Grit. He was
inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy Museum
in 1974, and was also awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 1541 Vine
Street. Outside the motion picture industry, Wayne’s spoken-word album, America,

848
 Wayne, John

Why I Love Her (1973), was a best seller in both the year of its release and in 2001,
when it was rereleased after the terrorist attacks of September 11. The album was also
a Grammy nominee in 1973.
Wayne died of lung and stomach cancer on June 11, 1979. He was posthumously
awarded the Congressional Gold Medal that year, at the behest of Senator Barry
Goldwater, with the inscription “John Wayne, American.” The following year, in
1980, then-president Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
America’s highest civilian honor. The actor continued to garner posthumous awards
and recognition over the next three decades. Ranked fifth in Entertainment Weekly’s
“Greatest Movie Stars of All Time” list and fourth in Premiere magazine’s list of the
same name, Wayne has also consistently appeared in the top 10 of the Harris Poll’s list-
ings of America’s favorite movie stars since the poll’s inception in 1963—including
garnering a top-10 spot in 2003, nearly a quarter of a century after his death. The
American Film Institute ranked him 13th in its list of the “50 Greatest Screen
Legends,” and he was also ranked 16th in Empire magazine’s (United Kingdom)
October 1997 “Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time” list. Quigley Publications, publisher,
since 1932, of the annual Top 10 Money-Making Stars, cited Wayne as North
America’s Top box-office star, based on his inclusion 25 times between 1949 and
1974. The actor is also pictured on a U.S. Postal Service commemorative stamp, issued
in March 1990. The stamp, one of a series designed to honor classic Hollywood films
released in 1939, depicts Wayne in his role as the Ringo Kid, in Stagecoach. The John
Wayne Museum, located in Wayne’s birth town of Winterset, houses memorabilia and
resources on the actor’s career, and hosts an annual celebration on the anniversary of
the actor’s birth that is consistently attended by thousands.

Selected Filmography
The Shootist (1976); Rooster Cogburn (1975); Brannigan (1975); McQ (1974); Cahill U.S.
Marshal (1973); The Train Robbers (1973); The Cowboys (1972); Big Jake (1971); Rio Lobo
(1970); Chisum (1970); The Undefeated (1969); True Grit (1969); The Green Berets (1968);
The War Wagon (1967); El Dorado (1966); The Sons of Katie Elder (1965); In Harm’s Way
(1965); The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965); Circus World (1964); McLintock! (1963); Donovan’s
Reef (1963); How the West Was Won (1962); The Longest Day (1962); Hatari! (1962); The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); The Comancheros (1961); North to Alaska (1960); The Alamo
(1960); The Horse Soldiers (1959); Rio Bravo (1959); The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958); Jet
Pilot (1957); The Wings of Eagles (1957); The Searchers (1956); The Conqueror (1956); Blood
Alley (1955); The Sea Chase (1955); The High and the Mighty (1954); Hondo (1953); Big Jim
McLain (1952); The Quiet Man (1952); Flying Leathernecks (1951); Operation Pacific (1951);
Rio Grande (1950); Sands of Iwo Jima (1949); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); 3 Godfathers
(1948); Red River (1948); Fort Apache (1948); Angel and the Badman (1947); They Were Expend-
able (1945); Back to Bataan (1945); The Fighting Seabees (1944); Reunion in France (1942);
Pittsburgh (1942); Flying Tigers (1942); Reap the Wild Wind (1942); Seven Sinners (1940);
The Long Voyage Home (1940); Dark Command (1940); Allegheny Uprising (1939); The Big Trail
(1930)

849
Weber, Lois

References
Buscombe, Edward, ed. The BFI Companion to the Western. New York: Atheneum, 1988.
Davis, Ronald, L. The Life and Times of John Wayne. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2001.
Holland, Ted. B Western Actors Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997.
Munn, Michael. John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth. New York: New American Library
(NAL), 2004.
Roberts, Randy, and James S. Olson. John Wayne: American. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1997.

—Cynthia J. Miller

WEBER, LOIS. Lois Weber was the first American woman to direct a full-length
feature film, The Merchant of Venice (1914). She made significant contributions to
the nascent medium, creating a prolific body of work and earning enormous respect
from her male counterparts. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1882, Weber moved
to New York hoping to start a career in music. Unsuccessful, she became a street-corner
evangelist and a stage actor. Her film career began in 1905 at the Gaumont Film Com-
pany. After marrying actor Phillip Smalley in 1906, Weber left her public life in film
and became a homemaker. Returning to her career shortly thereafter, she and Smalley
took over the Rex Film Company from Edwin S. Porter in 1911. It was here that she
acquired a thorough knowledge of the filmmaking process.
During most of the 1910s, Weber was under contract with Universal Studios, even-
tually becoming their highest-paid director. Universal financed a private studio for her
and granted her total artistic freedom. She became one of the studio’s biggest money-
makers with works such as Where Are My Children? (1916), a film about abortion that
eventually earned $3 million. Weber ultimately left Universal, establishing her own
production company in 1917. She then signed a contract with Famous Players-
Lasky, earning $50,000 per film; but her contract was dropped when her films proved
unprofitable. She rejoined Universal in 1923.
Weber’s films were known for provocative themes. The People vs. John Doe (1916)
addressed capital punishment, Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1917) celebrated birth
control advocate Margaret Sanger, and Shoes (1916) exposed dangers resulting from
unequal pay for working women. Initially, her willingness to explore deeply conten-
tious themes lured audiences and generated high revenues, despite problems with cen-
sorship boards.
Weber saw the cinema as a vehicle for evangelism, believing earnestly that film
should function as a form of social uplift. Her cinematic sermons, aimed at middle-
class audiences, challenged attitudes about social issues of the day. Her goal was not
to provide commercial entertainment, but to encourage her viewers to involve them-
selves in progressive causes. Thus, she not only tried to improve the public reputation
of film as an art, she also used the medium to make audiences more socially aware.
The Blot (1921) is considered Weber’s masterpiece. The film focused on a proud but
poor family trying to avoid charity. Her films often condemned capitalistic materialism
and linked consumerism with sexual exploitation. Another theme Weber examined

850
 Weber, Lois

regularly in films such as Hypocrites (1915) was hypocrisy in business, religion, and
politics.
Significantly, Weber created women-centered narratives hoping to spur her female
viewers to become engaged in social reform. She believed that women’s superior spir-
ituality would allow them to effect significant social change. Her idealized selfless her-
oines were contrasted with materialistic modern women. Films such as The Haunted
Bride (1913), Woman’s Burden (1914), Idle Wives (1916), and Two Wise Wives
(1921) explored the place of women in a male-dominated society.
Weber was not a feminist, refraining from participation in the suffrage movement
active at the time. She never advocated alternatives to domesticity; nor did she recom-
mend fighting social inequities through political activity. Instead, she saw her filmic
indictments of social problems as moral and not political statements. In the end, how-
ever, her pious moralizing increasingly began to be perceived as overly preachy. Her
stereotypically gendered characters and the depictions of the lives they led seemed
hopelessly out of step with the spirit of the Roaring Twenties. She eventually lost her
production company, divorced her husband, survived a nervous breakdown, remar-
ried, and ultimately divorced again.
After a seven-year hiatus, Weber directed her final film, White Heat (1934), a work
about miscegenation. The film was poorly received. She finally resorted to taking work
as a script doctor in order to support herself. Once a pioneering filmmaker, Weber died
in Hollywood in relative obscurity on November 13, 1939.

Selected Filmography
White Heat (1934); The Angel of Broadway (1927); Topsy and Eva (1927); Sensation Seekers
(1927); The Marriage Clause (1926); A Chapter in Her Life (1923); What Do Men Want?
(1921); The Blot (1921); Too Wise Wives (1921); What’s Worth While? (1921); To Please One
Woman (1920); Life’s Mirror (1920); Mum’s the Word (1920); Forbidden (1919); Borrowed
Clothes (1918); For Husbands Only (1918); The Doctor and the Woman (1918); The Price of a
Good Time (1917); Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1917); Even As You and I (1917); The Boyhood
He Forgot (1917); The Face Downstairs (1917); The Gilded Life (1916); The Rock of Riches
(1916); The People vs. John Doe (1916); The Celebrated Stielow Case (1916); Saving the Family
Name (1916); Shoes (1916); Where Are My Children? (1916); Jewel (1915); A Cigarette—That’s
All (1915); Scandal (1915); Hypocrites (1915); It’s No Laughing Matter (1915); Helping Mother
(1914); The Merchant of Venice (1914); Woman’s Burden (1914); The Female of the Species
(1914); The Traitor (1914); The Haunted Bride (1913); The Rosary (1913); Faraway Fields
(1912); A Japanese Idyll (1912); An Old Fashioned Girl (1912); The Greater Christian (1912);
The Troubadour’s Triumph (1912); The Bargain (1912); Fine Feathers (1912); Angels Unaware
(1912); The Heiress (1911); A Heroine of ’76 (1911)

References
Parchesky, Jennifer. “Lois Weber’s The Blot: Rewriting Melodrama, Reproducing the Middle
Class.” Cinema Journal 39, 1999: 37–38.

851
Welles, Orson

Slater, Thomas. “Transcending Boundaries: Lois Weber and the Discourse Over Women’s Roles
in the Teens and Twenties.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, 2001: 257–71.
Slide, Anthony. Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History. Westport, CT: Green-
wood, 1996.
Stamp, Shelley. “Lois Weber, Progressive Cinema, and the Fate of the Work-a-Day Girl in
Shoes.” Camera Obscura 56, 2004: 140–70.

—Jamie Capuzza

WELLES, ORSON. George Orson Welles, a dominant directorial personality whose

films embodied the auteur theory of modernist cinema, was also a radio entertainer,
political activist, magician, and commercial actor. By the time of his death in 1985, he
had directed more than 40 film and television projects and acted in over 100, ranging
from Jane Eyre (1944) to The Muppet Movie (1979). Throughout his career, he had dif-
ficulty completing and marketing films, in part because of his unorthodox working style
and increasingly experimental cinematic technique. Ultimately, he left a multifaceted
entertainment legacy by developing a distinct visual style, establishing new guidelines
for cinematic adaptations of literature and initiating postmodern explorations of the line

Orson Welles delivers a radio broadcast from a New York studio in 1938. On October 30, 1938, he
performed an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. The realistic account of an invasion
from Mars caused thousands of listeners to panic, many of whom believed that an actual attack
was taking place. (AP/Wide World Photos)

852
 Welles, Orson

between truth and fiction in mass media. Welles was best known for his first completed
feature film, Citizen Kane (1941), which tops the American Film Institute’s list of great-
est American movies of all time; but he was also widely recognized for his infamous 1938
War of the Worlds radio broadcast and his resonant voice in commercials.
Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on May 6, 1915. The strained mar-
riage between his entrepreneurial father and musically inclined mother resulted in his
being raised in part by a family friend, Dr. Maurice Bernstein. Following his mother’s
death when he was nine, Welles enrolled in the Todd School for Boys, where he met
another mentor, Roger Hill, and explored magic and theater, initiating an interest that
would mark his whole career—spectacular adaptation of the classics. Hill later collabo-
rated with the teenage Welles on the collection Everybody’s Shakespeare, a performance
guide to Shakespeare. Throughout his career, Welles adapted Shakespeare, including
Othello (1952), several different stage and screen versions of Macbeth, and his
composite view of Falstaff, Chimes at Midnight (1966). He was working on a version
of King Lear at the time of his death. Welles’s Shakespeare productions in particular
reflect his belief that art should “have an educational function and serve a social pur-
pose” (Anderegg, 1999).
Following graduation and his father’s death, Welles insinuated his way into per-
forming at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, where he met Hilton Edwards and Micheál
MacLiammóir. Both would later appear in his film adaptation of Othello, winner of
the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1952, and in the documentary Filming Othello (1978).
Upon his return to the United States he secured work with Katherine Cornell, which
brought him to the attention of John Houseman, who cast him in the 1935 stage adap-
tation of Archibald MacLeish’s Panic.
From 1936–37, Houseman and Welles worked for the Federal Theatre Project,
where they produced a Haitian Macbeth with an all-black cast, as well as Horse Eats
Hat and The Cradle Will Rock. Each of these productions directly addressed contempo-
rary politics through an experimental dramatic form. In 1937, Houseman and Welles
founded the Mercury Theatre. They launched the Mercury with a front-page mani-
festo in the New York Times, articulating their goal of undertaking new approaches to
the adaptation of classic literature for the masses.
In 1938, Welles expanded the Mercury Theatre on radio in the series First Person Sin-
gular: Mercury Theatre on the Air. Welles and Houseman funded their Mercury projects
with income Welles derived from his acting roles on radio in shows such as The Shadow.
Welles later recalled, “The radio loot gave us an edge” in terms of staging high-quality
productions at a rapid rate of speed” (Welles, Bogdanovich, and Rosenbaum, 1998).
The Theatre expanded to become Mercury Productions when Welles moved to
Hollywood. From 1937 to 1952, Mercury Productions created a body of work across
stage, screen, and radio that changed industry concepts of how mass media could make
classic literature relevant to audiences. The Mercury produced a fascist Julius Caesar, the
racially controversial Native Son, and an expansive film version of Othello. Welles’s inno-
vative use of journalistic style in his 1938 radio version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds
created panic among some listeners who believed that Martians were actually invading
New Jersey. The intense media scrutiny that followed this broadcast led Campbell’s Soup

853
Welles, Orson

to sponsor the radio series, which was renamed Campbell Playhouse. By the age of 23,
Welles had created a unique artistic persona and a trademark brand of narrative that
invited publicity and allowed him to move to Hollywood as an actor/director/writer
with a record-setting contract in terms of both money and power
Welles’s RKO contract stipulated that he write, direct, and act in an original
production each year. He immediately violated this RKO mandate before he even
began to shoot Citizen Kane, as he co-wrote the screenplay for the film with Herman
Mankiewicz. The film proved troublesome for RKO before it was ever released, as
rumors circulated that Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, was a thinly veiled por-
trayal of the powerful publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst went so
far as to try to suppress the film’s release; he failed, and Kane went on to be hailed by
critics as one of the greatest films ever made.
With its tightly woven narrative structure, innovative cinematography (largely the
result of Welles’s collaboration with Gregg Toland), and thematic exploration of the
human experience, Citizen Kane helped establish a new vocabulary for cinema. His
use of deep focus, high-contrast lighting, and long takes particularly influenced other
filmmakers. The film was not initially an audience favorite, however, performing
poorly at the box office. This raised concern among RKO’s studio heads, especially
because Welles had already spent huge amounts of their money adapting a never-
completed version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for the screen.
Welles’s failure to complete Heart of Darkness set the tone for what was to come: the
conception and initiation of innovative cinematic projects that were never fully real-
ized. Heart of Darkness, for example, stumbled badly, as Welles cast himself in both
lead roles and attempted to use the camera to represent the audience’s gaze—equating
the “I” of the narrator with the viewer’s eye. After extensive preparatory scripting, cast-
ing, research, and filming, the project was shelved at a cost of over $160,000. Welles
recycled parts of it on radio, but this failure undermined his later RKO projects.
Indeed, his adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was
reedited without his approval while he was filming his never released “Rio Project,”
It’s All True, in Brazil. Welles disowned the studio cut of the film, and Ambersons was
the last of his projects released by RKO.
Welles’s subsequent film work reveals a creative working style at odds with the stu-
dio film production process in Hollywood. Always a collaborative filmmaker with
enthusiasm for the initial phases of a project but impatient with the details of manage-
ment, marketing, and release, Welles increasingly chose cinematic experimentation
over commercial success. He remained politically active during World War II, broad-
casting many antifascist and pro-ally wartime radio shows, including Hello Americans,
which used material from his time in Brazil to encourage Pan-American identity.
He maintained a high profile in Hollywood, and married (and divorced) actress Rita
Hayworth, with whom he co-starred in The Lady from Shanghai (1947). His last
project before leaving the United States for Europe was a film adaptation of Macbeth
(1948), which used some structural features of his Federal Theatre Project adaptation
but returned the play to its original Scottish setting. Ultimately, he moved abroad to
work on projects such as his ongoing adaptation of Othello and the Harry Lime radio

854
 Welles, Orson

series, which was loosely based on the character he played in The Third Man (1949).
This series inspired the film Mr. Arkadin (1955), which exists in multiple forms, and
was variously released and distributed in Spain, Britain, and the United States. Welles’s
third wife, Paola Mori, played the role of daughter to his Mr. Arkadin in this film.
Welles had a chance to reconcile with Hollywood while making Touch of Evil (1958),
which has been described as a “daringly expressionistic nightmare vision disguised as a
B-movie crime thriller” (McBride, 2006). But on this project, too, Welles found him-
self at odds with the Hollywood studio establishment. Universal Studios barred him
from the lot during postproduction, and he again disavowed the version of the film that
the studio released. Returning to Europe, he was embraced as an avant-garde director
by filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. While filming his 1962 adapta-
tion of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, he met Oja Kodar, his artistic and romantic part-
ner for the last portion of his life. From 1967–69, he worked on The Deep with Kodar
and Jeanne Moreau. Welles returned to Hollywood in 1970, where he met another col-
laborator, cinematographer Gary Graver, who helped him shift his cinematic style in yet
another direction. He now became increasingly interested in exploring the boundaries
of documentary form and its potential for self-representation, manipulation, and self-
critique. His later films F for Fake (1974), Filming Othello (1978), and the unfinished
The Other Side of the Wind reflect this preoccupation.
Welles left a distinctive legacy to the entertainment industry: the development of a
cinematic rhetoric that bridged the movements of modernism and postmodernism.
He established a visual style that influenced later filmmakers, and his exploration of
the line between fact and fiction remains a central theme in contemporary entertain-
ment. Welles’s interests in the fact/fiction divide were vividly realized in his 1938
War of the Worlds broadcast and reiterated in It’s All True, F for Fake, and Filming
Othello. He became adept at representing the state of modern consciousness as it
devolved toward postmodern disorientation, and his characters often portray the diffi-
culty of constructing any single “truth” when it comes to personal or public history.
Equal parts huckster and literary master, Welles left behind more unfinished direc-
torial projects than completed ones, and he can be seen as an early proponent of inde-
pendent filmmaking. He ultimately became as famous for playing himself as for
producing, directing, or writing material. His resonant voice, which had been so
remarkable in his radio broadcasts, became his logo through his famous Gallo wine
slogan, “We will sell no wine before its time,” making him a cultural touchstone.
Welles received an honorary Academy Award for superlative artistry in 1970. In
1975, the American Film Institute recognized his work with a Lifetime Achievement
Award. The year before his death, the Directors Guild also gave him a Lifetime
Achievement Award, its highest honor. Welles died at his home in Los Angeles on
October 10, 1985. He is buried on a private estate in Ronda, Spain.

Selected Filmography
The Trial (1962); Touch of Evil (1958); Mr. Arkadin (1955); Othello (1952); Macbeth (1948);
The Stranger (1946); The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); Citizen Kane (1941)

855
Wenders, Wim

References
Anderegg, Michael. Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1999.
Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: Volume 1, The Road to Xanadu. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: Volume 2, Hello Americans. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Naremore, James. The Magic World of Orson Welles. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
1978.
Naremore, James. Citizen Kane: A Casebook. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004.
McBride, Joseph. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Welles, Orson, with Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum. This is Orson Welles. New
York: Da Capo, 1998.
—Marguerite Rippy

WENDERS, WIM. Wim Wenders ranks among the most influential German film-
makers of the postwar era, having written, directed, or produced more than 30 feature
and documentary films, including Kings of the Road (1976), The State of Things (1982),
Paris, Texas (1983), and Wings of Desire (1987), which won him the Best Director
award at the Cannes Film Festival. Generally associated with the New German Cinema
movement, Wenders has helped revitalize and internationalize German film produc-
tion. His stories, and the cinematic techniques he uses to tell them, tend to focus on
the individual’s search for meaning in postwar urban society.
Wenders was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, on August 14, 1945, and grew up
learning little about his nation’s recent past or cultural identity. Like most of his gener-
ation, Wenders was strongly influenced by the Americanization—via rock and roll,
Hollywood, and U.S. occupation forces—of German popular culture. At an early
age, Wenders recognized the cinema’s capacity to preserve what seemed to be the fleet-
ing moments of rapid-paced industrial society. Although he considered becoming a
doctor or a clergyman, in 1967 he enrolled in Munich’s new University of Television
and Film. As a student, Wenders wrote, directed, filmed, and edited numerous shorts,
culminating his studies with the feature-length Summer in the City (1970). By the time
he graduated, he had come to see film as a medium by which to challenge rather than
entertain audiences.
After graduation, Wenders became a vocal member of the New German Cinema
movement, which was critical of the German film industry’s sentimental Heimatfilme
(home-land film), with its avoidance of controversial topics. Following New Cinema
mentors Alexander Kluge and Volker Schlöndorff, Wenders sought to make pictures that
explored the human condition by troping traditional narrative structures in favor of
modernist explorations of cultural identity and ambiguity. The young filmmaker was
also inspired by American directors such as John Ford, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas
Ray; the latter became Wenders’s collaborator and subject in Lightning over Water (1980).
Concerned by the growing influence of for-profit studios and distributors, Wenders
co-founded a filmmakers’ cooperative, the Authors Film Publishing Group, in 1971.

856
 Wenders, Wim

German film director Wim Wenders looks on during an interview with AFP at the EU headquarters
in Brussels on October 26, 2010. (AFP/Getty Images)

That same year, he made The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which won the Film
Critics’ Award at the Venice Film Festival and demonstrated his characteristic slow-
moving camera work, long takes, and visual allusions to off-camera space. In 1975,
Wenders’s Wrong Move earned German Film Prizes in Gold for Director, Screenplay,
Editor, Director of Photography, Music, and Actors. A year later, Kings of the Road
won the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes, while The American Friend won the
1977 German Critics’ Prize. Moving to Hollywood in 1978, Wenders directed and
produced award-winning English-language features such as Paris, Texas, which won
a Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984. Since then, he has increasingly blended feature
film and documentary techniques. Examples include Tokyo Ga, his 1985 film about
Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, and Buena Vista Social Club (1998).
Wenders rarely offers interpretative or theoretical contexts for his work, instead
insisting that he aims simply to document the perpetual instability—and thus
insecurity—of contemporary life through what he has called “contemplative cinema”
(Kolker and Beicken, 1993). While critics have suggested that many of his films indi-
rectly explore Germany’s own struggle to come to terms with its postwar identity,
Wenders claims that the isolation and uncertainty expressed in his pictures are simply
foundational elements of the contemporary human experience.
In addition to writing numerous books about cinema, Wenders continues to direct
and produce films, and to assert the importance of independent production compa-
nies. From 1991 to 1996, he chaired the European Film Academy, and later served
as the Academy’s president. Both critics and advocates recognize him for his integrative
cinematic styles and sobering yet sympathetic depictions of modern sociological and

857
Wilder, Billy

political problems. These themes are showcased in his Los Angeles trilogy: The Million
Dollar Hotel (2000), The End of Violence (1997), and Land of Plenty (2004); and in his
2008 film Palermo Shooting. In recognition of his stylistic contributions to modern cin-
ema, Wenders received the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Prize in 1991 and a Lifetime
Achievement Award at San Francisco’s 2009 Berlin and Beyond Film Festival.

Selected Filmography
If Buildings Could Talk (2010); Palermo Shooting (2008); Don’t Come Knocking (2005); Land of
Plenty (2004); The Soul of a Man (2003); Other Side of the Road (2003); Ode to Cologne: A Rock
’N’ Roll Film (2002); The Million Dollar Hotel (2000); Buena Vista Social Club (1999); Willie
Nelson at the Teatro (1998); The End of Violence (1997); Lumière and Company (1995); A Trick
of Light (1995); Beyond the Clouds (1995); Lisbon Story (1994); Faraway, So Close! (1993); Wings
of Desire (1987); Tokyo-Ga (1985); Paris, Texas (1984); Docu Drama (1984); Der Stand der
Dinge (1982); Reverse Angle (1982); Hammett (1982); Lightning Over Water (1980); The American
Friend (1977); Kings of the Road (1976); Falsche Bewegung (1975); Alice in the Cities (1974); The
Scarlet Letter (1973); The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972); Summer in the City (1970);
Silver City (1969); Same Player Shoots Again (1968); Klappenfilm (1968); Victor I. (1968); Schauplätze
(1967)

References
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
Kolker, Robert Phillip, and Peter Beicken. The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and
Desire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Rentschler, Eric ed. West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices. New York: Holmes
and Meier, 1988.

—Kimberly A. Redding

WILDER, BILLY. Samuel Wilder—better known by his nickname “Billy”—was

born on June 22, 1906 in Sucha, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Poland). He is con-
sidered one of the most talented Jewish writers and directors of the many who, in the
1930s, sought refuge from Hitler’s Germany in Hollywood. Wilder’s career spanned
five decades, and during that time, in addition to winning six Academy Awards, he
established a reputation for verbal wit and for sharp, often satiric, observation of
American manners and mores.
Wilder’s career began in Germany with a collaborative script for the movie
Menschen am Sonntag/People on Sunday (1929), on which he worked with fellow film-
makers Robert Siodmak and Fred Zinnemann. This slice-of-life, pseudo-documentary
glimpse of middle-class couples on an ordinary summer’s day was followed by a dozen
additional scripts before Wilder fled to Paris, where he co-wrote and directed Mauvaise
graine (1933), starring the celebrated French actress Danielle Darrieux. From France,
Wilder made his way to the United States, and though knowing little English, he

858
 Wilder, Billy

was able to find work in Holly-

wood as a story writer, and soon
after a successful screenwriter.
Wilder was especially fortunate,
from the beginning, in his choice
of literary collaborators, two of
whom worked with him on many
of his most successful films:
Charles Brackett (from 1938
until 1950) and I. A. L. (“Izzy”)
Diamond, who both co-wrote
Wilder’s scripts and worked as
his producer from 1959 until the
1980s.
Wilder was equally fortunate,
however, in his choice of a direc-
torial mentor, Ernst Lubitsch, a
fellow expatriate and an accom-
plished director of light com-
edies. Of the several screenplays
that Wilder wrote for Lubitsch,
undoubtedly the most successful
was Ninotchka (1939), which fea-
tured the international queen of
cinema Greta Garbo, in her first The enfant terrible of the American cinema, Billy Wilder was
comedic role. Playing against one of the most successful writer/directors in Hollywood,
type, Garbo appears at the begin- applying European sophistication to “naive” American sub-
ning of this satiric romantic com- jects. Few films display the wit and cynicism of Wilder’s best,
edy as a Soviet agent on her first which include Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. (AP/
trip to Paris, incapable of any Wide World Photos)
emotion except contempt for the
capitalist West, only to find herself falling in love, almost against her will, with a
decadent playboy, Count Leon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas). Wilder’s script dwells
humorously on the contrast between emotion and ideology, celebrating the power of
the former and the hollowness of the latter.
Like his contemporaries John Huston and Preston Sturges, Wilder leaped at the
chance to make the transition from screenwriting to directing, and after directing
two rather unexceptional films—a comedy, The Major and the Minor (1942), and a
wartime drama, Five Graves to Cairo (1943)—Wilder broke new ground with what is
now regarded as a film noir masterpiece, Double Indemnity (1944). Based on James
M. Cain’s enormously popular crime novel of the same name, Double Indemnity
repeatedly challenged the Production Code, depicting a pair of adulterous lovers—
played brilliantly by Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck—who execute a murder
before finally turning on each other. To create a script worthy of such literary material,

859
Wilder, Billy

Wilder turned to mystery-novelist Raymond Chandler, after Charles Brackett refused

to have anything to do with characters as sordid and violent as Cain’s, and the result
was a new type of dialogue—snappy and cynical—and a voice-over narration that con-
veyed equal amounts of introspective irony and disenchantment as the criminal pro-
tagonist foresees his own tragic fate, perfectly capturing the darkness and world-
weariness of the era.
Wilder carried much the same tone over into his next three major films, Lost Week-
end (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Ace in the Hole (1951). Of these three, Lost
Weekend is perhaps the least despairing. Its protagonist, Don Birnam (played by Ray
Milland, a role for which he won the Academy Award), is an aspiring writer and
seemingly hopeless alcoholic, whose descent into addiction is traced in a series of
increasingly surreal sequences. In spite of its downbeat subject, and studio jitters over
its release, the film was surprisingly popular with audiences—if only because it holds
out the prospect of recovery at its conclusion—and earned Wilder Best Director and
Best Screenplay Academy Awards. Sunset Blvd., for which Wilder earned (once again)
an Oscar for Best Screenplay, offers no reassuring possibility of moral redemption for
its antihero, Joe Gillis (William Holden), who is seen lying dead in a swimming pool
at the beginning of the film, and whose life unfolds in a continuous series of flashbacks.
Like Don Birnam, Gillis is an aspiring writer, but one who allows himself to be drawn
into a romantic relationship with a faded movie queen, played in full diva mode by
silent film star Gloria Swanson. Swanson’s Norma Desmond was sufficiently close to
reality to pique its audience’s curiosity as to where fiction began and real life left
off, and while the movie may not have entirely succeeded as Swanson’s “return” to
Hollywood after many years of retirement, it certainly remains one of the most
indelible screen portraits of an artistic personality driven mad by the destructive power
of fame. Sunset Blvd. is unquestionably Wilder’s harshest critique of the Hollywood
subculture, from which he frequently tried to detach himself.
In contrast to Sunset Blvd., Ace in the Hole never quite found its audience in the
1950s, and though its portrait of media exploitation and amoral journalists is better
received today, its cynicism was seen by contemporary audiences as over the top—and
only partly as the result of Kirk Douglas’s scenery-chewing performance. Wilder’s next
major film, Stalag 17 (1953), enjoyed a very different fate, winning William Holden an
Academy Award for Best Actor. As an adaptation of a successful theatrical play, Stalag
17 succeeds at several levels, combining comic realism with suspense in its depiction
of a prisoner-of-war camp and a host of colorful and largely unheroic characters. Four
years later, Wilder turned to yet another theatrical play for inspiration, Agatha Christie’s
Witness for the Prosecution (1957), which features two extraordinary performances by
Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich, and a plot twist that even Christie admired.
Wilder’s films of the middle to late 1950s consist mostly of romantic comedies,
often tinged with mild social satire, and among them Sabrina (1954) and The Seven
Year Itch (1955) proved to be the most successful. By this time, Wilder had left Para-
mount and parted company with longtime collaborator Charles Brackett, and with
his new writing partner, I. A. L. Diamond, he created two of the most brilliant comic
films of his career: Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960). Some Like It

860
 Wilder, Billy

Hot is often described as a screwball comedy, combining slapstick with a slightly

absurd, fast-paced narrative, but its relentless parody of 1930s-style gangster movies
is only one source of laughter that Wilder cleverly exploits; his witty exploration of
male-female identity issues (via a series of cross-dressing episodes) attracts even more
attention today. When Joe E. Brown, a many-times-divorced millionaire who is about
to marry a woman he knows only as “Daphne” (played hilariously by Jack Lemmon),
utters the last line of the film—“Nobody’s perfect”—having just discovered that his
intended bride is really a groom, Wilder’s film rises far above the level of inane humor
one associates with this genre and enters the realm of sublime comic humanism, where
all contradictions are reconciled through laughter.
The Apartment ventures into somewhat more serious territory, while retaining a fun-
damentally comic view of love and romance. Building on sociological critiques of the
1950s that depicted corporate life in the United States as conformist and soulless,
Wilder offers us a portrait of the business world as a place of sexual as well as moral
exploitation. By placing two slightly pathetic but lovable losers at the center of his film
(Shirley MacLaine as Fran the elevator girl and Jack Lemmon as C. C. “Bud” Baxter, a
very junior executive on the make), Wilder offers his audience a pair of characters with
whom to empathize, and through whom the conflicts between ambition and integrity—
or more pointedly between bosses and workers—can be resolved and redeemed by true
love. Once again, Wilder’s perspective is that of the social outsider, viewing the manners
and mores of his adopted society with a mixture of sympathy and scorn.
The Apartment, though it garnered yet another set of Academy Awards for Wilder
(Best Director, Picture, and Screenplay), represents a turning point in Wilder’s career.
None of the films that followed achieved anything like the critical esteem or popular
success that had followed him up to this point, and he found it increasingly difficult
to connect with audiences whose taste in movies had evidently changed. Irma la Douce
(1963) and The Fortune Cookie (1966) reunited Wilder with Jack Lemmon in films
whose combination of farce and satire remains uneven, and the forced humor of flops
like Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) and Buddy, Buddy (1981) signaled to many in Hollywood
that Wilder’s days as an active and creative writer/director had definitely passed. Yet, in
spite of the evident decline of creative energy and inspiration in his last films, Wilder’s
reputation as a comic auteur and as a superb “actor’s director” grew in the last decades
of the twentieth century, and today his films routinely appear in “top 100 film” lists
throughout the world. Wilder died in Los Angeles on March 22, 2002.

Selected Filmography
Buddy, Buddy (1981); Fedora (1978); The Front Page (1974); Avanti! (1972); The Private Life of
Sherlock Holmes (1970); The Fortune Cookie (1966); Kiss Me, Stupid (1964); Irma la Douce
(1963); One, Two, Three (1961); The Apartment (1960); Some Like It Hot (1959); Witness for
the Prosecution (1957); Love in the Afternoon (1957); The Spirit of St. Louis (1957); The Seven
Year Itch (1955); Sabrina (1954); Stalag 17 (1953); The Big Carnival (1951); Sunset Blvd.
(1950); A Foreign Affair (1948); The Emperor Waltz (1948); The Lost Weekend (1945); Double
Indemnity (1944); Five Graves to Cairo (1943); The Major and the Minor (1942)

861
Williams, John

References
Chandler, Charlotte. Nobody’s Perfect. Billy Wilder: A Personal Biography. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2002.
Hopp, Glenn. Billy Wilder: The Complete Films. New York: Taschen, 2003.

—Robert Platzner

WILLIAMS, JOHN. John Williams, one of the premier composers of film music,
has written soundtracks for over 100 motion pictures. As Williams himself has made
clear, successful composers for films attempt to write music that will evoke emotions
from audiences while not overwhelming the movie-viewing experience. Williams has
certainly accomplished this, as he has produced some of the most powerful and popu-
lar musical themes in the history of cinema.
Born John Towner Williams on February 8, 1932, in Long Island, New York, the
composer began to play the piano at age eight. When the family moved to Los Angeles
in 1948, Williams studied with pianist-arranger Bobby Van Epps. During his service in
the U.S. Air Force (1951–54), he conducted ensembles and arranged music for a variety

Composer and conductor John Williams leads the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra during the
grand opening celebration at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando Resort
theme park in Orlando, Florida, June 16, 2010. Williams composed many film scores, including
those for Star Wars, Superman, Home Alone, the first three Harry Potter movies, and Steven
Spielberg’s feature films such as those in the Indiana Jones series, Schindler’s List, E.T.: The Extra-
Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, and Jaws. (AP/Wide World Photos)

862
 Williams, John

of performing groups. He returned to New York, studied at Jiulliard, and played in vari-
ous jazz clubs. He later moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at UCLA, where he studied
composition with Arthur Olaf Andersen and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
In 1956, he became a studio pianist, working with film composers Alfred Newman,
Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann, and Henry Mancini. During the mid-1960s, he
arranged and conducted music for Columbia Records. He scored the music for com-
edies such as John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1964) and How to Steal a Million
(1966); he also had subordinate compositional roles in films such as Goodbye, Mr.
Chips (1969) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971).
During the 1970s, he composed some of his most memorable themes; these were
often played at crucial moments during iconic films in order to signify both the literal
and figurative presence of a particular character or to evoke emotion from audiences.
One of his earliest efforts was for Cowboys (1972), a coming-of-age western starring
John Wayne that celebrated the myths of the American male and of America’s “mani-
fest destiny.” Two of his most stirring and provocative early themes were those for Jaws
(1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which, respectively, reminded
audiences that aliens from either the sea or the sky were always lurking close at hand.
It may be argued that Williams’s music that has had the greatest impact on movie-
goers is that which he produced for the double trilogy Star Wars (1977–2005). In com-
posing the different thematic musical elements for these pictures, Williams was seeking
to define a “strong melodic identification” between the filmic characters and audiences
(Byrd, 1997). With this in mind, he manipulated the music to reflect the mood. For
the heroic Jedi characters, for example, he composed themes befitting their idealized
status, the music soaring upwards. For conflict or for characters that had gone over
to the “dark side,” such as Darth Vader, he used minor modes, slower tempos, with
combined brass and percussion to suggest foreboding, military moods. For the fourth
film—the first episode of the second trilogy—The Phantom Menace (1999), Williams
was forced to coordinate his music with 2,000 special effects, a rate of about 17 per
minute. Even here, though, he demonstrated his artistic genius, cleverly inserting snip-
pets of themes that were well known to viewers who had watched the “earlier” episodes
in the series (the films of the “second” trilogy, while made long after the films of the
first trilogy, actually cover narrative material that predates the narrative materials that
are covered in the films of the first trilogy—thus, the films of the second trilogy are
actually “prequels” to the films of the first trilogy).
Significantly, Williams has been equally comfortable in scoring music for film genres as
divergent as science fiction (Jurassic Park, 1993), comedy (Home Alone, 1990), and history
(Schindler’s List, 1993). A romantic traditionalist in style, he does not rely on electronic or
synthesized sounds for machines, but emphasizes their “human” characteristics; in this way
he may be considered a composer in the mold of earlier cinematic composers like Elmer
Bernstein and Henry Mancini. Williams conducted his film music, Olympic fanfares,
and the compositions of many other composers as musical director of the Boston Pops
Orchestra between 1980 and 1993. In an interview with composer Irwin Bazelon, he
noted that the best filmmakers are inherently musical; producing a film, after all, suggested
Williams, is, in essence, a musical act (Bazelon, 1975).

863
Wyler, William

Selected Filmography
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008); Munich (2005); Memoirs of a Geisha
(2005); War of the Worlds (2005); Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (2005); The Termi-
nal (2004); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004); Catch Me If You Can (2002); Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002); Minority Report (2002); Star Wars: Episode II—Attack
of the Clones (2002); Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001); Artificial Intelligence: AI
(2001); The Patriot (2000); Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999); Stepmom
(1998); Saving Private Ryan (1998); Seven Years in Tibet (1997); The Lost World: Jurassic Park
(1997); Sleepers (1996); Nixon (1995); Sabrina (1995); Schindler’s List (1993); Jurassic Park
(1993); Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992); Far and Away (1992); JFK (1991); Hook
(1991); Home Alone (1990); Presumed Innocent (1990); Always (1989); Born on the Fourth of July
(1989); Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989); The Accidental Tourist (1988); Empire of the
Sun (1987); The Witches of Eastwick (1987); Space Camp (1986); The River (1984); Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984); Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi (1983); Monsi-
gnor (1982); E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982); Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); Star Wars: Episode
V—The Empire Strikes Back (1980); 1941 (1979); Dracula (1979); Superman (1978); Jaws 2
(1978); The Fury (1978); Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); Star Wars: Episode IV—A
New Hope (1977); Black Sunday (1977); Midway (1976); The Missouri Breaks (1976); Family
Plot (1976); Jaws (1975); The Eiger Sanction (1975); The Towering Inferno (1974); Earthquake
(1974); The Sugarland Express (1974); Cinderella Liberty (1973); The Paper Chase (1973); The
Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973); The Long Goodbye (1973); The Poseidon Adventure
(1972); The Cowboys (1972); Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

References
Bazelon, Irwin. Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,
1975.
Byrd, Craig L. Interview with John Williams. In Kendall, Lukas, ed. “Special Star Wars Issue.”
Film Score Monthly 2(1), 1997.
Darby, William, and Jack Du Bois. American Film Music: Major composers, Techniques, Trends,
1915–1990. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990.
Scheurer, Timothy E. “John Williams and Film Music Since 1971.” Popular Music and Society
21, 1997: 59–68.
—Ralph Hartsock

WYLER, WILLIAM. Director William Wyler was born on July 1, 1902, in

Mülhausen, a province of Alsace, which was then part of Germany. He immigrated
to the United States in the 1920s after his mother took him there to meet her cousin,
Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Studios. Nominated for 12 Academy Awards for
direction, he won 3 Oscars in the category, second only to John Ford’s 4 awards. His
films have won more Academy Awards for performances, sets, and music than any
other director in history.
As a young boy, after watching Feuillade’s Fantomas (1914) series, Wyler became
fascinated with film. When he arrived at Universal in the 1920s, he started at the

864
 Wyler, William

bottom, running errands, acting as an assistant prop man, and working on every aspect
of film production. The director’s bug caught him, and he eventually worked his way
up to the position of assistant director. He worked on such notable productions as
Lon Chaney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and the silent film version of Ben-
Hur (1925); he also began directing two-reel westerns, such as Crook Buster (1925),
at this time. His first major feature was a semi-talkie, The Love Trap (1929). Counselor
at Law (1933), which explored the then-taboo subject of anti-Semitism, is generally
regarded as his first serious film.
In 1935, Wyler formed one of the most successful producer/director partnerships in
film history when he joined with Samuel Goldwyn. His work with Goldwyn made
Wyler one of the most respected and sought-after directors in Hollywood. Their first
feature, These Three (1935), was based on Lillian Hellman’s Broadway hit, The Child-
ren’s Hour. Some criticized Goldwyn and Wyler for making the film, as the play had
been attacked for containing lesbian themes, even though Hellman denied this, main-
taining that her work was about the destructive power of a lie. The production went
forward, however, and Wyler would develop another important filmic relationship
while working on the picture, that with the brilliant cinematographer, Gregg Toland,
with whom Orson Welles would work on Citizen Kane.
Wyler’s next picture was Dodsworth (1936), adapted from a Sinclair Lewis novel of
the same name. This was his first film to receive Academy Award nominations. Wyler
then made the 1937 gangster picture Dead End, with Humphrey Bogart. Set in the
slums of New York, it was the first film to feature the Bowery Boys/Dead End Kids/
East Side Kids. In 1938, Wyler was loaned out to Warner Bros. to make the Southern
drama Jezebel, which featured Bette Davis. In 1939, he talked Goldwyn into making
what turned out to be one of the best film versions of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering
Heights; and in 1941, he worked on another Southern drama, Little Foxes, again with
Bette Davis. In 1942, Wyler made Mrs. Miniver, considered by many to be one of
his best films. Mrs. Miniver, which tells the story of the experiences of a British family
during World War II, was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to explore the
menace of Nazism. The film received 12 Oscar nominations, taking home 6 awards,
including the statue for Best Director for Wyler.
Interestingly, the same year that he made Mrs. Miniver, Wyler was commissioned as
a major in the United States Air Force. While stationed in England he produced docu-
mentaries, putting himself in harm’s way in order to gather air combat footage; indeed,
on a mission over Italy, he sustained injuries that left him partially deaf. After his return
to the United States, Wyler made two wartime documentaries, The Memphis Belle
(1944) and Thunderbolt (1947).
In 1946, Wyler directed what most consider his cinematic masterpiece, The Best
Years of Our Lives. Shot in deep focus by cinematographer Toland, the film follows
the lives of three veterans who return to their hometown and try to adjust to everyday
life. Featuring notable performances by Myrna Loy, Fredric March, and Dana
Andrews, The Best Years of Our Lives also starred Harold Russell, a nonprofessional
actor who had lost both hands when an explosive device detonated while he was mak-
ing a training film for the Army. Given hooks to replace his hands, Russell received an

865
Wyler, William

Academy Award for his portrayal of a disabled World War II veteran. In addition to
Russell’s award, the film won six other Oscars.
Feeling increasingly constrained working under Goldwyn, Wyler struck out on his
own in the late 1940s. His first production as an independent filmmaker was The Heiress
(1949), featuring Oliva de Havilland and Montgomery Clift. Throughout the 1950s,
Wyler made other notable pictures, including Carrie (1952), Desperate Hours (1955),
Friendly Persuasion (1956), and The Big Country (1958). He also directed Audrey
Hepburn in her breakthrough role in Roman Holiday in 1953; and in 1959, he made
the big-budget epic Ben-Hur, with Charlton Heston in the lead role. The highly successful
film brought MGM studios back from bankruptcy and garnered Wyler his third Best
Director Oscar.
During the 1960s, Wyler made the Children’s Hour (1961), The Collector (1965),
How to Steal a Million (1966), and the film that propelled Barbra Streisand to stardom,
Funny Girl (1968). His last film was the racially charged The Liberation of L. B. Jones,
which was released in 1970.
Perhaps Wyler’s greatest gift was as a cinematic storyteller. Working across genres,
he gained a reputation as a demanding director, but one who always maintained a
sense of dignity and respect on his sets. Known for the emotional quality that he
brought to his films, Wyler’s pictures continue to be extremely popular with audiences.
Heralded as one the greatest directors in film history—and one of the most highly
honored—Wyler died in Beverly Hills, California, on July 27, 1981.

Selected Filmography
The Liberation of L. B. Jones (1970); Funny Girl (1968); How to Steal a Million (1966); The Col-
lector (1965); The Children’s Hour (1961); Ben-Hur (1959); The Big Country (1958); Friendly
Persuasion (1956); The Desperate Hours (1955); Roman Holiday (1953); Carrie (1952); Detective
Story (1951); The Heiress (1949); Thunderbolt (1947); The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); The
Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944); The Little Foxes (1941); The Letter (1940);
The Westerner (1940); Wuthering Heights (1939); Jezebel (1938); Dead End (1937); Dodsworth
(1936); These Three (1936); The Gay Deception (1935); The Good Fairy (1935); Glamour
(1934); Counselor at Law (1933); Her First Mate (1933); Tom Brown of Culver (1932); A House
Divided (1931); The Storm (1930); Hell’s Heroes (1930)

References
Anderegg, Michael. William Wyler. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
Herman, Jan. A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William
Wyler. New York: Putnam’s, 1995.
Miller, Gabriel. William Wyler: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

—Robert G. Weiner

866
 v
Z
ZANUCK, DARRYL. Darryl Francis Zanuck was the head of production at Warner
Bros. and later at Twentieth Century-Fox from the mid-1920s to the 1950s. Zanuck’s
career was one of pioneering firsts for the motion picture industry.
Zanuck was born in Wahoo, Nebraska, on September 5, 1902, the second son of
Frank Zanuck and Louise Torpin. In 1917, he lied about his age and signed up with
the Omaha National Guard. In World War I, he was assigned to the U.S. Army’s
34th division, and later shipped to France, where he served as a runner and messenger.
Zanuck attempted to complete his war-interrupted education at the Los Angeles
Manual Arts High School but began a career as an author in 1920. His serial The Scar-
let Ladder was picked up by Fox Studios, establishing him as a successful independent
screenwriter. In 1924, he married Virginia Fox, the daughter of a prominent import-
export dealer. That same year, Zanuck met Jack and Harry Warner, and began his
career at Warner Bros. Studio as the screenwriter for the Rin Tin Tin movies.
By 1925, Zanuck was Warner Bros.’ most prolific writer. From 1925 to 1931, over
30 Zanuck plots were put into production, landing him as head of production. In
addition, Zanuck took on the role of talent scout, claiming to have discovered and nur-
tured the careers of major talents, among them James Cagney and Bette Davis.
Warner Bros. was the first studio, in conjunction with Western Electric, to develop
Vitaphone, a sound method that would play a prerecorded script and film together to
produce a talking picture. With Vitaphone, Zanuck and the Warners produced what
many consider the first sound film, The Jazz Singer, in 1927.
Zanuck’s continued innovation at Warner Bros. pioneered a new cinematic genre:
the gangster film. By meshing topics of current interest with a modicum of moral
direction, gangster films like Little Caesar (1931), and The Public Enemy (1931) gained
notoriety. Zanuck also utilized new advances in sound and color film to revive the
musical. In one musical, On with the Show, he was the first to initiate the studio prac-
tice of dubbing box-office stars’ singing voices with an uncredited singer of greater
musical talent.
The dawn of the Depression meant a $106 million debt for Warner Bros. Resulting
pay cuts, layoffs, and studio ownership disagreements caused Zanuck to leave the

867
Zanuck, Darryl

Twentieth Century-Fox film mogul Darryl F. Zanuck is seen in 1962 on the set of the movie The
Longest Day. (AP/Wide World Photos)

studio in 1933. Soon afterward, he started his own independent production company,
Twentieth Century, with United Artists’ Joseph Schenck and MGM’s Louis B. Mayer.
In 1935, Fox Films and Twentieth Century merged to form Twentieth Century-Fox.
Zanuck’s leadership of Twentieth Century-Fox produced an era of nostalgia films
and musicals, creating such stars as child actress Shirley Temple. World War II offered
Zanuck the opportunity to produce realistic films and patriotic pictures, bringing fame
to another of Zanuck’s studio stars—Betty Grable, the GI’s pinup girl. Marilyn Mon-
roe achieved fame through Twentieth Century-Fox, as well.
Ever the innovator, Zanuck sought to combat the growing use of the television set
by encouraging Hollywood to adopt CinemaScope, a photographic process that wid-
ened the size of the 35mm movie picture. This innovation turned mundane films into
spectacular theatrical events. Zanuck also pursued films in science fiction in The Day
the Earth Stood Still (1951), and paired with songwriter Irving Berlin to capitalize on
Berlin’s growing appeal. As the novelties began to wear off, Zanuck became bored with
production, announcing both his retirement and his divorce from his wife in 1956.
After this, Zanuck moved to Europe to produce independent films under his new
company, DFZ Productions. From 1956 to 1962, he produced six films. In 1960, he
used his influence to convince Twentieth Century-Fox to produce The Longest Day,
the highest-grossing black-and-white film of all time. Zanuck eventually returned to
Twentieth Century-Fox as Chairman of the Board in 1962. Despite successes like
The Sound of Music (1965) and Planet of the Apes (1967), box-office flops depleted stu-
dio profit, eventually allowing the Board to oust Zanuck on April 19, 1971. Returning

868
 Zanuck, Darryl

to California and to his wife, Virginia, he lived the remainder of his life in seclusion. In
October 1979, he was hospitalized for pneumonia, dying on December 22, 1979. He
was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Selected Filmography
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970); The Chapman Report (1962); The Longest Day (1962); Sanctuary
(1961); The Roots of Heaven (1958); The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958); The Sun Also Rises
(1957); The King and I (1956); The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956); Viva Zapata!
(1952); Twelve O’Clock High (1949); Pinky (1949); Thieves’ Highway (1949); The Snake Pit
(1948); Gentleman’s Agreement (1947); Forever Amber (1947); Boomerang! (1947); The Shocking
Miss Pilgrim (1947); The Razor’s Edge (1946); Somewhere in the Night (1946); Wilson (1944);
Buffalo Bill (1944); The Purple Heart (1944); Lifeboat (1944); The Black Swan (1942); A Yank
in the R.A.F. (1941); Blood and Sand (1941); Tobacco Road (1941); Western Union (1941); The
Mark of Zorro (1940); The Return of Frank James (1940); The Grapes of Wrath (1940); Drums
along the Mohawk (1939); The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939); Stanley and Livingstone
(1939); Young Mr. Lincoln (1939); The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939); Jesse James (1939);
Clive of India (1935); Moulin Rouge (1934); 42nd Street (1933); 20,000 Years in Sing Sing
(1932); The Public Enemy (1931); Little Caesar (1931); The Doorway to Hell (1930); Noah’s
Ark (1928)

References
Custen, George F. Twentieth Century’s Fox. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Harris, Marlys J. The Zanucks of Hollywood. New York: Crown, 1989.
Silverman, Stephen M. The Fox That Got Away. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1988.
—Anna Burke

869
This page intentionally left blank
SUBJECTS

871
This page intentionally left blank
 v
A
ACADEMY AWARDS, THE. And the Oscar goes to . . . The Academy Awards,
which is universally nicknamed the Oscars, began its tradition of showcasing the best
of the best in the film industry in 1928. On the night of May 16, 1929, hosted by
Douglas Fairbanks (president of the Academy) in the Blossom Room at the Hollywood
Roosevelt Hotel, roughly 270 guests sat down to dine at a lush banquet with fellow
film industry moguls. Dancing and conversation ensued, but soon the orchestra was
silenced as MGM Chief Louis B. Mayer decided it was time to get down to business.
The Academy Awards did not start out with the glitz and glamour to which we have
grown accustomed. The brainchild of Mayer, the banquet, the awards ceremony, and
the Academy were meant to be more bottom line than a glamorous event. Mayer
had hoped to unite the power players of the film industry by pushing out the labor
unions. When that idea failed, it was decided that the Academy would serve as its
own censor, as it was the fourth-largest industry in America. As movies became more
risqué, the industry realized it needed a touch of class and a better relationship with
the public. A night of glamour with a golden statue given to the best was just what
the industry needed.
The awards were first printed on a paper scroll and then cast in gold. The statuette
universally known as Oscar was designed by MGM’s art director Cedric Gibbons and
created by sculptor George Stanley. At first the award was sketched as a knight holding
a double-edged sword standing on a reel of film with five holes in the base. These five
holes represented the industry’s original branches: producers, writers, directors, actors,
and technicians. The statuette and the base have since been streamlined, but as cast the
statue remains 92.5 percent tin and 7.5 percent copper with a gold-plated exterior. The
Oscar statuette is thirteen-and-a-half inches tall and weighs about eight-and-a-half
pounds. Although it is unclear how Oscar got his name, the award has come to be
called the Nobel Prize of motion pictures.
The awards themselves were originally presented in 12 categories, but have continually
grown to encompass the new and innovative ideas and inventions of the film industry. At
the first ceremony there was little suspense because the award winners knew they had won
three months before the banquet convened. During the second year, however, all of that

873
Academy Awards, The

changed when the results were

kept a secret, adding to the allure
and mystery surrounding the cer-
emony. In subsequent years, the
winner’s list was handed out to
the media so it could be in print
the next morning, until a news-
paper published the names of the
winners in the evening post before
the awards ceremony was actually
broadcast. This led the Academy
to adopt the sealed-envelope sys-
tem in 1941; the system is still
used today.
By the time the second awards
dinner was held in 1930, enthusi-
asm for the star-studded event
was so great that a Los Angeles
radio station produced an hour-
long live broadcast of the eve-
ning. The ceremony has been
broadcast ever since, via radio
between 1930 and 1952, and
then via television from 1953 for-
ward. Broadcast in color since
1966 and internationally since
1969, the Academy Awards cer-
emony is now beamed to over
Kodak Theater decorated for the Academy Awards, Los
200 countries, dazzling hundreds
Angeles. (Shutterstock)
of millions of movie fan across
the globe. For many film enthusi-
asts, the Academy Awards ceremony is the highlight of their cinematic year. Although
the broadcast itself often drags, the opportunity to view the parade of stars moving
across the red carpet in their designer outfits and “crown jewels” and to exult and
bemoan the Academy’s choices for the best of the best has made the Awards into a cul-
tural phenomenon.

References
Kinn, Gail, and Jim Piazza. The Academy Awards: The Complete History of Oscar. New York:
Black Dog and Leventhal, 2002.
Levy, Emanuel. All about Oscar: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards. London:
Continuum, 2003.

874
 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS)

Osborne, Robert. 80 Years of the Oscar: The Official History of the Academy Awards. New York:
Abbeville, 2008.
Pond, Steve. The Big Show: High Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards.
New York: Faber & Faber, 2005.

—Katherine Ann Fridirici

ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES (AMPAS). The

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is an organization of film industry profes-
sionals based in Hollywood. It is perhaps best known for its annual achievement awards
ceremony, the Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars. The AMPAS was
formed in January 1927 by a collection of Hollywood executives and actors who wanted
to create an in-house organization that would prevent outside parties from wresting
away control of the Hollywood film industry. Attendees at the launch of the Academy
included Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, Cecil B. DeMille, and Irving Thalberg. By
May 1927, the Academy had been granted a charter as a nonprofit organization and
had awarded an honorary membership to Thomas Edison; it had also elected its officers,
with Douglas Fairbanks serving as president. (Subsequent Academy presidents included
Frank Capra, Gregory Peck, and Karl Malden.) Membership in the Academy was, and
still is, strictly by invitation only, and is extended only to those whom organization exec-
utives believe have made a significant contribution to the motion picture industry.
From its beginnings, the Academy stressed the importance of technological innova-
tions within the film industry. Between 1927 and 1959, the Academy included a spe-
cific body for technological matters, and it continues to honor those involved in
technological innovation through the Scientific and Technical Awards, first presented
in 1931 at the fourth Academy Awards ceremony.
The first Academy Awards ceremony was held in 1929. One of the Academy’s first
committees had been Awards of Merit, which suggested that awards be bestowed in
12 different categories. In 1929, Wings won the first-ever award for Outstanding Pic-
ture. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Academy was actively involved in industry poli-
tics and labor law issues. However in 1937, during Frank Capra’s presidency, the
Academy moved away from involvement in labor management issues. In 1937, the
Academy published the first Academy Players Directory which contained photographs
of actors, together with details about their agents. That same year the organization
declared itself a forum for all crafts used in the film industry and classified its member-
ship of 350 into five initial branches of membership: actors, directors, writers, produc-
ers, and technicians. By opening up its membership to all five groups, the Academy
ensured that its membership covered all workers employed by the studios. The Academy’s
membership grew rapidly, and many more branches of membership were added over the
years, including a documentary branch, a music branch, and a public relations branch.
The Academy’s Board of Governors consists of representatives of each of the branches.
In later years, the Academy began to concentrate on film education. In the 1960s,
the Academy began to award scholarships for film students; 1968 saw the first

875
Action-Adventure Film, The

Academy grants for film-related organizations, and in 1972 the Academy launched the
National Film Information Service, which provided library resources to those studying
film outside of Los Angeles. The following year the Academy initiated the Student
Academy Awards Committee to recognize student filmmakers. The 1970s also saw
the start of the Visiting Artists Program in which Academy members traveled through-
out the United States giving talks on various aspects of filmmaking.
Over the years, the Academy has become much less political, and it no longer con-
cerns itself with political or economic matters. Instead, it is now mainly known for the
Academy Awards ceremony, which is itself increasingly focused on celebrity attendance
and fashion, though winning an Academy Award continues to be regarded as presti-
gious and can help boost a film’s box-office returns. The Academy has moved away
from its origins as a labor movement to become a body intent on advancing the arts
and sciences of the motion picture industry. It aims to recognize outstanding achieve-
ment, encourage technical and creative innovation, and facilitate film education.
See also: Academy Awards, The

References
Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and
Sexuality at the Movies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Bordwell, David, Janet Straiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film
Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 1985.
Hozic, Aida A. Hollyworld: Space, Power, and Fantasy in the American Economy. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2001.
Polan, Dana B. Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007.
—Victoria Williams

ACTION-ADVENTURE FILM, THE. Academic genre theorists and popular crit-

ics agree on the primary features of the action genre: breathtaking stunts; cutting-edge
special effects; and numerous sequences devoted to chases and explosions—all in the
service of high-energy, high-escapism cinematic fare (Neale, 2000; Dirks, 2009).
Some of these theorists go even further, distinguishing between action films and adven-
ture films, with the latter often focusing on the discovery and exploration of exotic
settings as foundational plot points (Dirks, 2009). In adventure films, then, the protag-
onists usually travel to locales that exist outside our everyday world.
The origin of the term “action-adventure” may be traced to a 1927 article concern-
ing The Gaucho (1927), a late silent-era film that starred the first action hero of the cin-
ema, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (Neale, 2000). Working under D. W. Griffith, Fairbanks
began his film acting career playing leads in romantic comedies. Combining the light-
hearted romantic persona he had developed in these roles with his natural athleticism,
he went on to star as masked crusader Zorro in Fred Niblo’s The Mark of Zorro (1920).
The film made him a superstar. For the next decade, Fairbanks epitomized the silent

876
 Action-Adventure Film, The

cinema swashbuckling adven-

turer, playing the swordsman
D’Artagnan in The Three Muske-
teers (1921) and The Iron Mask
(1929), and title roles in Robin
Hood (1922), The Thief of Bagdad
(1924), Don Q Son of Zorro
(1925), The Black Pirate (1926),
and The Gaucho. Often doing
his own stunts, Fairbanks defined
the swashbuckler for the first gen-
eration of Hollywood.
As with many silent-era stars,
the advent of the sound era ended
Fairbanks’s career. Errol Flynn
would take up the swashbuckler
mantle, however. Dashingly hand-
some and boyishly charming,
Flynn had only a few minor credits
to his name when he was tapped to
play the title role in Captain Blood
(1935). Just as The Mark of Zorro
had launched the career of Fair-
banks, Captain Blood catapulted Bullitt (Steve McQueen) talks with Chalmers (Robert
Flynn to superstardom. The Vaughn) in a scene from the movie Bullitt, which was released
roguish actor—he was rumored to October 17, 1968. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
have slept with almost every
woman in Hollywood—would go on to star in many more adventures, even playing some
of the roles that Fairbanks had made famous, most notably the populist hero in The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Flynn did not simply remake silent-era swashbucklers,
though; staking out his place as the newest swashbuckling hero, Flynn went on to star in
films in other genres such as The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Dawn Patrol
(1938), and They Died with Their Boots On (1941).
Based on his work in Gunga Din (1939), Safari (1940), and The Corsican Brothers
(1941), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. seemed destined to become as big a star as his famous
father had been; indeed, some thought the younger Fairbanks might even rival Flynn
as the most popular swashbuckling hero in Hollywood. Ironically, though, after
America entered World War II, Fairbanks would spend six years as a Navy officer,
becoming a real-life hero but fading from the minds of moviegoers. The actor who
would become nearly as popular as Flynn—some would even say that among younger
audiences he ultimately became more popular than Flynn—was the former Olympic
swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. A powerful, laconic figure on-screen, Weissmuller
starred in the first Tarzan sound feature, Tarzan the Ape Man (1932); he would go to
make 11 more Tarzan films, establishing the character as the Lord of the Jungle.

877
Action-Adventure Film, The

After the war, swashbuckling heroes gradually disappeared from the big screen.
Admittedly, there were a few notable exceptions: Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate
(1952), Stewart Granger in Scaramouche (1952), and Gregory Peck in Captain Horatio
Hornblower (1951); but by the 1960s, testosterone-driven action films were becoming
increasingly popular with audiences. There were a number of causal factors, it seems,
that contributed to the rising popularity of action-oriented action-adventure films:
the Supreme Court handed down several decisions that allowed American filmmakers
to depict violence—and sexuality—more realistically; technological advances made for
more realistic—and more thrilling—action sequences; and a well-established pulp-
fiction action hero, James Bond, Agent 007, made his way onto the big screen.
The Bond franchise is the longest-running in film history: 22 pictures (and count-
ing) spanning 46 years. Like the action-adventure swashbucklers that preceded them,
Bond movies are generally set in exotic locales. Unlike those earlier films, however,
Bond pictures are consistently set during the period of their production. During the
Cold War era, for instance, Sean Connery’s 007 dealt with Soviet spies in From Russia
with Love (1963); while later, shortly after Richard Nixon declared America’s “war on
drugs,” Roger Moore’s 007 fought international drug traffickers in Live and Let Die
(1973). George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig have all
appeared as the super-cool superspy with no apparent negative effect on the popularity
of the films—although purists argue that there is really only one Bond, Sean Connery.
The popularity of the Bond films inspired other filmmakers to make action-
oriented movies during the 1970s. Interestingly, it was at this time that blaxploitation
pictures—films with ultrahip, ultradangerous black action heroes—exploded onto
American screens. Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971),
Gordon Parks Sr.’s Shaft (1971), and Gordon Parks Jr.’s Superfly (1972)—three of
the best of the dozens of blaxploitation pictures that were made during the 1970s—
shocked, thrilled, and unsettled audiences, both black and white. The 1970s also saw
the release of the films of martial arts phenomenon Bruce Lee. Dissatisfied with playing
bit parts in American films, Lee left the United States for Hong Kong, where he began
making films with director Raymond Chow and Chow’s production company Golden
Harvest. After starring in The Big Boss (1971), which proved extremely popular in Asia,
Lee took control over his next two films, Fist of Fury (1972) and Way of the Dragon
(1972), before going on to make the iconic Enter the Dragon (1973), produced jointly
by Golden Harvest and Warner Bros. and featuring American martial arts champion
Chuck Norris. The few films that Lee made during his too short career—he died mys-
teriously at the age of 32 in 1973, just six days before Enter the Dragon was released in
Hong Kong—initiated America’s fascination with what would come to be called kung fu
cinema.
After Lee’s death in 1973, Hong Kong filled America’s demand for kung fu pictures
with actors such as Sonny Chiba and, later, Jackie Chan. Chiba would make dozens of
kung fu action films, but he was a different kind of screen figure than Lee had been.
Where Lee had thrilled and amazed audiences with his otherworldly kung fu artistry,
Chiba exploded from the screen, a terrifyingly vicious force of nature—brutal and
shockingly effective. For his part, Chan would make a series of buddy-movie

878
 Action-Adventure Film, The

comedies—the Rush Hour pictures (1997–2007) with Chris Tucker—and likable

genre spoofs—Shanghai Noon (2000) for instance—that showcased not only his aston-
ishing martial arts skills but also breathtaking stunts, almost all of which were per-
formed by Chan himself.
The 1970s also saw the release of pictures produced by a new generation of film-
makers who were influenced by the troubled 1960s in America. Unique in their
counterculture sensibilities, small action pictures such as Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing
Point (1971) and Tom Laughlin’s Billy Jack (1971) appealed to younger, mostly male,
counterculture audiences. Vanishing Point was the story of a Vietnam vet, Kowalski
(Barry Newman), a counterculture dropout who uses his extraordinary skills behind
the wheel to thumb his nose at the rule-bound American establishment (ironically,
throughout the film he drives a Dodge Challenger, one of Detroit’s premier muscle
cars of the day); while Billy Jack—which also starred Laughlin—was the story of a
Vietnam vet, the eponymous Billy Jack, a counterculture dropout who uses his
extraordinary skills as a martial artist to thumb his nose at the rule-bound American
establishment.
Given the popularity of counterculture films such as Vanishing Point and Billy Jack,
it seems somewhat surprising that action-film moviemakers began to look to the police
department to locate their heroes during this same period. Cops and detectives had
long been heroes—or noirish antiheroes—in American films, but the majority of the
films in which these heroic figures appeared—although many did contain action
sequences—were not really action films. The amazing car chase sequences in Bullitt
(1968) and The French Connection (1971), however, began the transformation of cin-
ematic cops into action heroes—Clint Eastwood’s turn as Harry Callahan in the Dirty
Harry films completed it.
In the Dirty Harry series, Eastwood’s Detective Callahan wields his trademark
.44 magnum—the most powerful handgun in the world, says Harry—with the same
skill and apparent enjoyment with which Fairbanks and Flynn wielded their rapiers.
The suave, relentless, dangerously attractive Callahan tracked down the baddest of
the bad guys—a sadomasochistic killer in Dirty Harry and other cops in Magnum
Force, for example—while everything from Molotov cocktails (Sudden Impact, 1983)
and projectiles from antitank weapons (The Enforcer, 1976) exploded around him.
Interestingly, in the same moment that Eastwood was redefining the image of the
American movie cop, Burt Reynolds was reimagining the role of the disaffected anti-
hero of Vanishing Point. Where Vanishing Point’s Kowalski embodied the cynicism of
the Vietnam era—we know from the very beginning of the film that he will die in
the end—the characters that Reynolds made famous in pictures such as White Light-
ning (1973), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), and Cannonball Run (1981) were just
good old boys having fun at the expense of the hapless cops who chased them. Audi-
ences loved these pictures, and although they seemed little more than carbon copies
of each other, viewers flocked to theaters to see each new installment. (Each of the for-
mer films spawned sequels, and Reynolds went on to play similar roles in Hooper
[1978] and Stroker Ace [1983].) Reynolds ultimately became an international superstar,
as well as the highest-paid actor in Hollywood during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

879
Action-Adventure Film, The

As the 1970s drew to a close and the 1980s opened, Chuck Norris began making a
series of war films in which his skills as a martial artist were featured. In 1979, Norris
starred in Good Guys Wear Black, in which he plays a former Green Beret who served
in Vietnam in a special forces unit called the Black Tigers and who, having returned
home, must try to save the other members of his unit from a deadly assassin. He would
go to make Missing in Action, Part I (1984), Part II (1985), and Part III (1988), in
which he played Colonel James Braddock, a special forces hero who returns to Viet-
nam to win the war that America had lost. This filmic formula of martial arts star as
military hero would be repeated in films starring Steven Seagal, who played a Navy
SEAL turned cook in Under Siege (1992) and Under Siege 2 (1995), and Jean-Claude
Van Damme, who starred in the implausible Universal Soldier as a killed-in-
Vietnam-raised-from-the-dead super warrior.
Not coincidentally, it may be argued, the release of these unique hybrid Vietnam
veteran-martial arts war films occurred during the 1980s Reagan era, when the nation
sought to rebuild its status as the world’s leading military superpower and to reimpose
the law-and-order society that conservatives felt had been lost during the Kennedy/
Johnson-era 1960s. Although they did not star martial arts figures, Rambo: First Blood
Part II (1985) and the Die Hard films embodied these newly minted military and law-
and-order sensibilities. In First Part II—which starred Sylvester Stallone in a reprise of
the role of Colonel John Rambo that he made famous in First Blood (1982)—another
Vietnam war hero is sent back to Southeast Asia; while in the four Die Hard films, New
York City detective John McClane (played by Bruce Willis, who initially seemed an
odd choice as an action hero but performed brilliantly in the roles) must face down
groups of foreign terrorists who threaten America. Ironically, there was also an
international flavor to Reagan-era action. Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger—
who would go on to become the Republican governor of California—achieved star-
dom in genre hybrids such as The Terminator (1984) (Schwarzenegger was the villain
in the original, a point corrected in the sequels Terminator II: Judgment Day [1991]
and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [2003]); Predator (1987); Commando (1986);
and True Lies (1994). And Australian-born Mel Gibson became a star playing a
futuristic-outback-cop-turned-vigilante in Mad Max (1979) and its sequels, and had
even more success in the Lethal Weapon (1987) films.
Interestingly, swashbucklers would be revived during the 1990s, after George Lucas
and Steven Spielberg launched the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. Mel Gibson
would also have a hand in this revival, as he stepped behind the camera in 1995 to
direct—and star in—Braveheart (1995), the first of a number of very successful period
pieces, including Rob Roy (1995), Gladiator (2000), and The Patriot (2000), with
Gibson also starring in the latter. Even the subgenre pirate movie was resurrected, as
the fabulously successful Pirates of the Caribbean franchise kicked off in 2003. Starring
the brilliant Johnny Depp, who crossed golden-age swashbuckling with new millen-
nium attitude in his role as Captain Jack Sparrow, the franchise had already grown to
include four films by 2011.
High-impact action films continued to draw audiences—again, mostly young
males—during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Two franchises in

880
 African Americans in Film

particular—The Fast and the Furious and The Transporter—provided viewers with mus-
cular heroes (Vin Diesel and Jason Statham); edge-of-the seat car racing/chase sequen-
ces; and suspension-of-belief stunts. And in an odd bit of cinematic history, former spouses
James Cameron—who has directed some of the most popular, big-budget action films ever
made, including Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), and the first two Terminator pictures—
and Kathryn Bigelow—who has directed some of the least-popular, low-budget action
films ever made, including Blue Steel (1989), Point Break (1991), and Strange Days
(1995)—squared off for the Best Director Oscar in 2010. True to form, Cameron had
made the visually astonishing action-adventure movie Avatar in 2009, the most expen-
sive picture ever produced, while Bigelow had made The Hurt Locker, a spare, small-
budget, action-drama set in Iraq. In the end, Bigelow—the extremely rare female director
of action films—became the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Director.

References
Dirks, Tim. “Action Films” and “Adventure Films.” Available on Filmsite.org, 2009.
Grant, Barry Keith. Film Genre Reader. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1993.
Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1981.
Tasker, Yvonne, ed. The Action and Adventure Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.

—Carey Martin

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN FILM. Perhaps the most significant expression of

African Americans in film during the first half of the twentieth century came by way
of what were called “race movies.” Although generally financed by white investors
with screenplays written by white writers, race movies were made by and for African
Americans and, because they were released during the Jim Crow era, screened in segre-
gated theatres. One of the most important figures in the development of race movies
was the producer, director, and entrepreneur Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux created a
thriving studio, produced or directed many successful films, and helped several African
American actors achieve a measure of celebrity. He may rightly be compared to white
producers such as David O. Selznick, Cecil B. DeMille, and Stanley Kramer, who
often developed and controlled the production of films but usually did not direct
them. Ironically, certain parallels may be drawn between Micheaux’s films and some
of those directed by the controversial D. W. Griffith, whose 1915 picture The Birth
of a Nation fueled the flames of black-white racial tensions during the early twentieth
century: while Griffith’s domestic melodramas centered on white womanhood debased
or usurped, Micheaux’s pictures tended to focus on proper black men and women
whose hard-fought bourgeois values are constantly under threat.

881
African Americans in Film

Race movies generally posited

an alternative cinematic universe
to that inhabited by whites, with
African Americans functioning
as filmic counterparts to white
archetypes: the lawman, the cow-
boy, and the romantic hero, for
example. While their production
values were threadbare, directo-
rial technique basic, and the writ-
ing and acting often amateurish,
race movies were conceptually
interesting and energetically
filmed. If the dialogue was occa-
sionally stilted, it was to compen-
sate for the primitive parodies of
black speech in films made by
whites. Indeed, a stark difference
between Hollywood’s earliest
all-black films and race movies
often lay in elocution: Hollywood
films depicted African Americans
speaking with ludicrously exag-
gerated accents, while in race
movies black actors spoke in real-
istic and conventional African
American vernacular, or in over-
pronounced formal English.
Film poster for Lady Sings the Blues, starring Diana Ross, Most film scholars agree that
1972. (GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images) the figure that represented the
central link between race movies
and the mainstream cinema was
Paul Robeson, the singer, actor, and political activist. He was featured in Micheaux’s
Body and Soul (1925), in which he played an escaped convict, and went on to star in
the 1933 film adaptation of the Eugene O’Neill play The Emperor Jones. Robeson’s
brooding, powerful big-screen presence perfectly matched O’Neill’s dramatic sensibil-
ities, compensating somewhat for the stagy production of the film. Ultimately,
Robeson’s significance transcends his film achievements, though, as he was the only
African American of his time, other than Joe Louis, to become a household name—in
both black and white households. Interestingly, while Louis was marketed as a patriotic
“good Negro,” Robeson attracted controversy because of his affiliations with the Ameri-
can Communist Party and consequent conflicts with the U.S. government. He did make
a number of successful films—The Proud Valley, for example—but these were made in
Britain, during the time that he was forced to leave the United States and live abroad.

882
 African Americans in Film

The Hollywood film industry’s treatment of African Americans during the first half
of the twentieth century was mostly disgraceful. At the dawn of Hollywood, blacks
were portrayed as savages unleashed by Reconstruction in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation
(1915), a film that was subjected to protests by African Americans and legal challenges
by the NAACP. Ironically, it was this incendiary film that motivated many African
Americans to get involved in the film industry. Well before the establishment of race
movies as an alternative genre for black audiences, a number of polemical or idealistic
films were made as a response to Griffith’s film: The Birth of a Race (1918) and By Right
of Birth (1921), for example.
Later, blacks were used for comic relief or to play loyal domestics or exotics in jun-
gle movies or historical epics. Some African American entertainers, mostly with com-
edy or song-and-dance backgrounds, became notable in the Hollywood mainstream,
although they were forced to take roles that perpetuated the most destructive stereo-
types of the minstrel era: Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson
(who danced with Shirley Temple when she was Hollywood’s top star), Sleep n’ Eat
(Willie Best) and Stepin Fetchit. While Fetchit’s name became as scorned a symbol
as Uncle Tom, he does have the distinction of having been featured in the 1929 partly
sound version of Showboat (where his singing was dubbed) and Hearts in Dixie (also
made in 1929), the first all-black Hollywood film.
The handful of Hollywood films that explored black themes and that had all-black
casts largely capitalized on the growing popularity of jazz and blues music and dance.
King Vidor’s Hallelujah (1929), for instance, although it made its melodramatic prodi-
gal son story more complex by adding certain unique psychological elements, was still
filled with song-and-dance interludes that are largely jarringly intrusive. Similarly,
Marc Connelly and William Keighley’s Green Pastures (1935), Vincente Minnelli’s
Cabin in the Sky (1943), and Andrew L. Stone’s Stormy Weather (1943), while not
overtly demeaning in their depiction of their black characters, still focused on the
musical abilities of those characters rather than on any dramatic issues they might face.
In 1934, Imitation of Life became the first mainstream film to deal with race in a rel-
atively serious way. Starring Claudette Colbert and Fredi Washington, it was also the
first film about African Americans “passing” for white (interestingly, Washington, a
light-skinned black woman, refused to advance her own career by passing). While
the film did present black characters as fully realized figures, however, it nevertheless
made clear that the rigid interdiction against breaking social rules regarding racial
identity and hierarchy was still very much in place. Gone with the Wind (1939), one
of the most successful films in Hollywood history, dealt with the antebellum South
and the Civil War, as had Birth of a Nation. Yet, while Gone with the Wind did not
seem to exhibit the same venomous attitudes as Birth of a Nation—there was no
latter-day call for the KKK to rise up to protect white America from the threat of
out-of-control young “black bucks”—the former picture did continue to perpetuate
the stereotype of “loyal darkies” who choose to remain forever faithful to their masters.
Shockingly, although Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an
Academy Award (for Best Supporting Actress), she was not allowed to appear at the
film’s Atlanta premiere.

883
African Americans in Film

Marked by chilling revelations about the Holocaust, the onset of the Cold War, and
the beginnings of the civil rights movement, the early years of the post-World War II
era defined a somewhat incongruous period for African Americans involved in the film
industry. While on one level Hollywood did become more racially integrated than it
had previously been, the filmic breaking of the “color line” that occurred toward the
end of the 1940s actually led to a precipitous decline in the production of race
movies—nearly half of the hundreds of these films that had been made before World
War II were lost. Several Hollywood dramas, though, did explore themes related to
African Americans: Home of the Brave (1949), for instance, in which a black veteran
is treated for wartime trauma; No Way Out (1950), in which Sidney Poitier, in his
debut, plays a doctor threatened by the racist brother of one of his patients; and
Intruder in the Dust (1949), an adaptation of Faulkner’s novel about an African
American falsely accused of a crime. Still, while these films did treat black characters
seriously, they addressed the problem of race in American only obliquely, at best.
During the 1950s, a small number of black actors, including Poitier, Harry
Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, and Lena Horne, achieved a certain level of movie star-
dom with films in which they appeared focusing on their characters. As before, though,
the majority of the most important films of this period featuring African Americans
dealt largely with the issue of blacks passing as white. In Elia Kazan’s Pinky (1949),
for instance, a young light-skinned black woman—played by Jeanne Crain, a white
actress “passing,” as it were, as a black woman passing for white—who has passed,
rejects a life married to a successful white doctor and opens up a clinic and nursery
school for black children; while in Douglas Sirk’s 1959 remake of Imitation of Life, a
young black woman who passes rejects her race as well as her family, but comes to grief
and repents only after her mother’s death; and in Alfred L. Werker’s Lost Boundaries
(1949), an entire family passes in the interest of becoming upwardly mobile.
The 1960s saw a political rivalry develop between Dr. Martin Luther King’s moder-
ate integrationists and militant black nationalists, such as Malcolm X. This rivalry was
reflected in the American cinema, as more radical films about the black experience
were released alongside more mainstream pictures. Melvin Van Peebles, for example,
challenged audiences with his Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1970) and Watermelon
Man (1971), while Robert Downey—a white director—made Putney Swope (1969),
which featured a black protagonist treating conventional society with derision. Ossie
Davis, a distinguished black actor who gave the eulogy for Malcolm X, directed Cotton
Comes to Harlem (1970), which was based on a novel by Chester Himes, an African
American writer who had long used crime fiction as a vehicle for caustic depictions
of the black experience; and Ivan Dixon adapted The Spook Who Sat by the Door
(1973), in which he took a kind of pulp-fiction approach to political advocacy.
Significantly, the more radical films of black directors like Van Peebles, Davis, and
Dixon led to the production of what may be described as the crudely assertive blaxploi-
tation films. Ironically, two of the figures who helped initiate this movement were
Poitier and Gordon Parks Sr. Poitier had become a major movie star based on his work
in mainstream films such as The Defiant Ones (1958), In the Heat of the Night (1967),
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), and To Sir, with Love (1967), but in 1972 he

884
 African Americans in Film

stepped behind the camera to make Buck and the Preacher (1972). A trope of tradi-
tional westerns, the gritty picture starred Poitier as a post–Civil War wagon master
and Belafonte as the Preacher. For his part, Gordon Parks Sr. made the film that many
suggest truly initiated blaxploitation, Shaft (1971), which starred Richard Roundtree
as the ultracool, seemingly invincible uber-detective John Shaft.
The success of Shaft opened the floodgates for the production of films featuring
black action heroes played by charismatic ex-athletes—Jim Brown and Fred William-
son are notable examples. Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown (1974) and Tamara Dobson’s Cleo-
patra Jones (1973) extended the genre to women. Afterwards came numerous twists of
every genre imaginable: Black Caesar (1973), Black Gestapo (1975), Blacula (1972),
Blackenstein (1973). Parks’s son, Gordon Parks Jr., following in his father’s footsteps,
also directed one of the most influential blaxploitation pictures of the day, Superfly
(1972). Ultimately, the quality of blaxploitation pictures declined, and the enthusiasm
for them waned after little more than half a decade.
A string of mainstream 1970s films offering sympathetic and positive images of
African Americans acted as a counterpart to the blaxploitation pictures of this period.
Set during the years of the Great Depression, Sounder (1972), for instance, was an
exercise in social realism and restrained sentiment; while Claudine (1974) offered audi-
ences a contemporary take on romantic comedy from a black perspective. Two period
pieces—The Great White Hope (1970), a fictionalized biography of boxer Jack John-
son, and the TV film The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1973)—were historical
testaments to black endurance and dignity. While these films were made by white
directors, the lead roles showcased the talents of gifted black actors such as James Earl
Jones, Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Diahann Carroll. Many of these films won
awards and succeeded in penetrating the mainstream market.
Between the poles of blaxploitation and edifying social films, comedy served as a
significant vehicle for blacks in the 1970s. Somewhat surprisingly, Sidney Poitier
became an important journeyman director at this time, making—and starring in—
films such as Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let’s Do It Again (1975). Poitier,
who many thought was too dignified to play comedic roles, proved to have a raucous
sense of humor as a filmmaker. Richard Pryor, a successful stand-up comic who had
had a supporting role alongside Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams in the memorable
1972 biopic of the life of Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, also emerged as a major
screen talent at this time. Pryor’s genius for stand-up, by turns personal and surreal,
was given expression in two concert films: Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979) and
Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), which were remarkably popular with both black and
white audiences. It may be argued that the two successful films that Pryor made with
Gene Wilder at this time, Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980)—they would go
on to star in See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) and Another You (1991)—paved the
way for black comedians such as Eddie Murphy in the decades that followed.
Although a small-screen vehicle, mention should be made of the TV miniseries
Roots (1977), which was enormously successful during the 1970s. Though criticised
by some as an overly sentimental melodrama, the powerful family saga, adapted from
Alex Haley’s novel of the same name, was the first epic portrayal of the African

885
African Americans in Film

American experience covering the period from slavery to the civil rights era. The series
riveted white audiences, many of whom were shocked by what they learned about the
treatment blacks had received—and continued to endure—since they were forcibly
brought to what became the United States in the early seventeenth century.
Ironically, during the Reagan Era 1980s, a period when black America suffered
social and economic reversals, African Americans achieved major successes in Holly-
wood. Eddie Murphy, who jumped from the extraordinarily popular satirical sketch
show Saturday Night Live to the big screen, became the world’s most bankable star with
box-office hits such as 48 Hours (1982), Trading Places (1983), and especially Beverly
Hills Cop (1984). It was also during this time that Spike Lee, the first major main-
stream African American director, emerged. He came of age with other 1980s proto-
indie directors such as Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, John Sayles, and Susan Seidelman,
writing and directing two small independent pictures, She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and
School Daze (1988). His breakout moment, though, came in 1989, with the release
of the controversial, culturally complex Do the Right Thing (1989), a film that captured
the racial tensions simmering in pre-Giuliani New York. Following on the success of
Do the Right Thing, Lee would go on to produce two other small-budget films, Mo’ Better
Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever (1991). To the surprise of many, Lee was tapped to direct
the big-budget studio production Malcolm X (1992), which his critics—and even some
of his supporters—thought was too much picture for him. The film turned out to be
brilliant. After the success of Malcolm X, Lee found himself in the position of
being one of the most prominent cinematic spokespeople for black America, and in
addition to making more feature films, he would also go on to make several notable
documentaries dealing with controversial topics such as the infamous 1963 bombing
of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama (4 Little Girls,
1997), and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (When the Levees Broke, 2006).
Significantly, Lee had cast Denzel Washington in his 1990 film Mo’ Better Blues, and
when he was chosen to direct Malcolm X, Lee insisted that Washington be given the
lead role. Although Washington had already won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for
his work in Glory, many thought that he was not right for the role of Malcolm X. They
could not have been more wrong, as the actor transformed himself into the slain black
activist. The performance solidified Washington’s status as one of the most important—
and bankable—actors in Hollywood, and he has gone on to make a series of highly
regarded pictures, ultimately winning the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Alonzo,
the rogue cop in Training Day. Washington once again teamed with Lee to make Inside
Man (2006) and Inside Man 2 (2010).
Lee was joined by other successful black directors during the 1990s. John Singleton,
for instance, had a critical and box-office hit with his raw, provocative Boyz N’ the Hood
(1991). Interestingly, while Lee had included rap music in the soundtrack for Do the
Right Thing, Boyz N’ the Hood was a sort of filmic analogue to the controversial genre
of gangsta rap that was embraced by some and reviled by others. The picture ultimately
earned Singleton an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. The Hughes
Brothers (identical twins Albert and Allen) followed Boyz N’ the Hood with another
offering about the angst-filled lives of young black gangsters, Menace II Society (1993).

886
 African Americans in Film

By the time the new millennium dawned, an increasing number of African American
actors had established themselves in America’s motion picture mainstream. In addition
to Denzel Washington, actors such as Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence
Fishburne, Danny Glover, Forest Whitaker, and Wesley Snipes achieved renown
and became major Hollywood players. Will Smith, a stand-up comic who also had a
successful recording career, become a major international attraction. Smith has proved
to be a versatile performer, not only taking on comedic roles but also playing serious
characters; indeed, his portrayal of boxing legend Muhammad Ali in Michael Mann’s
Ali, earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Halle Berry, well
known for her stunning appearance, proved that she was much more than just another
pretty face, ultimately earning a Best Actress Oscar—the first African American
woman to do so—for her disturbing portrayal of Leticia Musgrove opposite Billy
Bob Thornton in Monster’s Ball (2001).
In 2009, Lee Daniels’s Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire was released to
great critical acclaim. Exploring the tortured life of the obese, illiterate, wholly disaf-
fected teenaged-mother Claireece “Precious” Jones, the film went on to garner Academy
Award nominations for Best Picture, direction, editing, writing, Best Actress in a
Lead Role (Gabourey Sidibe as Precious), and Best Actress in a Supporting Role,
which went to Mo’Nique for her portrayal of Mary, the angry, terrifically abusive
mother of Precious. For many, the film—devoid of the simplistic stereotypes and
destructive racist messages that have marked so many pictures about the black
experience—was seen as a watershed moment in the long narrative arc of African
Americans in the cinema.

References
Bernardi, Daniel Leonard, ed. The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of United States
Cinema. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 1996.
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in
American Films. New York: Continuum, 2001.
Bowser, Pearl, ed. Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African American Filmmaking and Race
Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Diawara, Manthia. Black American Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Gaines, Jane M. Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001.
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1993.
Howard, Josiah. Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide. London: FAB Press,
2008.
McGilligan, Patrick. Oscar Micheaux, The Great and Only: The Life of America’s First Black Film-
maker. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
Reid, Mark A. Redefining Black Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Yearwood, Gladstone L. Black Film as a Signifying Practice. Harlem, NY: Africa World Press,
2000.
—Dimitri Keramitas

887
Ancient World in Film, The

ANCIENT WORLD IN FILM, THE. Antiquity has had an incalculable influence

on the themes and language of cinema. While less numerous than fantasy and mytho-
logical films inspired by the ancient world, ancient history films are a significant genre.
Nominally dealing with the past, these films reveal more about the contemporary
world in which they were made and are best viewed as explorations of contemporary
American ideals and anxieties. Films from the height of the ancient epic cycle of the
1950s and 1960s, for example, generally reinforce conservative Christian values and
link those values to the self-image of Cold War America (Pomeroy, 2008; Wyke,
1997). However, the same films can be read as warnings that America, too, may suc-
cumb to corruption and hubris. Of ancient civilizations, Rome has cast the longest
shadow over the modern West, and films about Rome greatly outnumber those about
other ancient civilizations. Interestingly, the cinematic image of Rome is caught
between the glorification of Roman power and glory, and criticism of the Empire’s
oppressive nature.
The ancient world is not always accessible to modern audiences, who may only
know the broad outlines of its people and events. Individual characters often are lost
in the spectacle of vast armies and gigantic buildings, for which ancient epics are
famous. Filmmakers also face a challenge in balancing historical accuracy and

Woody Strode (left) faces off with actor Kirk Douglas in scene from Spartacus, directed by Stanley
Kubrick, 1960. (J. R. Eyerman/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

888
 Ancient World in Film, The

“dramatic necessity” (Solomon, 2001). These issues are typically resolved by simplifi-
cation of history, compression of events, and a focus on universal themes like freedom,
love, or ambition. Antiquity, therefore, becomes a site of allegorical explorations of
modern political and social issues. Two silent films exemplify this technique. In The
Ten Commandments (1923), the story of the Exodus unfolds as a modern morality tale
in which a corrupt architect breaks every commandment on his road to ruin. Intoler-
ance (1916) juxtaposes the parallel “hopes and perplexities” of ancient Babylon, the life
of Jesus, sixteenth-century France, and contemporary America. The increasingly rapid
crosscutting among the stories emphasizes the common theme of injustice across time.
Using ancient history as allegory is facilitated by the free mixture of fact, specula-
tion, and fiction. This is particularly common in Roman-era religious films
(Ben-Hur, 1925 and 1959; Sign of the Cross, 1932; Last Days of Pompeii, 1935; Quo
Vadis, 1951; The Robe, 1953; Demetrius and the Gladiators, 1954; The Silver Chalice,
1954; and Barabbas, 1962). In these films, New Testament narratives and fictional stories
are set against, and interwoven with, actual Roman history. Nonreligious films, such as the
Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and Gladiator (2000), follow a similar model in telling
historical stories through the eyes of fictional characters.
The process of adapting past to present in order to enhance dramatic appeal inevi-
tably leads to the production of films that are less than historically accurate. While
the wildest examples of historical inaccuracy have to be the war rhinos and ninja
Persians depicted in 300 (2006), Last Days of Pompeii notably collapses the roughly
half-century between Christ’s crucifixion and Vesuvius’s eruption into a single decade.
History may be manipulated in films for reasons other than enhancing dramatic
appeal, however. For instance, in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
(1966), a hyperactive mix of ancient Rome and modern Broadway, the film’s genre-
bending excess is used to make serious points about the injustice of slavery. Militarism
and the epic convention of the triumphal march are also thoroughly mocked in Forum.
Miles Gloriosus (Leon Greene) rides into Rome singing a love song to war (and to
himself ), bragging of his many atrocities, and declaring “I am a parade!” Other films
use anachronism in order to echo contemporary events. Solomon and Sheba (1959),
for example, mingles the ancient and modern Middle East, imagining a summit meet-
ing of “absolute monarchs” plotting against the constitutional monarch Solomon; and
as with modern Arab states, the despots try to “drive Israel into the sea.”
The dominant political theme in ancient history films is the struggle for freedom
against tyranny and injustice. If besieged Israelites, Greeks, or Christians may be read
as the precursors of modern Americans, and ancient despots as fascists or communists,
ancient epics become allegories of twentieth-century political struggles. While the his-
torical settings may vary, similar themes and images are used. The Ten Commandments
(1923, 1956) depicts an authoritarian Egypt bound in slavish worship of god-kings
and sadistic in its treatment of the Hebrew slaves. Director Cecil B. DeMille’s prologue
to the 1956 film even declares that one lives either by God’s law or under the rule of a
dictator. Similar ideas unfold in films about ancient Greece. 300 Spartans (1962), for
instance, contrasts the freedom of Greece with the one-man rule of the Persian king
Xerxes and his multinational army of slaves; and Alexander the Great (1956) dismisses

889
Ancient World in Film, The

the Persian “slave army” as no match for the free Macedonians. The hypermasculinized
300 (which is really a fantasy film despite its historical setting) pushes the imagery fur-
ther, describing Persia as a “hungry beast” leading the savage “hordes of Asia” on a
quest to extinguish the life and liberty of Greece. To stress the point, Xerxes’ “horde”
is depicted as an inhuman army of piercing fetishists, seemingly recruited from the
same demonic pit as Sauron’s legions in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003).
However, it is Roman history films that provide the darkest visions of decadence,
corruption, and the misuse of power. Decadence (designed both to attract and repel
audiences) is signaled in many ways: empress Poppaea bathing in milk (Sign of the
Cross); Nero’s corpulent, bejeweled fingers (Quo Vadis); and the bloodshed of gladiato-
rial matches (Spartacus). It may be, though, that the greatest corruption comes from
the empire’s indifference to the misery of its slaves and subjects. Ben-Hur (1959) pro-
vides what may be the most durable image of Roman cruelty. Innocent of any crime,
Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is tortured and made a galley slave (inaccurately,
as Roman warships did not use slaves as rowers). Roman corruption seems inevitably
to lead to persecution, especially of Christians. Cinema’s Christians, in contrast
to the pagan perversions that surround them, are paragons of egalitarianism and
virtue. They even renounce slavery, though early Christianity actually did little to chal-
lenge the institution of slavery (Finlay, 1980). When the persecution of Christians is
shown on film, it not only emphasizes the injustice of religious intolerance, but also
the sheer horror of arena and torture chamber. Considering its age (1932), it can be
argued that Sign of the Cross is unmatched in the nightmare tortures it depicts on screen
(women mauled by a gorilla and a crocodile; a man trampled by an elephant). Similar
horrors drive Quo Vadis, Demetrius and the Gladiators, and other religious epics. Ironi-
cally, persecution and the excessive temptations of court life may be part of the films’
audience appeal (Wyke, 1997).
While drawing from numerous historical and literary sources, post–World War II
Roman films were often thinly veiled indictments of totalitarianism and the Holo-
caust. Scenes of the celebration of Roman triumphs in Quo Vadis and Gladiator, for
example, strongly resemble the Nuremberg rally captured by German filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl in her unsettling documentary Triumph of the Will (1935); while the
“Roman” salute used in virtually every ancient history film is a conscious echo of those
used by Mussolini’s fascists and Hitler’s Nazis. Significantly, while the Romans appear
never to have actually used a Roman-style salute, its use in artwork and plays during
the nineteenth century fixed the image in the public imagination (Winkler, 2009);
after World War II, the gesture could not help but bring to mind the fascism and
Nazism it so chillingly represented. In Quo Vadis, then, the emperor Nero is deliber-
ately depicted as an ancient Hitler (Winkler, 2009) who viciously orders the extermi-
nation of Christians and obsesses over an architectural model of Rome—one that
was actually commissioned by Mussolini (Wyke, 1997). Later, a panicked Nero makes
Christians the scapegoats for his own incendiary destruction of Rome, burned to the
ground to allow for his supreme act of artistic expression. Recall that the young Hitler
had aspirations of becoming a successful artist and the allegory is complete. These allu-
sions transform the Roman Empire from a mere historical phenomenon into the

890
 Ancient World in Film, The

archetype of oppression. As fascism has tended to blur effortlessly with communism in

the American imagination, Roman tyranny serves as a substitute for both America’s
wartime and postwar ideological foes.
While tyranny can be institutional, individual rulers are the primary target of film-
makers’ criticism. While most rulers are, at a minimum, portrayed as ambitious, like
the wily Machiavellians of Cleopatra (1934, 1963), many films explore the perils of
unchecked power. Crassus (Spartacus) exploits the crisis of the Spartacus revolt to
become dictator over Rome, only to use his power to settle political and personal scores
(another inaccuracy, as the real Crassus never remotely possessed such power). Abso-
lute power can also endanger those who wield it. Khufu (Land of the Pharaohs, 1955)
is so obsessed with greed and building his pyramid he is heedless of the plight of his
subjects and to the machinations of his second wife. Even biblical hero David faces
divine wrath when he abuses his power in order to have Bathsheba (David and Bath-
sheba, 1951, and King David, 1985). Power may even drive otherwise admirable rulers
insane, as the pictures Alexander the Great and Alexander (2004) suggest. It is not sur-
prising that the downfall or humbling of despots climaxes so many films, with one of
the most dramatic examples being Nero’s fall in Quo Vadis. Ramses (Ten Command-
ments) sees his army destroyed by the Red Sea, and even Xerxes wins only a pyrrhic vic-
tory over the Spartans (300 Spartans and 300).
It may be argued that the Roman trifecta of Caligula, Nero, and Commodus takes
the “evil ruler” motif to its campy, perverse perfection. The obviously unstable Caligula
of The Robe and its sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators is a vicious, raving lunatic. He
treats the titular robe of Christ as magic to be mastered, even killing a man to see if the
robe can resurrect him. The second-century emperor Commodus is deeply troubled
but is also starkly contrasted with his father, the benevolent philosopher-emperor
Marcus Aurelius. In Fall of the Roman Empire (a fall he largely triggers), Commodus slowly
succumbs to giggling madness, first imagining the gods laughing and then coming to
believe he is really hearing them. In Gladiator, haunted by his father’s disapproval,
Commodus lashes out at everyone around him, entertains incestuous plans for his
sister, and empties the treasury to buy public approval with the Coliseum. Cinema’s
Nero is a villain apart, no doubt due to his persecution of Christians and the histori-
cally false accusation that he burned much of Rome to the ground. Filmic depictions
of Nero are unabashedly negative, with Charles Laughton’s (Sign of the Cross) and Peter
Ustinov’s (Quo Vadis) camp interpretations being particularly vivid. In these films, and
The Silver Chalice, Nero presides over a court of fawning sycophants who fuel his delu-
sions. Dom DeLuise’s Nero (History of the World, 1981) contributes a bored gluttony
to the imperial repertoire. These stereotypical emperors—sadistic, bloated, and
crazed—are ultimately the victims of their own power, and it is the corrupting influ-
ence of power that is the true villain. Interestingly, it is a mark of nobility that Livius
(Fall of the Roman Empire) refuses, and Maximus (Gladiator) resists, absolute power
when it is offered to them.
This bloody trail of persecution and corruption is ironically paralleled by a contra-
dictory cinematic image: the dream of a cosmopolitan society of equality and peace.
The dream itself is closely associated with Alexander the Great, a conqueror whose

891
Ancient World in Film, The

empire briefly linked Europe and Asia. Alexander the Great symbolizes the cosmopoli-
tan dream in a mass wedding Alexander arranges between his Greek officers and Per-
sian women. In Alexander he pointedly rejects the racism of his generals and teacher
Aristotle by marrying a Central Asian woman. In both films, Alexander proves to be
tragically unsuccessful, and he dies before consolidating his worldwide common-
wealth. Alexander’s dream resonates strongly in Cleopatra (1963), where the Greco-
Egyptian queen urges first Caesar, then Antony to create the Alexandrian empire.
Indeed, it is in Alexander’s tomb that Cleopatra enlists Caesar to the cause of “one
world-one nation-one people.”
The image of world empire also pervades Roman-era films, despite the generally
negative cinematic image of ancient Rome. Prologues to Quo Vadis and Spartacus
pointedly expound upon Roman glory and prosperity before denouncing Roman tyr-
anny. The Roman Messala (Ben-Hur, 1959), admittedly a chauvinistic thug, is none-
theless correct when he boasts of the Empire’s order, roads, and trade; the epic
chariot race depicted later in the film highlights the Empire’s diversity. Even the Judean
rebels in Life of Brian (1979) compose an awkwardly long list of benefits derived from
Roman rule. The most celebratory vision of Pax Romana is in Fall of the Roman
Empire. Marcus Aurelius’s speech to a diverse gathering of governors and rulers charac-
terized the Roman Empire as a commonwealth of free nations, transcending race and
religion, and even willing to embrace the barbarians. This optimistic version (soon to
be shattered by Commodus), sees Rome almost as a proto-United States, a nation of
nations and a model for a united world.
While many films embrace or at least acknowledge this cosmopolitan image, it is usu-
ally overshadowed by the crueler realities of Rome. Classical Rome was too authoritarian
and pagan to be a fully satisfactory model for most audiences. However, Roman history
also offers the Christian world-state as an alternative. Quo Vadis, for example, ends with
the implicit hope (symbolized by Marcus Vinicius’s conversion to Christianity) of a
Christianized empire that will heal ancient ills and inaugurate a society of true freedom.
Quo Vadis (as well as many of the other religious films previously discussed) presents
idealized Roman-era Christian communities living in quiet harmony. Even in Fall of
the Roman Empire, an essentially secular epic, Timonides’ utopian community of
“reformed” barbarians is subtly revealed to be Christian-inspired. The Roman and
Christian visions become fully harmonized in Sign of the Pagan (1954), where fifth-
century Christian Rome makes civilization’s last stand against Attila the Hun’s pagan
horde. The Christian world triumphs, even if the film indulges in some inaccurate opti-
mism (Attila’s death changed little and the Western Roman Empire fell 23 years later).
The ambivalent political legacy of Roman civilization has a particular resonance for
the United States. As the heirs of Roman civilization, the Western world continues to
be haunted by Rome’s legacy, even as it endlessly recycles its symbolism, architecture,
and language. The United States, where “a second Senate . . . [sits] upon a second
Capitol Hill” (Holland, 2003) is equally part of this tradition, even if the Romanesque
trappings of the Founders have evolved into the Pax Americana of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. The conservative Christianity and political liberalism of the
post–World War II epic cycle does not so much reject the power of the Roman Empire

892
 Ancient World in Film, The

(no more than it could reject American power) but rather expresses the wish to save
Rome/America from its more corrupt and immoral tendencies. It is therefore fitting
that American films give us a Rome (and to some extent, an Egypt) that is a paradox
of darkness and light. Romans are idealized as figures of honor, military prowess,
and accomplishment. The Roman Empire at its height is something for the American
viewer to marvel at and perhaps to compare to their nation’s own global predominance
(Cyrino, 2004).
This power is made manifest in the inevitable march of resplendent armies sur-
rounded by cheering crowds and martial music. Ben-Hur (1959) offers no fewer than
three sequences of marching Roman armies: first through Nazareth, then Jerusalem,
then in the most spectacular sequence, a triumph through Rome itself. Armor-clad
armies, mounted on horses or chariots and wielding gleaming weapons, have a terrible
beauty that epic films celebrate. Filmmakers certainly never fail to linger over the aes-
thetics of ancient war machines. However, the same films remind us of Roman taste
for gladiatorial games, the Roman crucifixion of Jesus, and persecution of Jews and
Christians. It is a simple fact that Roman glory was built on conquest and slavery,
and the Republic slid slowly into the pit of authoritarianism. The cinematic view of
Roman history suggests that whatever the ideals of Roman civilization, when ideals
are corrupted by power, they die. Spartacus, perhaps, has the most explicit depiction
of this transition from liberty to police state, when Crassus compiles lists of the disloyal
like an ancient Joe McCarthy (Wyke, 1997). McCarthyist allusions also appear in
Ben-Hur (1959) and The Robe. Quo Vadis warns that “with power inevitably comes
corruption.” If, too, as Fall of the Roman Empire states ominously, great empires are
destroyed from within, America may also become a victim of its own success and lose
itself in decadence, corruption, and perhaps even political repression (Wyke, 1997).
By linking past and present, ancient history films provide an opportunity to explore
universal themes of the human condition. The majority of American films set in
antiquity, however, are laden with metaphors of contemporary American ideals and
fears: Ancient heroes tend to serve as stand-ins for America’s leaders, reinforcing
America’s self-image as a bastion of morality, equality, and freedom. Yet ancient civili-
zations, especially Rome, offer a warning about the use and misuse of power that also
applies to modern American society. It may be, then, that films set in antiquity tell
us less about the distant past then they do about ourselves.
See also: DeMille, Cecil B.; Gladiator; Religion and Nationalism in Film; Religion
and Censorship in Film

References
Cyrino, Monica S. “Gladiator and Contemporary American Society.” In Winkler, Martin M.,
ed. Gladiator: Film and History. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004: 24–149.
Finlay, M. I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. New York: Viking, 1980.
Holland, Tom. Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. New York: Anchor, 2003.
Pomeroy, Arthur. Then It Was Destroyed by the Volcano: The Ancient World in Film and on Tele-
vision. London: Duckworth, 2008.

893
Animation

Solomon, Jon. The Ancient World in the Cinema. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
Winkler, Martin M. The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2009.
Wyke, Maria. Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History. New York: Routledge,
1997.
—Karl Leib

ANIMATION. Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images, each slightly

different from the last, to give the illusion of motion. Animation can be shown
through two-dimensional artwork or the images of three-dimensional models in differ-
ent positions. There is no single person credited with inventing animation, as many
people independently developed concepts across the world and throughout history
that would lead to the creation of animation as we know it today.
Sequential art has existed since ancient times, but devices specifically designed for
animation did not, for the most part, begin to appear until the 1800s. The zoetrope
was created in 1834 by William George Horner. The device consists of a cylinder with

Original zoetrope picture bands, c. 1860s. A zoetrope is a cylinder with a series of pictures on the
inner surface that, when viewed through slits with the cylinder rotating, give an impression of con-
tinuous motion. The idea that a sequence of drawings should be made on a band of paper to be
viewed in a rotating cylinder was first suggested by Simon Stampfer in 1833. However, it wasn’t
until the 1860s, when several patents were obtained, that the zoetrope appeared on the market. It
remained a popular parlor toy for the rest of the century. (SSPL/Getty Images)

894
 Animation

vertical slits cut around the sides. Around the inside of the cylinder, a series of pictures
is placed, directly opposite the slits. If one looks through the slits while the cylinder is
spun, this produces the illusion of motion. Similar to the zoetrope was the phenakisto-
scope, invented in 1831 by two men, the Belgian Joseph Plateau and the Austrian
Simon von Stampfer. This device consists of a flat disk mounted on a spinner, with a
series of slits around the circumference. By looking through the slits into the mirror
as the disc spins, the images appear to be in motion, similar to a zoetrope.
The praxinoscope was invented in 1877 by French scientist Charles-Émile
Reynaud, and was an improvement to the zoetrope. While it used the same concept
of a cylinder with a series of sequential images set on the inside, the images were viewed
through a series of stationary mirrors, allowing a steadier and hence clearer image.
Charles created another model, which could be projected onto a screen and could uti-
lize a far larger number of images. This device was called the Théâtre Optique, and
with it, Reynaud was able to create the first truly animated films. This device was even-
tually overshadowed by the Lumière brothers’ photographic film projector, but anima-
tion continued to thrive, as video technology improved throughout the twentieth
century and into the twenty-first century.
Perhaps the most recognizable form of animation is cel animation, which was the
dominant form of animation throughout most of the twentieth century. Traditionally,
individual drawings, varying only slightly from one to the next, are traced or photo-
copied onto transparent acetate sheets called “cels,” which are filled with paints in
assigned colors or tones on the side opposite of the line drawings. These are then pho-
tographed one by one onto film set against a painted background. Traditional anima-
tion techniques can be seen in films such as Walt Disney’s Snow White.
Since the late twentieth century, computers have become a large part of the process.
Artwork can be scanned into a computer system, where computer programs can be
used to color them, add special effects, and simulate camera movement. From there,
the animation can be placed onto many various mediums, whether traditional 35 mm
film stock or digital video formats. The Lion King is an example of traditional animation
aided by computer technology.
Stop motion is created by physically manipulating real-world objects and photo-
graphing them one frame at a time, and then showing them in sequence. There are
many different forms of stop-motion, each named after the medium used to create
the models being photographed. Clay, construction paper, toys, puppets, even live
humans, can all be used in stop-motion. Some examples are Wallace and Gromit (clay),
South Park (construction paper cutouts), Robot Chicken (toys), and The Nightmare
Before Christmas (puppets with armatures).
Computer animation is the most recent form of the process and can be used for a vari-
ety of techniques. Two basic subtypes are “2D animation” and “3D animation.” The for-
mer consists of using two-dimensional graphics, essentially digital drawings, and editing
them into various poses onto a background, simulating traditional animation. Many
video games prior to 1994 used 2D graphics, and the technique is still used for certain
systems today. However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, many televised
cartoon shows are created partially, or completely, using 2D computer animation.

895
Auteur Theory

Employing three-dimensional digital models, 3D animation is rigged with a digital

armature that can be manipulated by an animator to give motion to the model. As
computer technology increases in sophistication, 3D computer graphics become more
and more able to simulate real-world visuals and motions. This form of animation is
becoming increasingly common, especially for animated films. Examples of such films
are the Shrek and Toy Story series.
See also: Disney, Walt

References
Harryhausen, Ray, and Tony Dalton. A Century of Stop-Motion Animation: From Melies to Aard-
man. New York: Crown, 2008.
Thomas, Frank, and Ollie Johnston. Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, Vol. 1. New York: Disney
Press, 1995.
Williams, Richard. The Animator’s Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles and Formulas
for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop Motion and Internet Animators. New York: Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux, 2002.
—Benjamin O’Neill

AUTEUR THEORY. Often simplified and misunderstood, the “auteur theory” echoes
and rehearses the larger debates about the value, meaning, and viability of “authorship”
that have occupied cultural criticism since the latter half of the twentieth century.
The theory engages several thorny questions. How can the idea of authorship—of a
single, unitary consciousness that controls the creation of a given text—be applied to
cultural products, like commercial films, that require complex industrial mechanisms
for their creation? How is it possible to identify a single “author” of a commercial film
given the number of creative forces involved in its making? What would be the distin-
guishing characteristics of the author’s personality (assuming one could identify such
an author), particularly given the traces of all the other artists’ contributions to the final
film product? And finally, does the concept of film authorship add aesthetic meaning
to the commercial work under question, and if so, what is the value of that meaning?
More complicated than they may at first appear, these are the questions the auteur
theory tries not so much to answer as to turn into an aesthetic battleground, a call to
arms for cinephiles who believe film authorship must be ascribed, at least insofar as it
can be, to the controlling vision and sensibility of one artist: the film’s director.
Today, the assertion that a director is the de facto author of a film does not seem
particularly shocking or revelatory—a sign, perhaps, of the effect auteur critics have
had in shaping the public’s attitudes toward accepting the primacy of the director.
But before the World War II, it seemed a truism that the sheer number of creative peo-
ple needed to craft a commercial film—scriptwriters and actors, cinematographers and
composers, producers and editors—rendered any attempt to identify an individual
author a quixotic enterprise. In classical Hollywood filmmaking, for instance, studio
productions depended on “the genius of the system” for a film’s conception, financing,

896
 Auteur Theory

casting, technical facilities, shooting, publicity, and distribution. Assigning authorship

to a “product” constructed by a well-oiled machine seemed a superficial and superflu-
ous ploy—a matter mostly for publicists heralding, say, a new “Howard Hawks” pro-
duction.
The case of Hawks is central to the question. How could one contend Howard
Hawks was the author of a “Howard Hawks” film, particularly when his work resulted
from the efforts of so many other strong “authors”? For instance, in the screwball com-
edy His Girl Friday (1940), the screenplay is adapted, without credit, by Ben Hecht
from the play The Front Page he wrote with Charles MacArthur, and its star chemistry
is provided by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell; and in the detective vehicle The Big
Sleep (1946), the screenplay is co-adapted by William Faulkner from a novel by
Raymond Chandler and relies on the offscreen chemistry of Humphrey Bogart and
Lauren Bacall to fuel the on-screen frisson. Hawks, the director in each circumstance,
was a fine craftsman certainly; but was it not more accurate to call him, in effect, not
the author but the director of multiple authors who have been assigned roles in the
larger system, more accurate to say that his films were authored by the sum total of
all the artists and technicians supplied by the studios, or by the system itself?
Perhaps. But in the 1950s, finally afforded the opportunity to see the flood of
Hollywood films that had been held up from export during the World War II—
including pictures such as Citizen Kane (1941) and The Big Sleep—a group of French
writers and filmmakers associated with the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma
advanced the polemical argument that not only was the nature of film authorship
worth considering theoretically, but that it was precisely that authorship that was the
single most important factor in determining a film’s aesthetic value, particularly of a
film produced within the Hollywood industrial system. Film was not a literature,
written in words; it was also not merely an industry, written by technology and
money; it was, rather, something else: a cinema, written in images. And works of cin-
ema were authored not by scriptwriters or producers but by directors, the artists who
had the greatest influence on how a given film’s mise-en-scène contributed to its over-
all visual (cinematic), not verbal (literary) meaning. These writers—who included the
young critics-turned-filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard—passion-
ately posited that only the director invested a film with the nuances and significances
of an identifiable style and vision that could be noted and traced among other films;
only the director controlled the cinematic value, which is to say, the visual aspects of
the work.
Simplified, the idea may seem obvious. Why the need for a “theory” to suggest
directors shaped the images of films? After all, the fame of European directors like Jean
Renoir and Fritz Lang, whose reputations preceded them to Hollywood, was based on
the unique temperaments and styles they imparted to their work. Even powerful
Hollywood directors got the lion’s share of credit for being the guiding force behind
the overall craft and artistry of their films. They worked within the “system,” but were
able to carve out distinct artistic personalities within that industrialized world. Clearly,
directors somehow imprinted themselves on their films, a fact everyone knew without
needing a theory to tell them so.

897
Auteur Theory

But such an understanding of theory—one held perhaps even today by most every-
day moviegoers—misses the point as formulated by the Cahiers critics and their fol-
lowers. The auteur theory always was a bit more recondite, a bit less straightforward,
a game played by insiders; it always tended to be reduced and simplified by those
who didn’t quite understand it.
While the young Cahiers critics were far from systematic in their polemical articles
and reviews, nevertheless in their fast formulations, in their enthusiasms and denunci-
ations, they began to limn a definition of film authorship that depended on the capac-
ity of the viewer to identify cinematic values and true cinematic authorship.
It was only trained viewers who fully understood cinematic values that were directly
opposed to the unconsidered system of antiquated literary values that had been falsely
lacquered onto the cinema. The young François Truffaut, for example, in his bromide
“A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1954,
attacked what he called the “Tradition of Quality” in French movies, which included
polished photography that “under the cover of literature” provided bourgeois pleasures
to a stupefied audience; there could not be, in Truffaut’s view, peaceful co-existence
between the bourgeois literary cinema and an auteur’s cinema that had nothing to do
with literary values.
Nowhere was the battle for an auteur’s cinema waged more fiercely than in the criti-
cal consideration of the American commercial cinema. While European directors
during this period were more easily granted the privileged status of major artists—a
trend that extended to great directors in the 1950s like Ingmar Bergman from Sweden
and Federico Fellini from Italy—directors working in the entertainment-driven American
system, like Hawks, George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Frank Tashlin, and Alfred Hitchcock,
were seldom given such privileged status; they were still considered craftsmen who
contributed their skills to make the products of the system. It was the job of the
auteur theory to rescue them, on the one hand, from the tyrannical false values of
literary quality; and, on the other hand, to elevate their heretofore submerged status
in the system. The theory required the film critic to identify the particular cinematic
qualities—the stylistic gestures, the inner visual structures—of the often underappreci-
ated work of these commercial directors, so as to grant to them, as they worked within
the confines of the industrial system, the status of authorship they deserved.
It was exactly this tension—between the confines of the studio system and the need
of a director’s cinematic personality to somehow express itself within that system of
constraint—that provided the aesthetic interest of many of the films that auteur critics
championed.
Thus, an auteur’s cinema became, in effect, a film critic’s cinema, for only the
trained critic could point out the nature of a given director’s specific cinematic person-
ality within the system. Since many viewers presumed that American films had little to
do with art, auteur critics took it upon themselves to rectify this mistaken presump-
tion, and offered to show the often complex nature of a director’s hidden artistry when
and where it existed.
Foremost among these critics was the American Andrew Sarris, whose article “Notes
on the Auteur Theory in 1962” helped to systematize the major premises behind the

898
 Auteur Theory

theory and to explain some of its quirks and tenets. Sarris made it clear that the theory
did not predict success or failure, as good directors could make bad films and vice
versa. The implicit assumption behind the theory was made clear: not all directors
were auteurs. Directors were not always consistent—even auteurs could fail—but cin-
ematic meaning was always more likely to be imbued in a film made by an auteur.
While anyone with a talented crew of technicians could make a film, perhaps even an
enjoyable film—witness the number of successful films made by actors turned one-
time directors—only an auteur demonstrated, in film after film, consummate technical
mastery. And this was Sarris’s first premise of the theory: supreme technical compe-
tence of the director as a criterion of value.
The second premise was the director’s distinguishable personality as a mark of a
film’s value. Directors could move up or down a scale of aesthetic value based on cer-
tain recurring characteristics of style that could come to be seen as signatures of a direc-
tor’s identity. Billy Wilder, for example, a very successful commercial writer/director,
never fit in the auteur critics’ pantheon because his films did not demonstrate stylistic
development and consistency. Other directors, however, whose work demonstrated
such consistency even in the face of other severe artistic problems, were accorded high
honors: Orson Welles, for instance, never lost rank with auteur critics even as his films
became increasingly shoddy; and Otto Preminger in Sarris’s economy of value proved
his worth by indicating a consistent visual personality even when he tackled themati-
cally diverse projects.
If Sarris’s first premise emphasized a director’s technical mastery, and his second a
director’s stylistic consistency, evolution, and personality, the third premise was related
to what he regarded to be the holy of holies of cinematic art: interior meaning.
Interior meaning was precisely the place where the director’s artistic personality was
in tension with the material. Uncovering internal meaning was the ultimate joy of the
auteur critic, and it took years of close observation of a director’s work to uncover it.
Even Sarris admitted such meaning could almost seem mystical to the acolyte: and thus
the theory was always in flux: directors rose and fell in value as their inner meaning
became apparent. Inner meaning required a kind of decryption that separated out
the distracting contributions of producers and cameramen and actors: eventually, over
time, after the critic sifted through the evidence of film after film, the auteur’s inner
meaning emerged.
Thus, Howard Hawks, far from being a mere craftsman of a variety of Hollywood
genre pictures, becomes a premier test case of the theory: from war films to gangster
films, from musicals to comedies, from westerns to melodramas, Hawks codes again
and again for the watchful critic the same motifs and themes, the same visual styles,
the same tempos of movement, the same paradigms of relationship, now between
men and women, now between men and men. Seen in toto, his films call out to the
critic to lift him up not just as a Hollywood craftsman but as a supreme author,
embodying a career project that consciously or unconsciously saturates his filmogra-
phy. Style is not contingent to the accident of the selections of each film; it is the
essence of each film’s significance. One can watch a Hawks film and only see its artifice
and genre manipulation (Monkey Business [1952]), or its relative success (The Big Sleep

899
Auteur Theory

[1946]) or its failure (Hatari [1962]); but the auteur critic sees codes of expressiveness
that can be read backwards and forwards through the filmmaker’s oeuvre. The flirta-
tious bickering of John Wayne and Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo (1959) overlaps the
flirtatious bickering of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940),
and both inform the same pattern one can see in the exchanges between John Barry-
more and Carole Lombard in Twentieth Century (1933).
But Hawks is far from the only case. Raoul Walsh, Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray—
they and many others, from the auteur critic’s point of view, are auteurs because they
find a way to lace their diverse films with the imprint of personality in spite (and even
because) of the scripts, genres, bad actors, and budgets under which they are con-
strained to work, and the audiences to whom they are forced to pander. The process
of finding the author’s hidden meaning isn’t programmatic, or schematic: it is a matter
of decipherment, of discovery, of finding the hidden pressure points that even the
auteur in question may not be aware are coded in film after film; it is a process of
imbuing these pressure points with levels of meaning that can only be called personal,
unique, and inextinguishable.
To those who became the theory’s converts and proponents, the concept was revela-
tory; to those who resisted it, the theory was misguided. Indeed, by the middle 1960s,
particularly in American film criticism, auteur theory had become the staging ground
for discussions on the very nature of cinema aesthetics. For over two decades it was a
critical touchstone, complete with its attendant acolytes, defenders, explainers, refiners,
and (of course) bitter opponents.
Among the opponents were critics like Stanley Kauffmann, who resisted the notion
that a film’s value was primarily connected to the filmmaker’s ability to use a camera
consistently, or to exploit film’s inherent mythology, or to pursue “unconscious”
themes while in the service of “fourth rate melodrama” (1971, 96). Kauffmann also
suggested that the idea was being picked up by filmmakers themselves, who were using
it to justify working with material that was otherwise beneath their, and our, intellec-
tual interest. Instead of merely serving critics who deciphered the hidden meaning of
the works of the past, the theory was providing young filmmakers with the justification
to assert their value as directors by placing self-referential signs in their films that
showed they relished “the exaltation of pop over pompous ‘elitist’ art” (1971, 256).
In other words, the theory had become, for those who resisted it, an excuse used by tal-
ented fetishists to justify the recycling of forms from the past rather than pursuing new
territories of art. Read forwards, auteur theory seems to make possible not only Martin
Scorsese but Quentin Tarantino, two directors prepared from their first work con-
sciously to demonstrate stylistic mastery and consistency, and to place references that
can be “read backwards” throughout their films (and film history). Kauffmann’s intu-
ition was prescient: a theory of critical decipherment became a clue for how a filmmaker
could fashion an artistic personality even before the filmmaker began making films.
Oddly enough, in the light of burgeoning developments in postmodern thinking at
the end of the twentieth century, auteur theory may seem a relic of a bygone era. From
the earliest French Cahiers critics, auteur theory appeared to be an attempt to prop
up the critical value of certain directors; and it raised the figure of the director to the

900
 Auteur Theory

same cultural level occupied by literary authors. But this attempt, successful insofar as
film directors became significant world figures in the 1960s and ’70s, seemed to run
diametrically opposed to concurrent tendencies in literary theory where the author
was losing prestige. Roland Barthes’s claim that the author was dead as a determiner
of literary meaning, for example, enhanced the trend to deconstruct the way authors
signify the meanings of texts; and Michel Foucault’s recognition that authors in the
hum of a postmodern infotainment society exist only insofar as society needs “author
functions”—a means to distinguish one text from the next primarily for purposes of
ownership—seemed to suggest that the concept of the author was a hoax of capitalism.
Would it be possible, if one, say, watched every film Quentin Tarantino has seen,
and memorized every frame of every film Tarantino has directed, to identify the
“anonymous” television commercials he is reported to have been paid millions to direct
in Japan? Would such an identification uncover the “inner meanings” posited by
auteur theory? Would finding “deep meaning” prove that cinematic authorship illumi-
nates itself regardless of the genre or the purpose of the project? Or would this effort,
rather, underscore the hollowness of auteur theory? Would it show that the signs of
authorship alone have never determined the value of a text, but are only one aspect
among many that help a reader, a viewer, an audience, a culture, or an epoch negotiate
the indeterminate value of the artist’s gesture to produce a provisional defense against
the abyss?
See also: French New Wave; Intellectual Montage; Italian Neorealism; Sarris,
Andrew

References
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Heath, Stephen, ed. Image, Music, Text. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977: 142–48.
De Baecque, Antoine, and Serge Toubiana. Truffaut: A Biography. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In Rabinow, Paul, ed. The Foucault Reader. New York:
Pantheon, 1984: 101–20.
Kauffmann, Stanley. Figures of Light. New York: Harper Colophon, 1971.
Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” In Hollows, Joanne, Peter Hutchings,
and Mark Jancovich, eds. The Film Studies Reader. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
2000, 68–71.
Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York:
Henry Holt, 1988.
Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972.

—Robert Cowgill

901
This page intentionally left blank
 v
B
BIBLICAL EPIC, THE. The biblical epic has been an immensely popular genre of
cinema that illuminates many aspects of American religious culture. Although the term
actually includes three distinctly different subtypes—the Old Testament epic, the Jesus
film, and epics about the clash between Rome and the early Church (e.g., Ben-Hur)—
they all raise similar artistic and cultural questions: How to depict familiar stories that
millions of people regard as uniquely sacred, yet make them fresh and exciting enough
to be profitable in a global market? How to balance the need to treat the stories rever-
ently, yet accommodate the unique interpretative slant of individual filmmakers and
the aesthetic tastes of modern consumers of film? How to stay sufficiently faithful to
the original biblical texts, yet make the films relevant to contemporary political and
social concerns? Filmmakers face daunting challenges in translating biblical material
to the silver screen.
Many of Hollywood’s greatest directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, D. W. Griffith,
William Wyler, George Stevens, Sidney Olcott, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli,
and Martin Scorsese, have accepted the challenge, creating some of the most
profitable, influential, and controversial movies in history. Cinematic renditions
of the Jesus story include one of the first epics (Intolerance); two of the most profit-
able films ever produced (the 1925 and 1959 versions of Ben-Hur); the first movie
made in CinemaScope (The Robe); one of the most expensive films ever shot in
America (The Greatest Story Ever Told); and one of the most controversial (The Last
Temptation of Christ).
Both the potential for profit and the unique challenges inherent in the genre
became apparent very early. In 1898, just a few years after the invention of motion pic-
tures, a New York theatre produced a 19-minute film entitled The Mystery of the Passion
Play of Oberammergau. Although billed as an authentic version of the famous German
Passion Play, it was actually filmed on the roof of the Grand Central Plaza Hotel in
Manhattan, a fact that did not dampen audience enthusiasm for the twice-daily show-
ings. Consisting of 23 scenes from the life of Jesus, from Bethlehem to the Ascension,
and script cards that were taken verbatim from the Gospels, every effort was made to
make the presentation acceptable to Christians. The theatre accompanied the showings

903
Biblical Epic, The

Charlton Heston, playing Moses, stands in a barren landscape in a scene from the biblical epic The
Ten Commandments, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, 1954. (Ralph Crane/Time Life Pictures/Getty
Images)

with a boys’ choir and lectures by a minister. Both Protestant and Catholic leaders gave
their stamp of approval, and soon it was being distributed throughout the United
States, not only by theatre owners but also by some itinerant Protestant evangelists
who integrated the movie into their tent revival meetings (Tatum, 2004).
Indeed, some religious leaders felt that such a film belonged only inside a church, as
film mogul Adolph Zukor discovered in 1908 when he brought to his U.S. theatres
The Passion Play, produced by the French Company Pathé. After a showing of the
movie, one angered Catholic priest informed Zukor that he intended to ask local
authorities to close down the theatre for sacrilege. Although the priest had enjoyed
the film very much, he believed that such a sacred topic should be presented only
within a sacred space, never within the profane confines of a theatre (Keyser, 1984).
Sidney Olcott directed From the Manger to the Cross for Kalem in 1912, on location
in Egypt and Palestine. The script was written by actress Gene Gauntier, who also
played the role of the Virgin Mary. By now aware of the potential controversy

904
 Biblical Epic, The

surrounding any cinematic representations of Christ, Kalem wisely arranged to give

ministers and priests advance showings of the 71-minute movie, the most elaborate
Jesus film made up to that date. A telling review in Moving Picture World offered many
suggestions to distributors for how to “reverently” air the movie: use organ music and a
little incense in the exhibition room, invite church members with written invitations
(gothic type), and advertise with billboards rather than sandwich boards (Tatum, 2004).
D. W. Griffith, who directed the first truly epic Jesus movie, Intolerance (1916), dem-
onstrated no such concern with church support. Griffith’s three-hour-long film, released
the year after his groundbreaking The Birth of a Nation, tells four stories from different
historical epochs, using the image of a mother rocking a cradle as the transition from
one tale to the next. Griffith developed three stories in detail: the fall of Babylon to the
Persians in 539 BCE, the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Huguenots
by Catholics, and a contemporary story of an innocent American youth sentenced for
murder. He also used brief scenes from the life of Christ—seven altogether, taking up
just over 12 minutes of film—as thematic commentary to drive home his point: the same
intolerance that had led to the death of Jesus had caused atrocities throughout history
and was still alive in the United States. Griffith’s story cards left viewers with no doubt
whom he was attacking: modern Progressive “uplifters” who sought to impose their
own moral standards upon the nation (Solomon, 2001; Tatum, 2004).
Griffith no doubt had in mind the sort of thinking that in 1916 led both the General
Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the General Convention of
the Protestant Episcopal Church to support film censorship. Yet he himself sought
advice from Rabbi Isadore Myers in making his film, and prior to its release Griffith
removed a scene showing the crucifixion of Jesus at the request of the Jewish organiza-
tion B’nai B’rith, which feared that it might trigger anti-Semitic attacks on Jews as
“Christ-killers” (Tatum, 2004). This concern would surface again repeatedly through-
out the history of Jesus movies, most notably in the case of Norman Jewison’s Jesus
Christ Superstar (1973) and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004).
Griffith’s film was the first to use a biblical story deliberately to comment on con-
temporary social issues. Many future directors would follow his lead, especially in the
heyday of the Old Testament Epics in the 1950s. Perhaps most importantly, the grand
scale of Griffith’s sets and the drama of his presentation became the standard for other
directors who ventured into the genre.
No filmmaker is more closely associated with the biblical epic than Cecil
B. DeMille, whose more than 70 feature films included two versions of The Ten Com-
mandments (1923 and 1956), The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932),
and Samson and Delilah (1949). DeMille’s Bible epics reveal a complex blend of his
deep personal religious faith, strong patriotism, and uncanny sense of showmanship
and marketing savvy. He spent countless hours researching the details of ancient art,
clothing, and architecture in an effort to make his monumental sets as authentic as
possible, yet freely took artistic license with the biblical texts and fabricated many plot
elements out of pure imagination (Solomon, 2001).
In an effort to make The King of Kings as reverential as possible, DeMille sought the
advice of Bruce Barton, author of the best-selling Jesus book The Man Nobody Knows

905
Biblical Epic, The

(1924), as well as Reverend George Reid Andrews of the Federal Council of Churches
and Father Daniel A. Lord, S.J., of St Louis University. Shooting of the movie opened
with a prayer service involving every member of the production, and Father Lord said
mass daily on the set while filming on location. DeMille required all cast members to
sign contracts mandating exemplary moral behavior off the set, and H. B. Warner, cast
in the role of Jesus, rode from his dressing room to the set in a special closed car. While
Warner was dressed as Jesus, only DeMille was allowed to speak to him (Stern, Jefford,
and DeBona, 1999; Tatum, 2004).
Yet DeMille began his spectacle with a wholly nonbiblical scene of a wild banquet at
the emperor’s palace, where a scantily clad Mary Magdalene (Ziegfeld Follies girl Jacque-
line Logan) reclines on a couch and lovingly embraces a pet leopard. This opening
anticipated other highly eroticized scenes in DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (Hedy
Lamarr as the bewitching Delilah) and The Ten Commandments (1956), in which Anne
Baxter plays the teasing Princess Nefretiri, barely able to restrain her lust for Moses
(Charlton Heston). Of all American films produced during the Production Code era,
few if any surpassed the biblical epics in raw eroticism. DeMille offered a theological
response to critics who regarded his Bible movies as too sexual, arguing that by shroud-
ing them “in what we think is reverence . . . we have too often stripped the men and
women of the Bible of their humanity,” a process that also stripped them of their reli-
gious value. The scanty clothing and scenes of illicit desire could be justified by the
ancient settings and the need to visually portray moral temptation, but filmmakers could
hardly be unaware of the added market appeal of such scenes (Babington and Evans,
1993; Smith, 2001; Solomon, 2001).
Biblical epics dominated the industry during the 1950s, the genre accounting for
three of the four most profitable movies of the decade. Facing tough competition
from television, Hollywood studios found Bible spectaculars a reliable way to bring
masses of Americans out to the theatre. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah opened in late
1949, and became the number one box-office film of 1950. This was followed by
David and Bathsheba (1949), Quo Vadis (1952), Androcles and the Lion (1952), The
Robe (1953), Salome (1953), Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), The Prodigal
(1955), The Silver Chalice (1955), The Ten Commandments (1956), The Big Fisherman
(1959), Solomon and Sheba (1959), Ben-Hur (1959), and The Story of Ruth (1960).
The immense popularity of the biblical epic in part reflected pervasive Cold War
fears. Tales of ancient Jewish and Christian heroes made an ideal vehicle for addressing
the conflict with America’s enemies. In the Bible films, the foes of Israel and the
Church are depicted always as militaristic dictatorships, while the Israelites and
Christians are champions of human freedom. This motif, which runs through all
the epics of the era, is made very explicit by DeMille in The Ten Commandments, which
famously begins with DeMille himself appearing on-screen to talk with the audience
about the eternal war between good and evil. The story of Moses and the giving of the
Law at Sinai, DeMille claimed, are about the birth of liberty. “Are men the property
of the state or are they free souls under God?” DeMille asked viewers. “This same bat-
tle continues throughout the world today” (Pratt and Reynolds, 1989; Nadel, 1993;
Smith, 2001)

906
 Biblical Epic, The

The Old Testament epics of the 1950s also reflected the ecumenical impulse of the
period. During the decade, political and religious leaders frequently collapsed Judaism
and Christianity together rhetorically into a common “Judeo-Christian tradition” that
stood over and against humanism and paganism. Will Herberg, a Jewish sociologist,
published a best-selling book in 1955 entitled Protestant-Catholic-Jew, in which he
asserted that American Jews and the two major streams of American Christianity con-
stituted diverse but essentially similar expressions of a common religious faith that
could be summarized as the American Way of Life. In such a context, Hollywood Bible
spectaculars fused Old Testament and New Testament together with American nation-
alism to create dramatic morality tales about the eternal war between liberty and des-
potism. The audiences who flocked to watch these films left theatres with no doubt
that the stories in their Bibles and the headlines in their daily newspapers both pointed
to the same truths (Pratt and Reynolds, 1989; Babington and Evans, 1993; Mart, 2004).
The Old Testament epic went into decline during the 1960s, just as Jesus films
made a resurgence. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) had remained so popular that
until the great director died in 1959, nobody else in Hollywood attempted to make
another cinematic portrayal of the Christ. Beginning with Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings
(1961), there followed Barabbas (1962), Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew
(1964), George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Godspell (1973), Jesus
Christ Superstar (1973), Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Jesus (1979), The Last Temptation of
Christ (1988), and The Passion of the Christ (2004).
Many of these films stirred considerable controversy. The liberalization and final
abandonment of the Production Code allowed directors a much greater range of inter-
pretative freedom, permitting them to take greater liberties with the biblical stories and
to explore provocative theological questions. Ray, who had directed James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause (1955) before taking up the Jesus story, chose the youthful
Jeffrey Hunter for the role of Christ, earning the film the nickname “I Was a Teenage
Jesus.” King of Kings downplays the divinity of Jesus and presents him as something of
a disaffected ascetic and teacher who called on people to question existing social norms
(Stern, Jefford, and DeBona, 1999; Tatum, 2004).
Pasolini, an atheist and socialist, presented Jesus as a peasant rebel who challenged
the political and religious authorities of his age. His Gospel According to St. Matthew,
filmed in black and white, relied on unknown actors and eschewed dramatic sets. Aes-
thetically alien to Hollywood, it appeared in the United States at a time when many
Americans had grown more accustomed to European imports. Even so, it failed to
impress general audiences. A popular art film of the 1960s, Gospel According to St. Matthew
earned the praise of many liberal theologians with its activist Jesus, but had virtually no
impact on popular culture (Stern, Jefford, and DeBona, 1999; Tatum, 2004).
George Stevens, in contrast, worked in the tradition of Hollywood spectacles. The
Greatest Story Ever Told utilized famous stars, large sets, and exotic locales, but,
strangely, provided almost no drama. Stevens began and ended his film with the same
scene—a christus figure painted on the ceiling of a cathedral. The audience immedi-
ately knows that this is the familiar story of the Christ of faith, the Jesus revered
throughout the ages in countless Christian churches. His Jesus (Max von Sydow) is

907
Biblical Epic, The

drawn largely from the high Christology of John’s gospel, a being so divine that his
humanity barely shines through. Unlike Pasolini’s Christ, there is no political or social
radical in Stevens’s version. The Greatest Story Ever Told reverently but predictably
gives the audience the savior they already know (Stern, Jefford, and DeBona, 1999;
Babington and Evans, 2001; Tatum, 2004).
Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, both rock operas originally produced for the
stage, sought to breathe fresh life into the Jesus story, in the process shocking many
religious conservatives with their portrayals of a countercultural messiah. By the
1970s, the counterculture was entering American popular culture. A fragmented soci-
ety, torn by the civil rights revolution, assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate, was
willing to question traditional sources of authority. Movies like Little Big Man
(1970) questioned the myth of the West, and M*A*S*H (1970) the American military.
The Graduate (1967) challenged middle-class notions of marriage and material success.
The time was ripe for questioning the Church and traditional constructions of Jesus. In
American seminaries of the time, students debated the death of God and probed a host
of new liberation theologies. On the religious right, many youth embraced a more tra-
ditional understanding of Jesus as savior, but one who also called on his followers to
live a radically countercultural lifestyle that resembled that of the hippies. These “Jesus
freaks” could find in Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell a figure who spoke to their
deepest concerns (Stern, Jefford, and DeBona, 1999; Solomon, 2001; Tatum, 2004).
The Jesus of Godspell is a socially hip preacher of peace, condemned to die by the
hypocritical establishment. Rather than proclaiming himself, Jesus enacts parables
about the Kingdom of God for his disciples, who like him have dropped out of society
and embraced a countercultural existence. Set in modern Manhattan instead of ancient
Palestine, Jesus appears literally as a clown, is baptized in a water fountain, and cruci-
fied on a chain link fence. His death is not presented as an atoning sacrifice, but rather
seems simply to underscore the brutality of the established political and social order.
The Jesus of Superstar, also an antiestablishment figure, is very much a man, unsure
of his own identity, who is elevated by his followers to superstardom. In a sense, the
focus of Jesus Christ Superstar is less on Jesus himself than on his followers Judas Iscariot
and Mary Magdalene. In one famous scene, Mary puts the exhausted Jesus to bed,
and then sings her hit song “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” confessing to the
audience her sexual desire for the Messiah. Perhaps no other scene in the film under-
scores so clearly the cultural shift that had occurred since DeMille’s era (Stern,
Jefford, and DeBona, 1999).
Franco Zeffirelli, a Roman Catholic, found all of the existing cinematic representa-
tions of Christ to be inadequate, or in the case of Godspell and Superstar blasphemous.
His Jesus of Nazareth was originally made as a miniseries for Italian and British TV.
Drawing on an all-star cast and huge budget, he attempted to reconstruct in detail
the look and feel of first-century Palestine and to present the divine-human Jesus
Christ of Catholic dogma as a figure who was fully Jewish. More than any other cin-
ematic portrayal of the Jesus story, Zeffirelli stresses the Jewish cultural milieu and
Christ’s complete identification with his people. The six-hour movie first aired in the
United States on NBC on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, April 3 and 10, 1977,

908
 Biblical Epic, The

and was watched by more than 90 million viewers. With warm support from Pope
Paul VI, who hailed the film as a model of Christian art, Jesus of Nazareth remained
a staple of American television at Easter throughout the following decade, and is still
perhaps the most popular of all Jesus movies among Christians (Tatum, 2004).
Unlike Zeffirelli, who based his film on the Bible and Catholic dogma, Martin
Scorsese turned to extra-biblical sources for The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), an
adaptation of the controversial novel by excommunicated Greek novelist Nikos Kazan-
tzakis. Although Scorsese, a lapsed Catholic, clearly intended the film to be a reveren-
tial portrayal of Jesus, he sparked international opposition from conservative Catholics
and Protestants alike (Mitchell and Plate, 2007). He opens the movie with a disclaimer
that the film is based on a novel rather than the Bible, and that his theme is the struggle
between body and spirit. His Jesus (Willem Dafoe) is unsure of his own identity and
only gradually comes to understand his mission as savior. Most shockingly, he clearly
has physical desire for Mary Magdalene. Much of the public furor focused on a dream
sequence in which the crucified Jesus is given a vision of what his future life could be
like as a married man if he should choose not to fulfill his role as sacrificial mediator.
The audience sees him, from a distance, making love with his wife and playing with
his children. When Jesus suddenly realizes that this vision comes from Satan, he com-
mits himself to his destiny as the savior and revives on the cross, where he utters the
final words of the film, “It is accomplished.”
Although some liberal theologians warmly praised Scorsese for raising the issue of
Jesus’s humanity and sexuality, other liberals felt that he had taken too literal an approach
to the Jesus story. After months of prerelease protests, the film had not been as cutting-
edge as they anticipated. Conservative commentators, on the other hand, universally
criticized the film for theological deficiencies (especially the lack of a resurrection) and
found the treatment of Jesus” sexuality to be morally offensive (Tatum, 2004).
Conservative Christians were far happier with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ
(2004), a film that depicts the last 12 hours of Christ’s life in such graphic detail that it
received an R-rating for violence. Gibson, a Catholic who criticized Scorsese’s account
of Christ, based his version on elements from all four canonical passion narratives, as
well as the mystical visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824), a German
nun whose religious experiences were published in 1833 under the title The Dolorous
Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Emmerich described her visions of Jesus’s death in gory
detail, adding to the bare bones of the Gospels intricate descriptions of torture and suf-
fering. Emmerich also stressed the influence of demons on those who killed Jesus,
including the Jews collectively. By choosing to incorporate Emmerich’s writings into
his script, Gibson opened himself to charges of anti-Semitism, a concern that has sur-
faced in all cinematic depictions of the crucifixion, but that especially dominated pub-
lic discussion on The Passion of the Christ (Tatum, 2004; Malone, 2007).
Like DeMille, Gibson attempted to infuse the production of his film with religious
devotion. A priest was on the set to say daily Latin Mass and also to hear confessions.
Gibson’s Jesus (Jim Caviezel) was a devout Catholic who prayed the rosary to help
him endure his 15 days of recreated torture on the cross, and who understood himself
as a vessel of the Holy Spirit. Gibson and Caviezel both expressed their hope that

909
Blackface

viewers would be brought to repentance and conversion by watching the movie

(Malone, 2007).
Although even many conservative viewers found the depictions of torture difficult
to watch, Catholics and evangelical Protestant audiences generally praised Gibson for
his emphasis on the cross as an atoning sacrifice. Liberal Christians, in contrast, often
shared Jewish concerns that the film was anti-Semitic, and generally agreed that Gibson
had so focused upon the passion of Jesus that he ignored many other Christological
issues that are theologically central to the Gospels.
See also: DeMille, Cecil B.; Religion and Censorship in Film; Religion and Nation-
alism in Film

References
Babington, Bruce, and Peter William Evans. Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood
Cinema. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993.
Keyser, Les, and Barbara Keyser. Hollywood and the Catholic Church: The Image of Roman
Catholicism in American Movies. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1984.
Malone, Peter, ed. Through a Catholic Lens: Religious Perspectives of Nineteen Film Directors from
Around the World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
Mart, Michelle. “The ‘Christianization’ of Israel and Jews in 1950s America.” Religion and
American Culture 14, 2004: 109–46.
May, John R. ed. New Image of Religious Film. Franklin, WI: Sheed and Ward, 2000.
Mitchell, Jolyon, and S. Brent Plate, eds. The Religion and Film Reader. New York: Routledge,
2007.
Nadel, Alan. “God’s Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War Epic.”
PMLA 108, 1993: 415–30.
Pratt, George C., and Herbert Reynolds. “Forty-Five Years of Picture Making: An Interview
with Cecil B. DeMille.,” Film History 3, 1989: 133–45.
Smith, Jeffrey A. “Hollywood Theology: The Commodification of Religion in Twentieth-
Century Films.” Religion and American Culture 11, 2001: 191–231.
Solomon, Jon. The Ancient World in Cinema, rev. and expanded ed. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2001.
Stern, Richard C., Clayton N. Jefford, and Guerric DeBona, O.S.B. Savior on the Silver Screen.
Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999.
Tatum, W. Barnes. Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years, rev. and expanded ed.
Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2004.
—James Rohrer

BLACKFACE. The image is jarring to present-day viewers: white actors performing

with faces colored black. Nonetheless, “blacking up”—applying burnt cork to white
(and later black) skin—distinguishes the groundbreaking films of the early twentieth
century. The striking prominence of blackface, however, reflects continuity with an
earlier era and alludes to the ever-complicated relationship between race and entertain-
ment in American history.

910
 Blackface

The long and complex history of blackface predates film; its cinematic presence is
testimony only to the transition from the nineteenth century’s dominant cultural form
to that of the twentieth century, from theater to film. Although its roots stretch back at
least to Elizabethan England and wind their way through colonial America, blackface
first surged into popular culture during the 1830s and 1840s. Such entertainers as
Thomas D. “Daddy” Rice and Stephen Foster cultivated a mass audience for the black-
face minstrel show, a distinctly American form of stage entertainment that combined
dancing, singing, and comedy routines performed by blackface entertainers. Appealing
mostly to northern, urban, working-class men and claiming to speak as black men, the
blackface minstrels built the first form of mass entertainment in American history.
That blackface and the minstrel shows were racist is undeniable: they caricatured
and stereotyped African Americans. They presumed to speak for a people that could
not speak for itself and did so through exaggerated misrepresentations and often mock-
ing derision. Yet the minstrels could also identify with American blacks. While the leg-
acy of blackface would come to be associated with indignity and humiliation, the
minstrel show was more complicated than simple bigotry. It could evince sympathy
as well as ridicule, and sometimes both at once. It represented love and theft, affection
and disrespect, identification and distance. For the first time, black culture—however
distorted—met mass culture. By the 1860s, blacks themselves were performing in
blackface in front of white audiences, although they were limited to the same roles that
white minstrels had created.
As the nineteenth century neared its end, blackface maintained its hold. The min-
strel show gradually receded in popularity, but its successors—vaudeville and Tin Pan
Alley—incorporated blackface into their acts. The most famous entertainers of the
early twentieth century, including Al Jolson, George Burns, and Eddie Cantor, regu-
larly performed in blackface. Blackface infiltrated whatever new forms of mass enter-
tainment emerged, and film was not immune.
At the time of its release, Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) was the most
expensive and sophisticated film ever produced. Based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
famed abolitionist novel but owing more to its numerous theatrical reproductions, this
was the first film to feature a substantial black character—a white man in blackface,
reenacting stereotypes pioneered decades earlier. Films of the time were rooted in the
stage, in the minstrelsy-vaudeville tradition, and in blackface. D. W. Griffith’s ode to
the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation (1915), wedded technical and artistic innova-
tion with virulent racism and became a sensation. The film relied on whites in black-
face to portray the depraved black rapist; the conniving, mixed-race seductress; and
the unruly black mob. Griffith’s masterpiece redefined filmmaking but also demon-
strated blackface’s potential to demonize African Americans. Birth polarized many peo-
ple, some of whom raised a great hue and cry against its insidious content and,
ultimately, against the very practice of blackface, which began to fade as black perform-
ers gradually assumed dramatic roles. A decade later, Al Jolson’s performance in The
Jazz Singer (1927) would signal that decline. The most famous entertainer of his day,
Jolson, who frequently performed in blackface, played the son of an orthodox Jew
eager to make it big as a jazz singer. His climactic rendition of “Mammy” in blackface

911
Blackface

wows the crowd. Yet the film’s use of blackface is not reflexive or unconscious. The
audience witnesses Jolson blacking up, sees him don his nappy wig and deliver the ster-
eotypical blackface grin. Blackface had become conspicuous.
In the following decades, blackface faded from film, lingering mostly in musicals
and comedies before disappearing almost entirely. As the spirit of the civil rights move-
ment wrought a dramatic shift in public sensibilities, popular culture could no longer
tolerate such egregious stereotypes. Blacks began to assume ever more prominent roles,
roles less and less dictated by the caricatures drawn by early blackface performers.
Blackface exists now mostly in memory and the occasional satire. Nevertheless, its awk-
ward legacy reminds us of the centrality of race in U.S. history and hints at the contin-
uing complexity of American race relations.
See also: African Americans in Film; Ethnic and Immigrant Culture in Film

References
Lhamon Jr., W. T. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993.
Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996.
Toll, Robert. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1974.

—Joseph Locke

912
 v
C
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, THE. Every spring amidst the blooming foliage and
golden beaches of the French Riviera, filmmakers, actors, and film industry insiders
gather in the seaside city of Cannes for the annual Cannes Film Festival. Beginning
in the late 1930s and continuing into the twenty-first century, the Cannes Film Festival
is one of the most influential events in the world of international cinema. More than
just an artistic showcase, the festival is an arena for fostering international cooperation
as well as a venue where multimillion-dollar deals are brokered and the careers of up-
and-coming artists are made.
Situated on the Mediterranean, the city of Cannes has a long history as an
international gathering place. During the nineteenth century, it became a renowned
holiday destination for English aristocrats seeking respite from their country’s unpleas-
ant spring weather. Due to this influx of elite visitors, five-star hotels, luxury villas, and
health spas sprung up around the city. Cannes’s thriving economy and Mediterranean
location made it the perfect location for an international film festival whose organizers
were seeking to encourage global cooperation in response to the growing threat of
fascism. As a result of the efforts of French Minister of National Education Jean Zay,
and the support of France’s British and American allies, the first Cannes Film Festival,
or Le Festival International de Cannes, opened in September 1939, with film pioneer
Louis Lumière serving as its president. Although the cinematic festivities at Cannes
were suspended during World War II, organizers relaunched the festival in 1946. Sig-
nificantly, its focus on international cooperation was expressed even more powerfully
after the war. As the first major European postwar cultural event, the festival aimed
to rebuild international relations through what Italian director Roberto Rossellini
called the “international language of film.”
Despite the postwar reality of bilateral politics, the festival welcomed submissions
from all over the globe. Not surprisingly, filmmakers from France, Italy, and the
United States submitted their work for consideration at Cannes; but festival organizers,
determined to insure that Cannes was truly a celebration of world cinema, also sought
submissions from filmmakers in countries such as Mexico, India, Japan and Egypt.
During the 1950s, the festival established its most prestigious prize, the Palme d’Or

913
Cinéma Vérité

or Golden Palm. Awarded each year to the submission deemed by organizers as the fes-
tival’s “best film,” the Palme d’Or became one of the cinematic community’s most
prestigious honors. In 1955, an American film, Marty, won the inaugural award; since
then, 14 American films, including the work of directors such as Robert Altman, Francis
Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, have received the festival’s top prize.
While early on Cannes tended to reward epics such as Ben-Hur (1959) and Dr. Zhivago
(1965) with the festival’s top prizes, it also began to embrace new, and for many, radical
forms of filmmaking, such as Italian neorealism and French New Wave. Indeed, since
the 1960s, the Palme d’Or has gone to a number of small, independent films, including
American offerings such as Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), Barton Fink (1991), and Pulp
Fiction (1994). Festival organizers have also not shied away from honoring politically
charged works. In 2004, for instance, Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11,
which was sharply critical of what Moore argued was America’s latter-day imperialism,
took home the Palme d’Or.
In addition to being a showcase for both established and upcoming filmmakers, the
festival is also a magnet for international paparazzi. While studio executives broker dis-
tribution deals in Cannes’s beachfront cafes, everyone from pop stars, to porn stars, to
cinematic unknowns court the hordes of photographers that follow the festival’s events,
hoping to gain their own proverbial “15 minutes of fame” in the ephemeral world of
modern celebrity.
Although it began as a yearly event that sought to promote a global sense of cultural
cooperation and respect, the Cannes Film Festival has evolved into a multimedia
extravaganza for artists, celebrities, and opportunists. Still, what remains at the heart
of this extraordinary celebratory gathering is a deep reverence for the art of filmmaking.
See also: Film Criticism; Independent Film, The

References
Beauchamp, Cari, and Henri Behar. Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes
Film Festival. New York: William Morrow, 1992.
Craig, Benjamin. Cannes: A Festival Virgin’s Guide: Attending the Cannes Film Festival for Film-
makers and Film Industry Professionals, 5th ed. London: Cinemagine Media, 2006.
Schwartz, Vanessa. It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

—Amy M. Harris

CINÉMA VÉRITÉ. Cinéma vérité is a genre of documentary film marked by its aes-
thetic minimalism and attempts to achieve objectivity. The use of location shooting
and handheld cameras, as well as eschewing nondiegetic elements, allowed its practi-
tioners to make claims of achieving greater realism and, in some cases, objective truth.
It is widely considered the artistic precursor of contemporary reality television.
There is still debate as to the origin of the cinéma vérité movement of the 1950s and
1960s; was it fueled by technology or ideology? Many filmmakers were quick to point

914
 Cinéma Vérité

Scene from the 1969 documentary Salesman, directed by Albert and David Maysles, Shown is bible
salesman Paul Brennan (aka “The Badger”). (Photofest)

out that they were merely continuing a tradition of mobile filmmaking that went back
to the silent era. Civil War–era Soviet agit-trains were itinerant film studios that trav-
eled to hotspots to document and politicize the military and proletariat. The term
“cinéma vérité” is a translation of Dziga Vertov’s film series Cinema-Truth.
Ironically, it was said that this mobile, observational approach could counter claims
that documentarians allowed themselves to become weapons or propaganda during
World War II.
Others claim that the genre is the culmination of a technological revolution. By the
late 1950s faster film stock, lighter cameras, and changes in sound technology allowed
small, mobile film crews to create high-quality films. By the 1960s, these technological
breakthroughs were widespread.
Documentarians who utilized these technologies were initially divided into camps
separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Direct cinema, as it was referred to in North
America, rejected narration and reenactment as signs of heavy-handed, propagandistic
filmmaking. These filmmakers insisted they were able to capture objective, unfiltered
experience with the new technology and approach and therefore mitigated ethical
issues of the camera’s relationship to its subject. Robert Drew’s Primary (1960) fol-
lowed the Wisconsin presidential primary between Hubert H. Humphrey and John
F. Kennedy. Drew insisted that before long the subjects ignored the presence of the
camera crew and acted in a free and genuine manner. Private moments, in effect, were
made public.

915
Cinéma Vérité

Cinéma vérité, as it was known in Europe, made different claims to objectivity.

Jean Rouch, whose training was in anthropology, and Edgar Morin, a sociologist,
shot Chronique d’un été in 1960. The film begins with a debate between the two
filmmakers as to whether anybody could truly be “themselves” with a camera present.
While the filmmakers were generally hidden from the frame in direct cinema, Rouch
and Morin are in the forefront of their cinematic experiment as they interview a
cross-section of France. Topics from the mundane details of everyday life to larger
philosophical and political issues are discussed. Toward the end of the film, they
bring their subjects back before the camera and ask if they were accurately reflected
in the film. The answers varied, and some vehemently denied that an accurate
portrayal was achieved.
While Rouch and other practitioners of the European tradition of cinéma vérité
likely thought they were capturing a strict truth, they did not maintain that the camera
was easily ignored. To the contrary, Rouch said that it is the presence of the camera that
allows truth to be captured at all.
Cinéma vérité/direct cinema continued to flourish throughout the 1960s. Albert
and David Maysles’s Salesman (1968) chronicled the plight of door-to-door Bible
salesmen. Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967) examines a Massachusetts mental
institution. And D. A. Pennebaker shot a variety of films about pop culture icons,
including Don’t Look Back (1967), about Bob Dylan, and the concert film Monterey
Pop (1968).
Inevitably, a backlash to cinéma vérité developed. While some filmmakers returned
to the aesthetics that had been decried by the practitioners of the form, sometimes to
new effect (like Errol Morris), others decided to stop attempting to capture objectivity
and instead to concentrate on subjectivity. Ross McElwee, for instance, specializes in
first-person films that make no claims to a truth beyond his own.
Although much of the ideological weight of cinéma vérité has disappeared, its aes-
thetics remain. Reality television shows, like Big Brother, Survivor, and COPS, have
dominated the airwaves of the new millennium with their combination of inexpensive
production and voyeuristic pleasure. Fiction films, such as Blair Witch Project (1999)
and Cloverfield (2008), used techniques of cinéma vérité to create an engrossing first-
person experience.
See also: Documentary, The

References
Hill, John, and Pamela Gibson Church, eds. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998.
MacDonald, Kevin, and Mark Cousins, eds. Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of the Documen-
tary. London: Faber & Faber, 1996.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Roberts, Graham. Forward Soviet! History and Non-fiction Film in the USSR. New York: I. B.
Tauris, 1999.
—Alan C. Abbott

916
 Cinematography

CINEMATOGRAPHY. “Cinematography” literally means “writing in movement,”

and it relies heavily on photography, or “writing in light.” The way a film looks is
due in large part to the work of its cinematographer, often called the director of
photography (DP). The three main components of cinematography are the photo-
graphic elements, the framing of the image, and the duration of the image on screen.
Cinematography has been greatly impacted by technological developments, such as
digital video in the 1980s, and, more recently, high-definition digital video, which
offers greater resolution than standard digital video.
The photographic elements of cinematography include the use of film stock, the speed
of motion, and the perspectival relations among screen images. Film stock varies accord-
ing to its size, its sensitivity to light (its speed), its level of contrast, and its graininess. It is
known by its width, measured in millimeters; for example, 8 mm, Super 8 mm, 16 mm,
35 mm, and 70 mm. Home movies tend to be shot on 8 mm stock and professional films
on 35 mm or 70 mm stock. Different brands of film (known by their manufacturer and a
specific number) are chosen by a cinematographer for their unique qualities. Spike Lee’s
DP, Malik Sayeed, used Kodak 5239, for example, a film stock developed by NASA for
the Air Force, to give the 1995 film Clockers a distinctively raw look.
Issues related to film stock have been complicated by the introduction of digital
technology. With celluloid film, the chemical properties of the emulsion and the sensi-
tivity of the film to light determined its appearance. Now filmmakers who shoot on
digital video do not use film stock, but can still alter the look of the image with editing
programs. Joel and Ethan Coen, for instance, along with their DP Roger Deakins,
washed out the colors in their 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? to give it the look
of 1930s postcards.
Early black-and-white films, such as Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 The Great Train Rob-
bery, often added color by way of hand-tinting. This hand-tinted look was evoked in
Steven Spielberg’s black-and-white film Schindler’s List (1993), although the startling
splash of red that defines the coat of a little Jewish girl in the death camp—one of only
four color images used in the film—was most likely achieved by way of a digital post-
production process. Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s DP on the film, won an Academy
Award for his cinematography.
Although the first Technicolor processes had been used extensively by the early
1930s, an advanced, three-strip Technicolor process was not introduced until 1932,
when Walt Disney was convinced to use it to film one of his Silly Symphony cartoons,
Flowers and Trees. The system split the film into three strips, one for each primary
color, allowing screen images to appear in highly saturated, almost hyperreal hues. Sur-
prisingly, given the demand in the United States for color films today, the production
of a significant number of pictures made “in color” was slow in coming: only 1 percent
of the films made in 1936 (admittedly during the Depression) were shot in color,
although by 1967, that figure had reached 94 percent. As a result of this slow evolution
toward the dominance of color films, between 1939 and 1966 the Academy gave
Oscars for Best Cinematography in two separate categories: black-and-white and color.
In 1936, 1937, and 1938, Special Awards were given to films made in color before the
official category was inaugurated.

917
Cinematography

The choice of the lens used on the camera (based on focal length) also has an impact
on the way the image looks, determining the perspectival relations among the objects
in the frame. A wide-angle lens exaggerates depth, making the image appear to bulge
at its edges. Using a telephoto lens condenses the depth of an image, making it appear
that the planes are squashed together. This lens allows the magnification of action
filmed at a distance and can make it appear to take longer for people or other objects
in motion to arrive at a certain foregrounded point. An excellent example of this type
of shot is found toward the end of the Mike Nichols’s film The Graduate, when Benjamin
is seen running toward the church where Elaine is being married (DP: Robert
Surtees). A zoom lens allows for variation on these focal lengths, so that the images
appear to move closer to or farther away from the viewer while the camera remains
stationary.
During the 1930s, newer film stocks were developed that were more light-sensitive;
this gave rise to new cinematographic techniques, such as deep focus. Gregg Toland,
Academy Award–winning cinematographer of Wuthering Heights (1939), is credited
with popularizing this technique. Deep focus brings greater depth to the image,
allowing the viewer to see clearly multiple planes of action at once. Prior to this,
actions were visible on one or two planes only, or “soft focus” was used to highlight a
specific point of interest. The use of deep focus changed the entire look of film images.
The technique is used with stunning effect throughout Citizen Kane (1941), which
many consider the greatest film ever made, and on which Toland worked with director
Orson Welles. Toland also used this technique when he shot The Best Years of Our Lives
(1941) with director William Wyler. In each instance, deep-focus cinematography
allows the viewer to make meaningful connections among actions occurring simultane-
ously in the foreground, midground, and background of the frame.
The framing of the filmed image produces a certain vantage point for the viewer.
The size and shape of the frame can vary; standard aspect ratio (the dimension of the
screen image) is 1.85:1, but the image can be made larger or smaller with special lenses,
masking and matting, or newer digital techniques. Innovations such as the “iris shot,”
made popular by D. W. Griffith’s cameraman Billy Bitzer in The Birth of a Nation
(1915), directed the audience’s attention to a certain spot by encircling a portion of
the image and zooming the “iris” in or out on that image.
The angle, distance, or height of the image is determined by the setup and place-
ment of the camera. Shots can be filmed straight-on, from low angles or high, framed
level to the ground, or canted (tilted). The camera can be placed close to the action or
farther away from it, resulting in images being projected across a spatial continuum
that extends from the extreme close-up to the extreme long-shot.
The movement of the camera is also a component of cinematography. The pano-
ramic, or “pan,” moves the camera from side to side; the “tilt” moves the camera up
and down; and in the “tracking” shot, or “dolly” shot, the camera moves as a whole rel-
ative to the action in the shot. Technological innovations such as the dolly and the
crane (first developed in the 1930s), and later the Steadicam (introduced in 1976),
gave the camera and the DP freedom of movement. The Steadicam is a harness that
a cameraperson wears to prevent excessive shaking of the camera as he or she moves.

918
 Color

Busby Berkeley’s musicals 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933
(Mervyn LeRoy, 1933) feature dramatic uses of the crane shot; and in Gone with the
Wind (1939), Ernest Haller and Lee Garmes use a crane shot to capture the acres
and acres of wounded men.
Another important element of cinematography is shot length, or the duration of the
shot from start to cut (also known as a “take” on the film set). The length of the shot
may simulate real time, extend it, or shorten it. Innovations in camera technology
brought about the technique known as “mobile framing”; a moving camera brings vis-
ual interest to a long take (not to be confused with a long shot, which is a property of
the camera lens). In his 1958 film Touch of Evil, for instance, Orson Welles and his DP
Russell Metty heighten suspense in the opening scene by having the camera track a
ticking bomb as it moves through town in the trunk of a car; the shot runs for just over
three minutes without cutting. (In an homage to this iconic shot, director Robert
Altman and his cinematographer Jean Lepine open The Player with a nearly eight-
minute tracking shot, during which some of the characters discuss the Welles/Lepine
shot!) Mobile framing, also known as the sequence shot, was used to great effect in
the film Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002); there, DP Tilman Büttner filmed the
96-minute picture in one continuous shot, moving his high-definition video camera
slowly through the Hermitage Museum on a Steadicam. (Alfred Hitchcock had already
experimented with this single-take technique as early as 1948, when he made Rope.)
Although rarely acknowledged by most viewers, it is impossible to overstate the
importance of the cinematographer for the filmmaking process. Beyond those already
mentioned, other notable American cinematographers include Haskell Wexler (Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966; Medium Cool, 1969); Conrad L. Hall (Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid, 1969; American Beauty, 1999; Road to Perdition, 2002); and
John Toll (Legends of the Fall, 1994; Braveheart, 1995; The Thin Red Line, 1998).
See also: Disney, Walt; Griffith, D. W.; Hitchcock, Alfred; New Technologies in
Filmmaking; Welles, Orson

References
Ablan, Dan. Digital Cinematography and Directing. Indianapolis: New Riders, 2002.
Alton, John. Painting with Light. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Rogers, Pauline B. Contemporary Cinematographers on Their Art. Boston: Focal Press, 1998.
Schaeffer, Dennis, and Larry Salvato. Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinema-
tographers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
—Jennifer L. Gauthier

COLOR. Although color films would not become the norm in Hollywood until the
mid-1960s, the use of color in a variety of other forms can be traced to the infancy of
American cinema. In fact, even 50 years before the advent of cinema, the projection of
hand-painted images by proto-cinematic technology like the stereopticon, a projector
of photographic slides, was a common practice.

919
Color

Hand-painting, tinting, and toning were practices employed by early cinema, and
used either to establish mood or to serve as attractions for their own sake. There were
firms, the Kinemacolor Company being the most successful of these, that attempted to
produce color films. Its additive color process, however, was beset with technical prob-
lems that would also prove challenging to other early attempts engaged with the addi-
tive process.
The Technicolor Corporation was formed in 1915, and a year later it developed its
first color process, a two-color additive system that involved the use of red and green
filters. In 1917, the company showcased this process in The Gulf Between, a film that
was financed by Technicolor. It was Technicolor’s invention of a subtractive process
in the 1920s, however, that helped account for its hugely influential impact on Holly-
wood. Filmic demonstrations of this process included The Toll of the Sea (1922), fea-
turing Technicolor’s two-color subtractive process and use of a beam-splitting
camera, and The Vikings (1927), which displayed the company’s revised two-color
process.
During the 1920s and ’30s, color was primarily used to define fantasy sequences or
artistic spectacles; color, for instance, was widely used in musicals. Technicolor sequen-
ces appeared in films such as The Broadway Melody (1929), The Desert Song (1929),
and Putting on the Ritz (1930), while other pictures, such as Gold Diggers of Broadway
(1929) and The Melody Man (1930), were shot entirely in Technicolor.
In 1932, Technicolor developed their three-color subtractive process that would be
used until the early 1950s. This process recorded separate red, blue, and green images
on different negatives and required special cameras, which Technicolor owned and
would lease to Hollywood studios. Walt Disney was the first to use this process for
his Silly Symphonies cartoon series. Its high costs prevented the process from being
widely used, but three-color sequences can be found in The Cat and the Fiddle (1934),
Kid Millions (1934), and The House of Rothschild (1934). In addition to the musical,
other film genres, such as the adventure tale or the historical spectacle, made use of color
during the 1930s. Independent film producer David O. Selznick made use of the
constantly improving Technicolor process in a number of his films in the late 1930s,
including Gone with the Wind (1939).
The introduction of Eastman Kodak’s “Eastman Color” in the 1950s, a single-film
color process that did not require a special camera, eventually led to the replacement of
the Technicolor process; Foxfire (1954) was the last film to use Technicolor’s three-strip
camera. Along with other technological attractions such as wide-screen cinema, Holly-
wood used color in its films in order to draw audiences away from their televisions.
Although only half of Hollywood films were in color in the 1950s, this would change
dramatically in the 1960s, when television converted to color. By then, color had
become more naturalized, both because it was now consistent with audience expec-
tations and because Eastman Kodak had developed film stock that allowed for truer,
more balanced hues. In the 1980s, industry pressure, especially from directors such
as Martin Scorsese, would be brought to bear on Eastman Kodak to produce film stock
whose color would not degrade. As Scorsese pointed out, this problem of fading color
was particularly pronounced in films that were made during the three-decade period

920
 Coming-of-Age Film, The

between 1950 and 1980. Eastman Kodak responded by developing a low-fade film
stock that guaranteed increased color stability.
See also: New Technologies in Filmmaking

References
Bordwell, David, et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to
1960. New York: Columbia University Press: 1985.
Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994.
Dalle Vacche, Angela, and Brian Price, eds. Color: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Maltby, Richard. Hollywood Cinema. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
Musser, Charles. The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Prince, Stephen. A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

—Linda Mokdad

COMING-OF-AGE FILM, THE. The coming-of-age film is a narrative rite of pas-

sage, following the evolution of the main character or characters from childhood to
adulthood. These films often focus on a centralized experience, such as sexual awaken-
ing or graduation, or on a period important to teenagers, such as summer vacation or
senior prom. Significantly, coming-of-age films have shifted their focus as conceptions
of adolescence in American culture have evolved.
Coming-of-age films tend toward two subtypes: dangerous teens and celebration of
youth. In the first, coming of age is a perilous time, where teens are potentially victims
of the forces of the adult world and their own changing needs and desires. These stories
have an immediate precursor in the “fallen woman” tales of the late nineteenth century,
and share with them the image of coming of age as falling from grace.
In the second type, coming of age is a glorious time, a period of idealism and hope,
marked by drama, but a drama that is formative. These stories evolve from the
Bildungsroman, stories about adversity and moral development with male protagonists
who often rise from rags to riches through hard work. These stories often view the past
idealistically, with a nostalgic conception of childhood.
By the mid-twentieth century, child labor legislation and public schools had
extended the duration of childhood and created an entirely new cultural phenomenon:
the teenager. Concurrently, films began to be made about this transitional time, center-
ing on the lives of teenagers. Because the film industry was still restricted by the Hays
Code, these pictures were often framed as moral cautionary tales, showing dangerous
consequences for unrestricted teen behavior.
These initial coming-of-age films primarily fit the dangerous teen model. Starting in
the late 1930s with pictures like Boys’ Reformatory (1939), teenagers were depicted as soci-
etal threats. Films such as Reefer Madness (1936), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and
Blackboard Jungle (1955) all highlighted the dangers of rebellious teenagers. In these

921
Coming-of-Age Film, The

Poster for the 1955 coming-of-age film Blackboard Jungle, directed by Richard Brooks. (Redferns/
Getty Images)

films, teenagers represent a dangerous undirected force in culture, disrupting society by

falling victim to rebellious urges like drugs and violence. During this period, coming of
age was also represented in “instructional films,” such as Going Steady? (1951) and Social
Sex Attitudes in Adolescence (1953), that had a rather heavy-handed moral sensibility.
In the 1960s, adolescence became a hallmark of what might be understood as the
“culture industry.” As baby boomers became teenagers, adolescents developed as a mar-
ket and Hollywood began to craft films specifically for teenagers. The 1960s saw the
birth of celebratory-development films, which maintained a moral distance from teen-
age delinquency. However, as the Hays Code lost power, the coming-of-age film devel-
oped greater nuance and explored different facets of the lives of young people.
Beach Party (1963), for example, one of the first major films celebrating adoles-
cence, headed a series of films spotlighting summers on the beach free from adult
supervision. The Graduate (1967) provided a different look at coming of age, introduc-
ing a distinct sexual component to the genre. The documentary High School (1968)
provided a nonfiction examination of the coming-of-age process in America, examin-
ing a Philadelphia high school and its students.
During the 1970s and ’80s, the coming-of-age film shifted significantly. A genera-
tion of directors and screenwriters created films dealing with their own childhood
experiences, creating nostalgic, heavily regionalized explorations of lost cultures. As

922
 Coming-of-Age Film, The

part of this movement—especially with the end of Hays Code censorship—coming-

of-age films featured increased sexual content, including films focusing explicitly on
the sex lives of teenagers. Two seminal films of the genre made during this period were
George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture
Show (1971), both of which explored vanishing ways of life and personal change as a
manifestation of larger shifts in society. During the 1980s, films like Porky’s (1981)
and Dirty Dancing (1987) used sexual awakening as their central metaphor.
By the late1980s and early 1990s, the coming-of-age film had developed as a major
Hollywood genre. Writer-director John Hughes capitalized on the popularity of these
films, making cult classics such as Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985),
and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, all of which focused on teenage angst and redemption.
Ben Stiller’s 1994 film Reality Bites dealt with the extended adolescence of Generation X,
looking at the struggles of twenty-somethings trying hard to become adults. The theme
of sexual awakening also continued in films from this period, prominently represented
by the American Pie films (1999, 2001, and 2003).
Although the vast majority of coming-of-age films made during the 1980s and ’90s
concerned the activities of white teenagers and twenty-somethings, some, like Spike
Lee’s School Daze (1988) and Patricia Cardoso’s Real Women Have Curves (2002),
revolved around the experiences of young people of color.
Interestingly, several films from the 1990s used the dangerous teen model to cri-
tique teen sex comedies. Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) exposed the licentious world of
New York teenagers and HIV; Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999) explored the
sexualization of teenagers in American culture through the lens of adult-teen interac-
tions; and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) invited audiences to take a
journey of self-discovery from the perspective of two gay teenagers.
As the twenty-first century began, two subgenres of coming-of-age films began to appear.
The first of these highlighted the experiences of unorthodox characters—“nerds”—who
become unexpectedly popular within elite social circles; Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998)
and Jared Hess’s Napoleon Dynamite (2004) are good examples. The second of these sub-
genres was the early twenty-first-century 1970s and ’80s nostalgia film. Cameron Crowe’s
Almost Famous (2000), for example, gave expression to his own teenage experiences as a
rock-and-roll reporter; while Greg Mottola’s Adventureland (2009) explored frustration,
love, and salvation in, of all places, an amusement park.

References
Kaveney, Roz. Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film and Television from ‘Heathers’ to ‘Veronica Mars.’
New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006.
Sarno, Gregory G. Threshold: Scripting a Coming-of-Age. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2005.
Tolchin, Karen R. Part Blood, Part Ketchup: Coming of Age in American Literature and Film.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
Tropiano, Stephen. Rebels & Chicks: A History of the Hollywood Teen Movie. New York: Back
Stage Books, 2006.
—B. Grantham Aldred

923
Committee on Public Information, The

COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION, THE. After the United States

entered World War I in 1917, a number of government-backed films were produced
that were closely linked to President Woodrow Wilson’s effort to control the news con-
cerning America’s involvement in the military conflict. Wilson, hoping to gain a “con-
sensus of support” for his decision to enter the war, had turned for advice to one of his
most loyal supporters, George Creel. The 41-year-old Creel, a muckraking journalist
of some stature, defined himself as “the original Wilson man.” Indeed, as early as
1905, when Wilson was still president of Princeton University, Creel had encouraged
him to run for the presidency of the United States; and, as a vital member of the
1916 campaign, Creel had worked hard to ensure that his candidate would be reelected
to a second term in office, going so far as to write a pro-Wilson book entitled Wilson
and the Issues.
Shortly after the United States declared war in 1917, Wilson, who had defeated the
Republican candidate Charles E. Hughes by a relatively small margin in the 1916 elec-
tion, summoned Creel to the White House in order to discuss how he might most
effectively disseminate information concerning America’s participation in the global
struggle. Wilson and Creel were both well aware that Britain and France had instituted
policies of “iron censorship” in regard to the release of news about their respective
involvement in the war effort; and also that American admirals, generals, and State
Department officials were demanding that a similar U.S. policy of censorship be put
in place by the president. Strongly disagreeing with this approach toward dealing with
news of the war, Creel argued that instead of instituting an administrative policy that
would act to suppress the dissemination of information about World War I, Wilson
should create a governmental agency that would work to control the public distribu-
tion of news about the conflict. In this way, suggested Creel, the president could
“inspire Americans to see the struggle as a patriotic crusade.” Agreeing with Creel, Wilson
quickly established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), appointing Creel to
head up the agency.
Creel’s committee would eventually employ as many as 150,000 people and distrib-
ute 75 million pieces of print literature, including 60 million copies of the president’s
“Fourteen Points” for a “lasting peace” after the Allies won the war. Taking advantage
of the extensive resources provided to him by the U.S. government, once appointed,
Creel immediately set about developing a core group of public relations people, profes-
sional historians, and individuals from the entertainment industry to assist him in put-
ting in motion a campaign of “moral publicity.” Such a campaign was necessary, said
Creel, in order to develop the “war will” of the American people. In a democracy such
as ours, he argued, the will to make war depended on “the degree to which each one of
all people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit
in a supreme effort of spirit and sacrifice.” According to Creel, the completion of this
hallowed act would be realized only if “a passionate belief in the justice of America’s
cause” could “meld the people of the United States into one white hot mass instinct
with fraternity, devotion, courage and deathless determination” (Thomas, 2003).
One of the first things Creel did as he began to organize the CPI was to create a vast
body of volunteer speakers, some 75,000 strong, who gave short impassioned,

924
 Committee on Public Information, The

nationalistic speeches at public gatherings. These so-called “Four Minute Men”—

whose name was an allusion both to the Minutemen of the Revolutionary War and
to the time it took a projectionist to change film reels at the movie houses in which
these men and women so often delivered their speeches—were sent updates on the
“state of the war effort, including several sample speeches written by top advertising
copywriters on the committee’s staff ” (Thomas, 2003). Although the Four Minute
Men would eventually give their speeches at various public venues—including lodge
and labor halls, churches, lumber camps, and even Native American reservations—it
was no coincidence that the bulk of their orations were presented at the many movie
houses that were now spread across the country. By the time America entered the war
in 1917, thousands of Americans were packing these theaters each week, eager to watch
the latest cinematic release. Well aware of the power of film to shape the public’s opin-
ion, especially after the successful release of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1915,
Creel called on his entertainment industry associates to produce propaganda pictures
that could be used to demonstrate the wholesomeness of American life and to “slander
all things German.” They responded with films such as The Prussian Cur, The Hun
Within, The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin, and My Four Years in Germany (all 1918).
Interestingly, although The Prussian Cur and The Hun Within were not directed by
Griffith, they were nevertheless connected to him. The Prussian Cur was directed by
Raoul Walsh, who, although he began his film career as a stage actor in New York City,
eventually became an assistant to Griffith. The plot of Walsh’s film was thin at best,
although there was an interesting twist provided by the casting of one of the lead
actors. Otto Goltz, who played a villainous German spy in the picture, actually did
spy for Germany. He was captured by British forces, however, and ultimately cooper-
ated with the Allies. In the end, he was granted asylum in the United States and finally
made his way to Hollywood, where he was chosen for a part in Walsh’s picture. Perhaps
what is best remembered about this film, however, are the scenes showing the
“crucifixion” of an Allied soldier at the hands of the Germans. Although the report
of a real crucifixion of a Canadian soldier in Belgium in April of 1915 was probably
no more than a story meant to inflame the passions of the Allies—supposed eyewitness
accounts proved to be contradictory, no crucified body was found, and no one could be
sure who the murdered soldier might be—the gruesome tale nevertheless made head-
lines around the world. From that point on, the Allies used images of a soldier’s
crucifixion over and over, including in The Prussian Cur.
As with The Prussian Cur, The Hun Within was directed by a longtime assistant of
Griffith’s, Chester Withey. Indeed, so closely tied to Griffith was Withey that the latter
was able to use Griffith’s production company to produce his own war picture. Griffith
even received a writer’s credit for The Hun Within. The third of these three films, The
Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin, was perhaps most representative of the cinematic
propaganda machine put together by the Committee on Public Information. Oddly
enough, in 1913, five years before The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin was made, and four
years before America entered World War I, the New York Times, celebrating the 25th
anniversary of his coronation, heralded the German Kaiser as the world’s “Chief Peace-
maker”; in fact, said the Times, he is “the greatest factor for peace that our time can

925
Committee on Public Information, The

show.” Along with this effusive praise from the powerful New York newspaper came
tributes from figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Andrew
Carnegie, who took out a full-page notice that concluded that “all citizens of the civi-
lized world were the Kaiser’s ‘admiring loving debtors’ for his service to the cause of
peace.”
Once America entered the war, however, the Kaiser became a primary target of Hol-
lywood’s vitriolic attacks. Hollywood’s opening salvo came in the form of the film
adaptation of James W. Gerard’s book My Four Years in Germany. Gerard had been
the ambassador to Germany from 1913 until 1917, and My Four Years in Germany
painted a picture of the road to war through his eyes. Directed by William Nigh and
released on April 29, 1918, the film was a political propaganda piece in the form of a
“documentary” that depicted the leaders of the German state as “lunatics” who ordered
their troops to carry out horrific acts of violence against the women and children of
Belgium. In the end, films such as The Prussian Cur, The Hun Within, The Kaiser:
The Beast of Berlin, and My Four Years in Germany would go a long way toward defin-
ing an unsettling divide between American patriotism and un-American dissent during
and after the war.
See also: War Film, The

References
Butler, Ivan. The War Film. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1974.
DeBauche, Leslie Midkiff. Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Fleming, Thomas. The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I. New York: Basic Books,
2003.
Freidel, Frank. Over There: The American Experience in World War I. Short Hills, NJ: Buford
Press, 1964.
Guttmacher, Peter. Legendary War Movies. New York: Metro Books, 1996.
—Philip C. DiMare

926
 v
D
DOCUMENTARY, THE. There is no unifying characteristic of the documentary.
These films deal with a range of subject matters and make use of a wide variety of cin-
ematic conventions. It is therefore difficult to define exactly what a documentary is,
but a broad assumption that unifies them is that they address the world we live in as
opposed to one imagined by the filmmaker (Nichols, 2001). Because filmmaking is
always a construction, however, an unmediated representation of events is impossible.
The history of the form is therefore shaped by an ongoing negotiation between docu-
mentary filmmakers and their audiences.
One of the earliest and most influential documentaries was Robert Flaherty’s
Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic (1922). While making
this first feature-length documentary film, the director lived with an Inuit family for a
number of years, shooting on location in harsh Arctic conditions. As the camera equip-
ment was heavy and temperamental, Flaherty was unable to capture events as they hap-
pened, so he asked his subjects to reenact missed events for him. He also wanted to
provide film audiences with images of native peoples living their lives as they did
before their worlds were touched by Europeans. Flaherty asked “Nanook,” for
instance—his real name was Allakariallak—to recreate precontact practices such as
hunting wild animals with a spear, even though at this point Allakariallak regularly
used a rifle. Staging scenes was not uncommon among early documentary filmmakers,
so Flaherty’s actions were not unique. Yet his desire to make what he would describe as
an “authentic” feature led Flaherty to turn his film into a sort of hybrid work, in which
he wove a fictional narrative thread through the picture’s documentary images.
Flaherty’s picture was a box-office success, and noted filmmakers such as Sergei
Eisenstein and Orson Welles called Nanook a masterpiece. Interestingly, Flaherty had
received his financing from private companies, but understanding the power of this
cinematic form, the U.S. government began to fund documentaries in the 1930s, the
most famous of which was Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). Spon-
sored by the Resettlement Administration, The Plow was just one example of numer-
ous films that were produced by the U.S. government in an attempt to convince
Americans that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were necessary and proper.

927
Documentary, The

A short documentary, The Plow made the case that unregulated agricultural expansion
had led to the creation of the nation’s devastating dust bowl culture.
As the 1930s came to a close, the government involved itself in fewer and fewer
state-sponsored cinematic projects. Indeed, by 1940, the government had decided that
it would no longer make its own films. All of this changed, however, after America
entered World War II in 1941 (Ellis and McLane, 2005). Developing a Bureau of
Motion Pictures, the U.S. government turned to Hollywood filmmakers to assist it
in selling the war. Hollywood filmmakers flocked to the cause, with luminaries such
as John Ford, John Huston, and Frank Capra hired by the government to direct films
that would be used to educate both soldiers and the American public on the war effort.
Capra, who volunteered his services to the War Department the day after the bombing
of Pearl Harbor and who was commissioned into the Army on that day, went on to cre-
ate a seven-part series entitled Why We Fight. Combining newsreels and reenactments
of real events, the films in this series were used as instructional tools to help inform—
and inspire—newly enlisted American troops.
After the war ended, government funding for documentaries was once again cur-
tailed; during the 1950s, however, a new source of revenue—and distribution—began
to emerge with the increasingly popular medium of television. Each of the major net-
works developed their own documentary series, most notably Edward R. Murrow and
Fred W. Friendly’s See It Now, which ran on CBS until 1958. The subject matter of
these shows revolved around current events, human interest stories, and a “look back”
at moments of historical significance. Interestingly, the limitations inherent to airing
documentaries during rigidly programmed time slots—which included commercial
breaks—largely dictated the form the televised documentary took during the 1950s
(Ellis and McLane, 2005). Television, though, has remained a consistent source for
documentary funding and distribution, particularly the Public Broadcasting System—
a venue not subject to the commercial mandates imposed on the networks—which has
maintained long-term associations with filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman and
Ken Burns.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new documentary movement emerged.
Known as “direct cinema” for its commitment to the ideals of cinéma vérité—truth
in cinema—the movement was headed by directors such as Wiseman, Robert Drew,
Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and David and Albert Maysles, some of whom
had launched their careers working on the ABC-TV series Close Up! before branching
out on their own. Seeking to develop an objective, observational approach that made
the cinematic process as unobtrusive as possible, these filmmakers adopted the use of
lightweight, handheld 16mm cameras and synchronized sound equipment that
allowed them to shoot much more spontaneously. Using their direct cinema approach,
these directors recorded events ranging from political conventions to the landmark
gathering that was Woodstock.
The truth-in-cinema claims of the direct cinema movement were called into ques-
tion in 1968 when Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary was released. A movie about
the process of documentary filmmaking, McBride’s offering—which follows cinephile
David Holzman as he records his own life—was a biting satire that sought to expose

928
 Documentary, The

the lie of cinematic objectivity. As New York Times film critic Nora Sayre suggested
during the early 1970s, “As a voyeur, a gentle intruder into other people’s lives, [Holzman]
can’t understand that the filming makes his subjects feel self-conscious, or that ‘reality’ is
altered by the presence of his camera and his tape recorder and his lavaliere mike. . .”
(Sayre, 1973).
Interestingly, McBride’s film went a long way toward ushering in the more self-
reflexive approach to documentary filmmaking that characterized the 1980s. Errol
Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), for instance, consciously used documentary-
style re-enactments to highlight the contradictory viewpoints of eyewitness testimonies
concerning the murder of a police officer. The form evolved even further as the 1990s
unfolded toward the new millennium, as late twentieth-century audiences were del-
uged with a proliferation of “reality TV” shows such The Real World, Big Brother,
and Survivor. These shows, which claimed that their subjects were simply being
recorded as they lived their lives as “real people,” were ultimately revealed to be highly
stylized, with producers designing situations in a deliberate attempt to create on-set
conflict. These 1990s shows gave birth to twenty-first-century reality show offspring,
such as Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, Bravo’s Top Chef and Project Runway (which
switched over to Lifetime), and TLC’s John and Kate Plus Eight, the latter treating fans
to the spectacle of John and Kate Gosselin trying to raise “two sets of multiples”—twin
girls and sextuplets—as their marriage fell apart on national television.
The first decade of the new millennium saw resurgence in the popularity of feature-
length theatrical documentaries. No filmmaker benefited more from this renewed
interest in the cinematic form than Michael Moore, who attracted legions of fans—
and an equal number of critics—after releasing films such as Roger & Me (1989), Bowl-
ing for Columbine (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and Sicko (2007). Although
Moore’s films have been widely viewed—generating millions of dollars in revenue—
perhaps the most important development in regard to the distribution of
documentary-style filmic material has been the explosive growth of the Internet, which
now allows individuals to upload their own material onto Web sites and instantly dis-
seminate it across the globe. Animation, CGI, and digital cameras are currently taking
the documentary form in interesting new directions; and as this technology advances,
our understanding of what constitutes a documentary will no doubt continue to evolve.
See also: Cinéma Vérité

References
Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1993.
Ellis, Jack C., and Betsy A. McLane. A New History of Documentary Film. New York and
London: Continuum, 2005.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Sayre, Nora. “Screen: ‘David Holzman’s Diary’ Spoofs Cinema Verite.” New York Times,
December 7, 1973.
—Tom Smith

929
Drive-in Theaters

DRIVE-IN THEATERS. Drive-in theaters, a mid-twentieth-century venue for

viewing motion pictures, have influenced movie attendance and fast-food services.
Movie attendance had dropped during the early 1930s, as people hired a babysitter,
dressed for their outing to the theater, and then encountered parking problems once
they arrived. Richard Hollingshead (1900–1975) devised a convenient solution: out-
door theaters that became known as “ozoners.”
On June 6, 1933, Hollingshead opened Park-In Theatres, Inc., near Camden, New
Jersey. This first drive-in theater was called the Automobile Movie Theatre. It offered a
family movie for 25 cents and was shown in a 500 by 500 foot lot, with capacity for
336 cars. Other outdoor theaters grew in capacity, and by 1942 there were 95 ozoners
in 27 states. The number of drive-ins in the United States rose dramatically after
World War II, peaking at 4,063 in 1958. During the 1950s, drive-ins got bigger: Stanford
Kohlberg’s Starlite Drive-In, near Oak Lawn, Illinois, for instance, expanded to
1,875 outdoor spaces; interestingly, it also included an enclosed auditorium that seated
1,000 walk-in viewers. During its opening weekend, the theater featured live entertain-
ment: the hillbilly group Sleepy Hollow Gang. Other acts booked included sway pole
artist Penney Millette, human cannonball “The Great Wilno,” and various circus acts.

Drive-in theater sign advertising River of No Return, 1954. The first drive-in movie theater was
opened in New Jersey in 1933, although the theaters didn’t reach the height of their popularity until
the 1950s and 1960s. (Library of Congress)

930
 Drive-in Theaters

The movies shown in these drive-in venues had often been released several weeks earlier
in conventional, walk-in theaters.
During the 1950s, food service was refined into a profitable venture for ozoners. In
1952, for example, for every dollar of ticket sales, 45 cents was spent on concessions at
drive-ins, compared to the 26 cents spent at indoor theaters. While typical foods sold
were popcorn, soft drinks, hot dogs, and candy, Jack Farr’s Trail Drive-In, in Houston,
Texas, served chicken, tamales, shrimp, and chili. Some theaters provided a Snack-Kar
to deliver refreshments to viewers. Viewers at one North Carolina theater ordered food
during the movie by pressing a special button on the pole, and spoke into a micro-
phone—the food was delivered to their car. Prior to the construction of pizza parlors,
the drive-in theater was the only place in many communities that served pizza. Restau-
rant equipment entrepreneur Al Gordon (Morris Gordon & Son) recommended that
drive-ins provide a more cafeteria-style snack bar, which proved successful. Theaters
advertised their food services during film trailers and at intermissions.
When first opened, drive-in theaters proved enormously popular, especially among
families with small children and romance-hungry teenagers. Seeking to be left alone,
Elvis Presley even rented out whole drive-in lots for his private parties. Overbuilding,
the institution of nationwide daylight saving time in 1967, and a waning interest in
this pop-culture novelty, led to decreasing profitability in the 1970s and ’80s. By
1987, fewer than 1,000 drive-ins remained in America; indeed, many of today’s most
avid young moviegoers have never piled into the car and gone to the “drive-in.”

References
McKeon, Elizabeth, and Linda Everett. Cinema under the Stars: America’s Love Affair with the
Drive-in Movie Theater. Nashville: Cumberland House, 1998.
Sanders, Don, and Susan Sanders. The American Drive-in Movie Theatre. Osceola, WI: Motor-
books International, 1997.
Segrave, Kerry. Drive-In Theaters: A History from Their Inception in 1933. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1992.
—Ralph Hartsock

931
This page intentionally left blank
 v
E
EARLY MOVIE HOUSES. The period from 1894 to 1924 is regarded by many as
the pioneering era of film exhibition in the United States. The venues that showed
these early moving pictures ranged in scope from the small peep-show parlor and store-
front nickelodeon to the lavish movie and vaudeville palace. Thomas Edison’s develop-
ment of the Kinetoscope paved the way for the peep-show parlor. Although it could be
considered the first incarnation of the movie house, the peep show was very different
from modern exhibition venues. Customers looked through a magnifying eyepiece as
they viewed a series of small photographic images on cylinders. The first set of these
machines reached penny arcades and hotel lobbies across the United States early in
1894, and soon the peep show became part of the modern amusement landscape.
Edison sold the equipment and film prints for the peep show for $10 to $15, and
the first public Kinetoscope parlor was opened in a converted shoe store at 1155
Broadway in New York City, on April 14, 1894.
The peep-show parlor would soon give way to more modern forms of movie exhi-
bition. The Lumière brothers developed a new way to view moving pictures with their
Cinématographe. They projected images onto a flat surface, and for the first time,
movies became a shared experience. On June 29, 1896, the Lumières’ Cinématographe
was presented at Keith’s Union Square Theater in New York City. That same year,
Edison unveiled his version of the new technology, the Vitascope. The Vitascope sys-
tem was first exhibited to the press on April 3, 1896, and, soon after, publicly exhibited
at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, a well-known vaudeville theater located near Herald
Square in New York City.
At first, it seemed that motion pictures were nothing more than a passing fad, a
curiosity that filled the space between the popular vaudeville acts of the time. However,
increased demand for film product toward the end of the nineteenth century led to the
eventual transformation of some vaudeville theaters into full-fledged movie houses by
the early 1920s. Theaters that housed early film exhibitions were often large, luxurious,
and opulent. The mixing of vaudeville and film in large and ornate theaters was a result
of three factors: the saturation of large cities with nickelodeons, leading to a highly

933
Early Movie Houses

An advertisement for Edison’s The Vitascope motion picture, 1896. (Library of Congress)

competitive exhibition market; a scarcity of new film product; and a desire on the part
of some exhibitors to attract more middle-class customers (Allen, 1979).
The dominance of the vaudeville theater was eventually challenged as filmmakers and
enterprising businessmen began to target the burgeoning market of immigrant and
working-class audiences. The storefront nickelodeon—so named because it cost only a
nickel to enter—began to dot urban and working-class neighborhoods at the turn of the
century. There were several reasons why the nickelodeon became increasingly popular at this
time. Perhaps the most important of these was the fact that it was much cheaper to operate a
nickelodeon than a vaudeville theater. In New York City, for example, average costs for own-
ing and operating a theater totaled $2,500, compared to only $500 for a nickelodeon. The
nickelodeon owner could also draw a more diverse non-English-speaking audience because
films were silent. At the height of the nickelodeon’s popularity, as many as 7,000 to 10,000
of these storefront movie houses sprang up across the United States.
Notable early movie house owners included Marcus Loew, Jules and Stanley
Mastbaum, the Balaban brothers, and Samuel Katz. These businessmen became dominant
in the movie house industry in different regions of the United States—Loew in New
York City, the Mastbaums in Philadelphia, and Balaban and Katz in Chicago. Shrewd
and ambitious entrepreneurs, these men began to link individual movie houses into
theater chains during the 1920s. The emergence of such chains set the stage for the
development of the modern movie megaplex of the twenty-first century.
See also: New Technologies in Filmmaking; Silent Era, The

934
 Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema

References
Allen, Robert. “Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan 1906–1912: Beyond the Nickel-
odeon.” Cinema Journal 8(2), Spring 1979: 2–15.
Gomery, Douglas. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.”
Art and Text 34, Spring 1989: 114–33.
Kindem, Gorham, ed. The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures. Carbondale
and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.
May, Larry. Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

—Anna Thompson Hajdik

ETHNIC AND IMMIGRANT CULTURE CINEMA. Portrayals of ethnic and

immigrant cultures in American film may be divided into six historical periods: the
silent film era; 1927 to 1941; World War II and the early Cold War; 1960 to 1980;
1980 to 1995; and 1995 to the present. Although each period included significant
developments and landmark films, the 1980s and early 1990s represented a particu-
larly important watershed. It was not until then that American cinema began to pro-
duce a historically and culturally informed body of work that featured non-European
as well as European immigrants. Since the 1980s, both Hollywood and independent
filmmakers of all races and ethnicities have contributed to a more genuinely multicul-
tural cinema. Unfortunately, such projects still represent only a handful of American
films released each year, both in terms of diverse subject matter and overall cinematic
output, and by no means signal the end of the depiction of destructive filmic stereotypes.
Silent films emerged as a popular art form in the middle of what is sometimes
called the “great wave” of immigration to the United States, which occurred from
the 1880s to the 1920s. Europeans of all nationalities dominated arrivals during
the great wave, though migration rates from Mexico were high for two decades after
the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Depictions of immigrants in
silent cinema drew on a variety of stereotypes of foreignness. Among the more
common was the “Latin lover,” played by immigrant actors such as Ramon Novarro
and Rudolph Valentino. What was important about these characters was not so
much any ethnically specific “Latinness,” but a swarthy, exoticized Otherness, the
multiple valences of which were exemplified by The Sheik (1921), in which the Ital-
ian Valentino plays an Arab suitor of a British heiress whose love is scandalous until
it is discovered that he has European ancestors.
Characters defined by stock ethnic traits in the silent film era tended to represent
groups that had only recently joined the immigrant flows. These stereotypes included
the “money-grubbing Jew,” the “Arabian harem girl,” and the Mexican “greaser” or
“bandit.” Certain films during this period also portrayed members of a more estab-
lished immigrant group, the Irish, as non-American Others, at first negatively but later
more sympathetically. Earlier films portrayed Irish men as coarse, hard-drinking

935
Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema

laborers and women as maids and other working-class girls with questionable morals.
By the 1920s, male Irish characters were more likely to be policeman and priests, while
females played romantic leads—Irish actresses like Mary Pickford even became popu-
lar celebrities.
The end of the silent era coincided with the end of the great wave, as Congress
passed highly restrictive immigration legislation in 1921 and 1924 and the Great
Depression dramatically slowed migration worldwide. The National Origins Act of
1924 established immigration limits based on the 1890 census—and therefore dis-
criminated against Southern and Eastern Europeans and other groups that had not
arrived in large numbers before that date. It also barred all Japanese immigration, thus
completing an incremental ban on Asians that began with the Chinese Exclusion Act
of 1882. Hollywood’s early ethnic “talkies” reflected the nativist mood and concomi-
tant pressures to assimilate. Indeed, the very first movie with synchronized sound,
The Jazz Singer (1927), dealt with the difficult choices facing a member of a recent
immigrant group, Jewish singer Jake Rabinowitz (Al Jolson), as he tries to achieve
success as a mainstream performer. Interestingly, Asian American characters were
more widely represented on the big screen than were Asian immigrants on quota
lists. Inevitably, though, they were played by white actors in “yellowface” makeup,
as was the case in two popular series—the Charlie Chan and Dr. Fu Manchu films
that were made during the early 1930s. Detective Chan, often played by Swedish
American actor Warner Oland, used stereotypical Asian ingenuity and half-baked
Confucian wisdom to solve cases. Fu Manchu, most famously played by horror film
icon Boris Karloff, represented a continuation of the silent film archetype of the
conniving Asian nemesis.
The first decade of pictures with sound also saw the rise of one of the most impor-
tant major Hollywood genres focusing on the immigrant experience, the gangster film.
Key examples included mafia classics Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932), which
depicted Italian Americans in quintessentially American narratives in which protago-
nists (most played, ironically, by Jewish actors) sought social mobility and acceptance
by achieving wealth and fame. Significantly, these ethnic gangsters were unable to over-
come their inherent base desires, and ultimately it was not the law that brought them
down, but their own vanity—and venality. Films portraying Southern and Eastern
European immigrant groups suggested that their place in society was conditioned by
their ability to sacrifice individual gain, jettison old-country values, and assimilate into
mainstream American society. That their struggle to belong was dramatized at all,
however, represented an advance over depictions of Chinese American characters like
Charlie Chan, whose ethnicity was nothing more than a painted-on novelty that aided
his investigations.
In the 1940s and 1950s, major domestic and world events influenced the feel of
movies about American immigrants. World War II produced so-called Good Neighbor
Policy movies celebrating alliances with Latin American nations—Down Argentine Way
(1940) and The Gang’s All Here (1943), for example—and, occasionally, sympathetic
cinematic portrayals of Latinos in the United States, such as The Ox-Bow Incident
(1943). Hollywood’s portrayals of immigrants from Axis nations matched the double

936
 Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema

standard exhibited by U.S. policy. Just as the government subjected Japanese Americans
to mass incarceration while for the most part leaving German- and Italian Americans
alone, Hollywood, in movies like The Purple Heart (1944) and The Story of GI Joe
(1945), featured combat units of European ethnics that were valorized while presenting
audiences with demonizing depictions of the Japanese. It was not until the Korean War
classic The Steel Helmet (1951) that Hollywood discovered the dramatic possibilities of a
story of Asian American soldiers fighting against an Asian enemy.
The latter was among a significant group of postwar “social problem films” featur-
ing immigrant themes. Others included Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), which exposed
anti-Semitism in the United States, and Man from Del Rio and Giant (both 1956),
which portrayed racism against Mexican Americans. But McCarthyism and the Holly-
wood blacklist put many socially conscious filmmakers and writers out of work—
including the makers of Salt of the Earth (1954), which dramatized a Mexican Ameri-
can miners’ strike—and discouraged others from taking up controversial issues. In this
atmosphere, the emblematic ethnic film was the assimilationist urban drama about
European Americans, which may have peaked in popularity in 1955, when two such
pictures depicting Italian Americans (The Rose Tattoo and Marty) won several Academy
Awards, the latter for best picture.
Attitudes toward minorities in American culture underwent a dramatic shift in the
1960s and 1970s. The African American freedom struggle and other movements that
followed in its wake not only demanded civil rights, but ignited a vigorous “politics
of recognition” that emphasized the need for more inclusive cultural citizenship. In
national policymaking, the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 abolished the quota system estab-
lished in 1924 and opened the door to increased immigration in the coming decades.
These changes, however, were hardly apparent in Hollywood’s treatment of immigra-
tion and ethnicity. The most important filmic representations early in this period
included the highly lauded West Side Story (1961), a musical about Puerto Rican gang
rivalry in New York City. Although Rita Moreno took home an Oscar for Best Sup-
porting Actress, few quality roles for Latinas existed, and the Puerto Rican actress did
not do another movie for seven years. Martial arts superstar Bruce Lee achieved cross-
over success with films like Enter the Dragon and Fists of Fury (both 1973), but still rep-
resented exoticized Asian culture, and he left the United States after he was passed over
for the lead role in the American hit TV series Kung Fu in favor of Anglo actor David
Carradine. In contrast, this period marked a golden age for Italian Americans in Holly-
wood as Francis Ford Coppola made his landmark Godfather I and II (1972 and 1974,
respectively); Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging
Bull (1980) appeared; and two of the era’s most popular films were portraits of
working-class Italian Americans, Rocky (1976) and Saturday Night Fever (1977). Mean-
while, Jewish actor Dustin Hoffman emerged as an A-list performer, Woody Allen won
over national audiences with East Coast Jewish humor, and the early days of Jewish
immigration from Eastern Europe were portrayed sensitively in Hester Street (1975).
In part because of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, immigration rates increased in the fol-
lowing decades, and for the first time the majority of arrivals came from Asia and Latin
America. Although American politics took a sharp turn to the right in the 1980s, it was

937
Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema

not a time of strict anti-immigration legislation. The Refugee Act of 1980 established
yearly quotas for those facing what the government characterized as a fear of persecu-
tion that was “well-founded”; immigration legislation of 1986 provided amnesty for
three million undocumented immigrants; and the Japanese American redress move-
ment achieved success in 1988 when the Reagan administration issued a formal
apology and granted $20,000 each to those who were incarcerated during World
War II. In Hollywood, many filmmakers continued to draw on stereotypes, like the
martial arts sensei of the Karate Kid series or the emotionally unhinged Italian Americans
of Moonstruck (1987). But in general, the 1980s and early 1990s saw many advances,
among the most important the release of works by Asian American and Latino
filmmakers. Wayne Wang’s pioneering Chan Is Missing (1982) explored Chinese American
identity, and his follow-up, Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1984), dealt with tensions
between first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants. Wang later completed the
post–World War II period drama Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), and an adaptation of Amy
Tan’s bestseller The Joy Luck Club (1993). Two other widely distributed Asian American
films from the period dealt with controversial romantic relationships and resulting
family complications: Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1992) and Ang Lee’s The
Wedding Banquet (1993).
Latino directors who made breakthroughs in the early 1980s included Luis Valdez,
whose Zoot Suit (1981) adapted for the screen the director’s play about the Zoot Suit
Riots of 1943, and Gregory Nava, whose El Norte (1983) provided gritty details of
the Central American civil wars that many migrants were fleeing, of crossing the bor-
der illegally, and of the difficulties of working manual and domestic labor in the
United States. Valdez went on to make the hit La Bamba (1987), a biopic of rock
singer Ritchie Valens, and Nava later directed My Family/Mi Familia (1995), a multi-
generational saga of a Mexican American family, and the eponymously named Selena
(1996), a biopic about the life—and tragically bizarre death—of the Tex-Mex singer.
The latter two pictures helped launch the film career of Puerto Rican American super-
star Jennifer Lopez. Other important projects included two films that responded
to perceptions of Mexican Americans as noncitizens in very different ways: Cheech
Marin’s Born in East L.A. (1987) played the accidental deportation of a Mexican American
citizen for very pointed laughs, while Edward James Olmos’s American Me (1993) offered
an unsparing look at urban gangs, utilizing turf wars to explore issues of local and
national belonging.
The mid-1990s saw the rise of nativism in the United States, symbolized by the
passing of California’s Proposition 187, which prohibited illegal immigrants from
using state services, in 1994, and by increasingly restrictionist immigration policies,
trends which were only furthered by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Related or not to these developments, immigrant cultures cinema evolved in several
ways after the mid-1990s. First, directors like Wayne Wang and Ang Lee achieved
mainstream success with pictures that had little to do with their ethnicity—Wang with
Smoke (1995) and Maid in Manhattan (2002), among others, and Lee with films like
Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), and Brokeback Mountain (2004).
Second, many young directors, rather than celebrating ethnic heritage or dramatizing

938
 Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema

struggles with discrimination, made irreverent, stereotype-busting films. Asian American

efforts in this regard included Yellow (1997) and Better Luck Tomorrow (2002). Third,
an increasing number of multiethnic dramas appeared, most notably Crash, which won
the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2005; similarly multistranded films such as
Babel (2006) placed immigrant stories in a transnational context. Finally, along with
stereotypical portrayals of anti-American terrorists and other stock characters, more
complexly and sympathetically rendered Middle Eastern immigrant protagonists have
appeared in some films. Particularly noteworthy was The Visitor (2008), in which a
highly sympathetic Syrian immigrant is detained and separated from his family as
the result of a simple misunderstanding at a New York subway station. Like many of
the best films about immigration in the United States over the past century, The Visitor
dramatized the meanings of home, of citizenship, and of processes of boundary setting,
and how these issues affect newcomers and longtime residents alike.
See also: African Americans in Film; Native Americans in Film

References
Berg, Charles Ramirez. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2002.
Bernardi, Daniel, ed. Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001.
Feng, Peter X. Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2002.
Xing, Jun. Asian America through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identity. Walnut Creek,
CA: Alta Mira Press, 1998.

—Kenneth F. Maffitt

939
This page intentionally left blank
 v
F
FEMINIST FILM CRITICISM. Feminist film criticism is more than simply film
studies with women injected as authors and subjects. Like the movements that inspired
it, feminist film criticism deconstructs the role of gender, heteronormativity, race, and
patriarchy in society. Since its inception in the 1970s, it has changed the way we think
about film, spectatorship, and creative impulses.
While many people locate the beginning of feminist film criticism in Laura
Mulvey’s landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), its origins
are actually found earlier in the theories that inspired it. First, it takes as its roots
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It relies heavily on ideas about ego formation,
the pleasure of looking, and the castration complex—all concepts originally articulated
by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in the first half and middle of the twentieth cen-
tury. Second, feminist film criticism is inspired by semiotics, a linguistic study of signs
and signifiers, also originally articulated in the first half of the twentieth century.
Third, it draws on Althusserian Marxism, proposed by Louis Althusser in the mid-
twentieth century, which concentrates on the role of ideology in society. Finally, the
broader feminist movement and specifically the feminist arts movement, which began
in the early 1970s, significantly influenced feminist film criticism; most notably, per-
haps, the Women’s Film Festival that was organized in Edinburgh.
After the seminal works of Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1949) and Betty
Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963) circulated in popular discourse, several women
both inside and outside of academia explored the nuances of gender. Among these
women were those who focused primarily on the relationship between art and the con-
struction and deployment of gender. In 1972, Claire Johnston organized the Women’s
Film Festival in Edinburgh, at which she released a pamphlet entitled “Women’s Cinema
as Counter-Cinema.” In it Johnston suggested that because most Hollywood films are
told from a male viewpoint, they generate what can be understood as a “false con-
sciousness” among women: films merely encourage female viewers to internalize and
adopt false images, thereby reinforcing feelings of submission and inadequacy. Johnston
later expanded her ideas in Notes on Women’s Cinema (1973). This festival, among
other things, inspired several other feminists to confront the role of gender in cinema.

941
Feminist Film Criticism

Among them were Marjorie Rosen (Popcorn Venus, 1973), Molly Haskell (From
Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, 1974), and British film theo-
rist Mulvey.
As mentioned, in a 1975 issue of Screen Mulvey published her extraordinarily
important essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” While reliant on many the-
orists who had come before her, Mulvey’s article would prove to be one of the most
influential in film theory and feminist thought. In it she explores the relationship
between gender and cinema, arguing that “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance,
pleasure in looking has been split between [the categories] active/male and passive/
female” (Mulvey, 1989). In order to make her argument, Mulvey relied on two differ-
ent psychoanalytic theories that impacted feminist film criticism in general: Freud’s
idea of “scopophilia,” or the pleasure of looking, and Lacan’s theory of the “mirror
stage,” the reflective point at which every child comes to understand the self as a subject
that is different from, yet always in dialectical relationship, with all “others.” Armed
with these core tenets of psychoanalysis, Mulvey developed her feminist film theory.
Primarily, Mulvey, like Johnston, argues that Hollywood films are framed by a male
“gaze”—the active (male) self “looking” at the passive (female) Other. This gaze
expresses itself in three ways: by way of the camera (usually operated by a man); by
way of the actor’s (dominant) position in relationship to the actress; and by way of
the (male/female) spectator looking at the imagistic objects on the screen. In all three
moments, the male subject gazes at—and thus shapes the identity of—the female
object: the camera (most often operated by a man) lingers over the body of the actress;
the actor-subject controls the actress-object; and the spectator (male/female) looks
from the point of view of the camera/actor, always already in the position of the mas-
culine/active/subject. As Lacan would suggest, then, the spectator (male/female) sub-
ject always and everywhere identifies with—and is identified by—the active gaze that
defines the dialectical moment of looking at the passive Other; what Mulvey might call
the cinematic mirror stage. Mulvey goes on to argue that the gaze is not simply an act-
ing out of unconscious desire—although it is certainly that—but is something that is
consciously shaped by the techniques—and the technicians—used in traditional film-
making. For instance, says Mulvey, female characters are most often filmed in soft
focus in order to make their image more appealing—less threatening—to the spectator
who gazes. And how exactly does the female spectator gaze? Her visual pleasure, argues
Mulvey, can only be experienced in one of two ways: either she gazes “into the mirror,”
ultimately identifying with the passive object of male desire; or she identifies with the
male who gazes, thereby participating in her own objectification. In this way, Mulvey
contends, the female viewer is in fact a transvestite viewer.
Mulvey’s complex examination of the relationship between the male gaze and cin-
ema had a profound impact on those involved in film theory—indeed, it may be
argued that “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” forever changed the face of film
studies. It also had a powerful effect on feminist filmmakers, who now sought to liber-
ate the female subject by troping traditional ideas of cinematic production. Films such
as Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics (1974) and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991),
then, experiment with how to release women from their position as passive objects. For

942
 Feminist Film Criticism

instance, in Daughters of the Dust, Dash not only focuses the narrative almost com-
pletely on African American women, something almost unheard of in Hollywood cin-
ema, but she also strives to create a film that allows female spectators to engage
artistically with the film without being degraded. This is accomplished by creating a
symbolically jarring aesthetic that is marked by the use of folk song, the dialectic of
the South Carolina Sea Islands, and the inclusion of a story told by an unborn female
child who is still in the womb.
As so often happens with thinkers who force us to consider things from radically
new perspectives, however, Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze eventually became the focus
of a great deal of theoretical critique. While it was never completely rejected, several
feminist film theorists who came after Mulvey questioned some of her premises. One
such theorist was Kaja Silverman. An American film theorist and historian, Silverman
explored the nonvisual elements of film and their relationship to gender. While Mulvey’s
exploration of the cinematic gaze was certainly important, Silverman argued, what
about the equally important soundtrack in film? In her book The Acoustic Mirror:
The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1988) (note the reference to Lacanian
psychoanalysis), Silverman suggests that the soundtrack in traditional Hollywood films
also serves to make women the object of the powerful male subject. She maintains that
films are filled with the sounds of women crying, panting, and screaming; and, more
importantly, the female voice is almost always grounded in the body—very rarely used
as a voice-over or omniscient narrator—thereby denying it the possibility of breaking
free from the objectified bodily images of screen actresses. As Silverman points out,
however, several new feminist filmmakers are not simply playing with filmic images
of women, they are also reimagining the sounds of women on-screen. In providing
viewers with a female narrator who is an unborn child in Daughters of the Dust, for in-
stance, Dash releases both the viewer and the viewed from the objectified, passive,
filmic body.
While Silverman’s examination of gender and sound in cinema may be understood
to have expanded Mulvey’s theory in another—auditory—direction while still retain-
ing its general premise, other thinkers called into question her original suppositions.
In her 1987 work Technologies of Gender, for example, Teresa de Lauretis questioned
Mulvey’s general over-reliance on feminist critique, and more specifically, her founda-
tional binary opposition “man”/“woman.” According to de Lauretis, Mulvey’s rigid
binary structure tends to cover over the many nuances that may emerge when these cat-
egories are allowed to slip and slide over, around, and through one another. In theoriz-
ing these categories, de Lauretis was influenced by the work of the late French
poststructuralist thinker Michel Foucault, specifically his iconic work The History of
Sexuality. In this multivolume work, written between 1976 and 1984, Foucault argued
that sexual identity—in all its polymorphously perverse manifestations—had come to
be defined by a restrictive discourse that rigidly enforced the categorical relationships
normal/heterosexual-abnormal/homo-/bi-/asexual.
Building on these Foucauldian foundations, de Lauretis suggested that the focus of
feminist critique should be on the struggle between women and “Woman”—the latter
defined by the cultural discourses that act to construct gender, or the “technologies of

943
Feminist Film Criticism

gender,” what de Lauretis understands as the sociohistorical gender constructions

that arbitrarily define the constitutive boundaries of “male,” “female,” “man,” and
“woman.” More than being merely words, de Lauretis argues, these are rule-based
concepts that frame specific roles and attitudes about gender identity. Instead of sim-
ply focusing on the sights and sounds of women in film, then, says de Lauretis, femi-
nist filmmakers need to begin to deconstruct the “Woman” in films. Thus, they
should play with traditional narrative strategies, with the sights and sounds that
reinforce the technologies of gender, and, perhaps most importantly, recognize that
there is not just one gaze but multiple ways of looking at that issue from the multi-
plicity of women and men who view films. Significantly, one of the ways in which
de Lauretis would begin to explore certain of these non-normative ways of looking
was in relationship to the theory of queer cinema.
Queer theories have developed in the last 40 years and have had a huge impact on
feminist thinking generally, and on feminist film criticism specifically. During the
1980s, de Lauretis explored the relationship between the theory of queer cinema and
of film theory in general. In her book The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Per-
verse Desire (1987), she argued that it is not enough simply to inject lesbians into film
narratives—especially in situations that are meant only to titillate male views—as this
acts merely to instantiate the male gaze even more thoroughly. Instead, filmmakers
need to disrupt representational (white/male/heterosexual) norms by recognizing and
expressing lesbian sexuality as a radically alternative tropological discourse of desire.
Beyond what has already been discussed, Mulvey’s theories were also critiqued in
relation to specific kinds of films. Several feminist film theorists used the ideas of the
masculine-subject and the feminine-object to understand how different film genres
reinforced patriarchy. Barbara Creed, for example, in her book The Monstrous Feminine
(1993), applies feminist film critique to an understanding of women in horror films.
She suggests that the horror film mirrors patriarchy’s powerful constructions of gender.
Patriarchal ideology, she contends, constructs women as abject, or outside societal
norms. Interestingly, however, Creed suggests that women in horror films may act to
break down the patriarchal boundaries that frame traditional cinema. Building on
the work of French feminist thinker Julia Kristeva—who has explored, especially in
Powers of Horror (1982), how the woman in literature often functions as a “not me,”
as a “thing” that crosses over acceptable boundaries—Creed argues that by way of
border-crossing acts of transgression, horror film females may succeed in developing
a sense of active (non-passive) agency. This would seem to call into question Mulvey’s
notion that women are always already passive objects—never active subjects—in film.
According to Creed, because men fear women because they are, as Freud says, castrated—
and also because they may have the power to castrate—women in horror films may be
understood to be more interesting and complicated than perhaps Mulvey’s theories suggest.
E. Ann Kaplan found Mulvey’s ideas problematic for other reasons. In Looking for
the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Other (1996), she argues that much of
feminist film theory takes as its foundational premise the relationship between the
white male gaze and the white female object. This, however, suggests Kaplan, is a Euro-
centric view that denies the participation of people of color in the visual pleasures of

944
 Feminist Film Criticism

cinema as both subjects and objects. For instance, how does the black male gaze work?
What about the black female body as the object of not only the male gaze but also of
the white female gaze? What about the power of the white female gaze over the black
male body? In order to begin to answer some of these questions, Kaplan explores ideas
about colonialism, race, and power that have been developed over the past 30 years by
Frantz Fanon and others. She points out that because white women participated in col-
onialism, and held power over nonwhite victims of colonization, their gaze can be
equally as powerful as the (white) male gaze.
Kaplan’s work is complemented by the work of other feminist film critics. For
example, bell hooks expands the notion of the female gaze beyond the idea of the
powerful white female gaze of colonialism. For decades, and in several important
works, hooks has been exploring the role of race in film and film theory. In her book
Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, in particular, hooks specifically accuses
feminist film criticism, like the feminist movement itself, of ignoring African American
women. She argues that African Americans, and women specifically, have used the
power of their own gaze as a way to oppose the white patriarchal system. Historically
African Americans were not allowed to look directly at white bodies, hooks points
out, and therefore not only by daring to look at white people but also by critiquing
what they see, African Americans actively oppose conventional Hollywood film. Con-
trary to what Mulvey describes, then, African American women do not identify with
their oppressors or submit to degraded images of women on screen, but in fact actively
deconstruct and critique what they see. The reason that feminist film theorists have
missed this, hooks argues, even when exploring race, is that they continue to assume
that “women” comprise a monolithic category. Only when filmmakers and film theo-
rists acknowledge the existence of African American women as unique spectators,
hooks says, will the role of race be truly appreciated in the cinematic world.
Feminist film criticism has grown considerably since the advent of the Women in
Film Festival of 1972. Indeed, it continues to thrive, invoking new and exciting theo-
ries. Alongside the powerful and important theories of race and sexuality that have
changed the way feminist film criticism operates, theorists are exploring how new tech-
nologies, such as DVDs and the Internet, and the ability of audiences to view films in
almost every imaginable time and space affects the gaze.
See also: Film Criticism; Male Gaze, The; Mulvey, Laura; Women in Film

References
Chaudhuri, Shohini. Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis,
Barbara Creed. New York: Routledge, 2006.
De Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994.
De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays in Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987.
Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. New York:
Rinehart and Winston, 1975.
hooks, bell. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York: Routledge, 1996.

945
Film Criticism

Humm, Maggie. Feminism and Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Johnston, Claire. Notes on Women’s Cinema. London: Society for Education in Film and Televi-
sion, 1973.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Looking for the Other: Feminism and the Imperial Gaze. New York: Routledge,
1996.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Basing-
stoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989.
Rosen, Marjorie. Popcorn Venus. New York: Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1973.
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
—Katharine Bausch

FILM CRITICISM. Film criticism in America takes many forms; it is found in

newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and also on the radio, on television and
on the Internet. Critics of the cinema assign meaning to films through interpretation
and analysis. Some criticism is written for a general audience and published in popular
magazines, such as the New Yorker, Time, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, or in general-
circulation newspapers. Scholarly criticism is written for a well-informed or academic
audience and is published in journals such as Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, The
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Jump Cut.
Early American film criticism emerged with the birth of film itself, and it focused
on the spectacular elements of the technology. Frank E. Woods, a screenwriter for
D. W. Griffith, wrote commentary in The New York Dramatic Writer in 1908 under
the name, “The Spectator.” Woods championed the art of film and helped build an
audience for the new medium. Most early criticism appeared in trade periodicals and
newspapers such as Moving Picture World, Moving Picture News, Variety, Billboard,
and Dramatic Mirror. Poet Vachel Lindsay also wrote about film as a new art form in his
1915 book The Art of the Moving Picture. A year later, psychologist, Hugo Munsterberg
focused on the imaginative possibilities of the cinema and its effects on audiences in The
Photoplay: A Psychological Study.
Beginning in the 1920s, American film critics began to think about the social prob-
lems associated with the new medium such as class mixing, the effects on women and
children, and the representation of undesirable behavior on screen. These concerns had a
strong impact on Hollywood, which responded in 1922 by creating the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). This organization, headed by former
Postmaster General Will Hays, was responsible for monitoring the content of films to
avoid overt sexuality and violence. Later this organization adopted the Motion Picture
Production Code (1934–1968), which placed detailed restrictions on film content.
In Europe, early film criticism was characterized by a theoretical debate about the
nature of the medium. Led by the Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein,
formalists saw film as an art form that could transcend its recording capabilities. Eisenstein
believed that film was a powerful political tool whose expressive possibilities could
be used to challenge the status quo and incite social change. His films Strike (1924)

946
 Film Criticism

and Battleship Potemkin (1925) vividly display his theory of montage, in which indi-
vidual shots collide with each other to create meaning.
American film critics have tended to be more eclectic in their approach to the cin-
ema. Social criticism flourished in the 1930s with such writers as Lewis Jacobs, Gilbert
Seldes, Robert Sherwood, and Pare Lorentz. Both Jacobs and Lorentz were also film-
makers who made socially conscious documentaries. After World War II, humanist
critics emerged who championed neglected genres and directors. James Agee, novelist,
screenwriter (The African Queen, 1951), and critic, wrote for Time and The Nation in
the 1940s. He proposed a compromise between realism and fantasy in film. Bosley
Crowther, the venerated critic for the New York Times from 1940 to 1967, suggested
that cinema is both a popular art form and an important social force. Emanuel
“Manny” Farber, a respected artist and film critic, is known for his prolific writing in
The New Republic, The Nation, Commentary, Artforum, Film Culture, and Film Com-
ment. In a 1962 piece he derided the highbrow tendencies of Orson Welles, suggesting
that the films of genre and B-movie directors were better cinematic products. He also
sang the praises of “underground cinema,” a term he coined.
Genre criticism was developed more fully by Robert Warshow, who is best known
for his work on gangster films and westerns. His influential essays “The Gangster as
Tragic Hero” (1948) and “The Westerner” (1954) were originally published in Partisan
Review, calling attention to the important place of these figures in American cinema.
Warshow’s genre criticism lent weight to what others saw as mass-produced Hollywood
products; his work helped to elevate genre films to the status of an art form.
A watershed moment for film criticism came in 1951 when André Bazin founded
the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma. Bazin and his colleagues wrote essays prais-
ing the films of such Hollywood directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John
Ford, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, Anthony Mann, and Orson Welles. Writing for the
journal, French critics defended the artistry of American commercial cinema, putting
Hollywood on par with the much-lauded European cinemas. Bazin was outspoken in
his love of realist compositions using detailed mise-en-scène and deep focus. He
embraced Italian neorealism for its fidelity to daily life and was a fan of westerns, which
he called “the American film, par excellence.”
In 1954, Bazin, somewhat reluctantly, published an article entitled “Une certaine
tendance du cinéma français” (“A Certain Tendency in French Cinema”) in Cahiers.
The article was written by a brash young filmmaker and critic named François Truffaut,
who condemned what he called the French “cinema of quality.” He termed the
traditional French cinema, characterized by lavish, studio-bound adaptations of great
literary works, “le cinéma du papa,” or “our father’s cinema.” Instead he called for a
“politiques des auteurs,” a “policy of authors,” which envisioned the director as literally
the author of a film. In Truffaut’s opinion, directors should direct their own screen-
plays, and in so doing, put their own unique stamp on their films. Truffaut’s essay
was a stinging rebuke of the French establishment cinema, but it paved the way
for young filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chab-
rol, Jacques Rivette, Agnès Varda, and himself to develop a new approach to the
medium, resulting in what came to be known as the “French New Wave.” Their films

947
Film Criticism

exhibited youthful vitality, realism, and a sense of moral ambiguity. The impact of this
movement was felt across the Atlantic, as Hollywood filmmakers adopted the stylistic
innovations of the French New Wave directors.
Truffaut’s notion of the “policy” of filmic authors was embraced by the American
film critic Andrew Sarris, who, in 1962, termed it “auteur theory.” Sarris argued in
the Village Voice that the distinguishable personality of a film’s director should be used
in determining the film’s value. Significantly, Sarris’s reformulation of Truffaut’s ideas
sparked an intense debate with another American critic, Pauline Kael, who wrote for
the New Yorker from 1967 to 1991. Kael urged against the use of formulas in judging
films, preferring instead to use a more personal form of evaluation: if a film moved her
in some way, it was a good film. Kael’s prolific career includes criticism for the New
Yorker, 13 books, and a short stint as an executive consultant for Paramount. Her
strong views often ran counter to popular opinion; she championed the violent films
of Sam Peckinpah and wrote an extended essay on Citizen Kane in which she credited
writer Herman J. Mankiewicz with the film’s success. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s,
Kael and Sarris traded insults and opinions in the pages of different magazines;
although they disagreed about how to judge a cinematic work, their public debates
helped to cultivate a fierce love of movies in American audiences.
Other innovations in film criticism have challenged these approaches to the cinema.
Cultural critic Susan Sontag borrows elements of semiotics, or the study of signs, in her
work on photography and film. This method of criticism examines the messages that
individual images send to viewers when they are combined into codes and interpreted
in a specific historical context. An intellectual star in the 1960s and ’70s, Sontag pub-
lished work in Partisan Review and Commentary, and in different film anthologies.
Feminist film criticism evolved in the 1970s, when critics began to examine the
roles that women were playing on the screen and behind the camera. Molly Haskell’s
collection of essays From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies
(1973, revised 1989) paved the way for other feminist critics. Her writing has appeared
in the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Vogue, the New York Times, Esquire, the New
York Observer, the New York Review of Books, and The Nation.
B. Ruby Rich, a film critic and cultural theorist, is associated with the feminist and
queer film movements. Her essays have appeared in the Village Voice, the San Francisco
Bay Guardian, Elle, Mirabella, The Advocate, and Out. She works with various film fes-
tivals around the world and lobbies on behalf of filmmakers.
Film criticism on television is personified by Roger Ebert, the popular critic for the
Chicago Sun-Times and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his writings on the cinema. In
1975, Ebert and Gene Siskel paired to host the weekly review show Opening Soon at
a Theater Near You, the first of its kind on American television; Opening eventually
became Sneak Previews in 1977. Siskel and Ebert ultimately left Sneak Previews in
1982 to start Siskel and Ebert at the Movies. After Siskel’s unexpected death in 1999,
critic Richard Roeper joined with Ebert in 2000, and the show’s title was changed to
At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper.
With the advent of the Internet, film criticism is now widely available to anyone
with access to the Web. Acclaimed writer, director, producer Richard Schickel, for

948
 Film Editing

example, now writes exclusively for Time.com; and Roger Ebert has his own Web site
sponsored by the Chicago Sun-Times. “Web logs” (blogs) offer a wealth of information
about films written both by professional critics and serious fans. One of the most
popular film blogs is GreenCine Daily, which is written primarily by GC editor Aaron
Hillis. This blog is connected with GreenCine, an online DVD rent-by-mail service.
GreenCine also features a podcast downloadable onto iTunes for those who seek film
reviews on-the-go.
Providing readers with a blend of personal reflection and academic observation, sev-
eral well-established scholar-critics have made the move to the Internet blogosphere,
including David Bordwell, professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 to
2008. In addition to these more scholarly blogs, online film journals publish longer
critical essays and reviews. Senses of Cinema, for example, published quarterly out of
Australia, is an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema;
and Salon is an award-winning online news and entertainment Web site. Another
Internet film magazine from Australia, Rogue, was created in 2003, and is well
respected for its writing.
Other Web sites either feature their own reviews or compile offerings created by
authors writing on different sites. Rotten Tomatoes, for instance, gathers reviews from
accredited media outlets and online film societies, providing readers not only with
reviews but with ratings characterized by “fresh” or “rotten” tomatoes. PopMatters, an
international magazine of cultural criticism created in 1999, publishes critical writing
on film and other cultural products, such as music, television, books, video games,
sports, and theatre. And the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), one of the most valu-
able Internet film resources, provides readers with boilerplate information and fan syn-
opses and opinions.
See also: Auteur Theory; Ebert, Roger; French New Wave; Truffaut, François; Femi-
nist Film Criticism

References
Bywater, Tim, and Thomas Sobchack. Introduction to Film Criticism: Major Critical Approaches
to Narrative Film. New York: Longman, 1989.
Lounsbury, Myron. The Origins of American Film Criticism 1909–1939. New York: Arno Press,
1973.
Manchel, Frank. Film Study: An Analytical Bibliography. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni-
versity Press, 1990.

—Jennifer L. Gauthier

FILM EDITING. Film editing is the process of joining together continuous strips
of film, called shots, to create scenes, and ultimately assembling the scenes into a fin-
ished motion picture. Editing allows filmmakers to manipulate time and space in the
film and to connect thematically related ideas, images, and storylines to create a cohe-
sive narrative.

949
Film Editing

The earliest motion pictures were projections of single, brief events filmed in a con-
tinuous take. Audiences of the 1890s were entertained simply by the novelty of moving
pictures. For 5 to 25 cents they watched films depicting non-narrative events, such as
boxing matches, street scenes, dancing women, and cock fights, in single-viewer,
peep-show devices called Kinetoscopes.
In 1896, Thomas Edison’s Vitascope became the first commercially successful
motion picture projector in the United States. By the early twentieth century, movies’
running times increased from under a minute to 10 to 12 minutes—the length of a reel
of film. More importantly, filmmakers were starting to experiment with creating sim-
ple narratives.
By the early twentieth century, Edwin S. Porter, a director at the Edison Manufac-
turing Company, had taken narrative films to a new level in the United States. Building
on techniques pioneered by French filmmaker Georges Méliès, and British filmmaker
Frank Mottershaw, Porter’s films featured editing techniques such as dissolving from
one image to another, close-ups, and inserting stock footage. Cutting to continuity,
another important editing innovation, allowed filmmakers to trim scenes for time
while preserving the fluidity of the story.
Porter’s 1903 film The Great Train Robbery was a milestone in film editing. To tell
the story of the bandits’ crime and subsequent pursual, Porter developed the technique
of crosscutting: the camera cuts away from one scene of action to another one, and then
back again to the first scene, suggesting that the two actions are taking place simultane-
ously. Porter’s innovations in editing took films from short depictions of live events and
rigidly staged productions to a fluid, expressive means of conveying a narrative.
Film editing took another quantum leap forward with American filmmaker D. W.
Griffith, whose consolidation and expansion of editing techniques have earned him
the title “Father of Film.” Griffith pioneered the use of editing film to intensify dra-
matic and emotional impact, a convention known as “classical cutting.” Griffith also
interwove close-up, medium, and long shots to shift the viewer’s point of view within
a scene, replacing a linear continuity with a subjective continuity composed of related
ideas in connected shots. He also developed conventions of editing meant to make the
transitions seamless: the eyeline match, which assumes that when a character looks off-
screen, the subsequent shot will show the audience what he or she is looking at; match-
ing action, whereby a cut is masked by the continuity of motion in the scene; and the
180-degree rule, which mandates that the camera be kept on the same side of an imagi-
nary 180-degree line on the stage in order to maintain the same background.
Griffith’s masterpiece Birth of a Nation (1915) featured many innovative editing
techniques. At three hours and 10 minutes, it was America’s first epic feature film,
and its emotional intensity was maintained through the use of crosscutting between
scenes, a variety of camera setups, and varied camera angles. His follow-up, Intolerance
(1916), was the first feature film to utilize a thematic montage, associating shots based
on ideas and disregarding the continuity of time and space.
Griffith’s editing innovations changed the way films were produced. Through the
use of close-up shots, actors could convey emotion through nuanced expressions rather
than simply by gesticulations, thus creating a need for actors with a new, more subtle

950
 Film Noir

set of acting skills. Furthermore, Griffith’s method of shooting related shots together
paved the way for the era of the high-paid star, as studios could shoot all the star’s
scenes in a short time and out of sequence to save money.
The advent of sound in movies temporarily undermined the advances made in edit-
ing. Sound had to be recorded by microphones hidden on the set while the scene was
being filmed, effectively anchoring the action to a single location and requiring scenes
to be filmed with no cuts. These problems were eventually resolved with the invention
of a soundproof, moveable camera housing, as well as with the development of the
ability to dub in sound after filming.
Until the late twentieth century, the editing process entailed taking positive copies
of negative filmstrips and literally cutting and pasting sections of film together.
Invented in 1924, a device called the Moviola facilitated this process by allowing edi-
tors to view individual shots to determine where the best cut points would be. The edi-
tor would then make the desired cuts on negative film and make a final contact print.
In 1971, CMX Systems introduced the first nonlinear editing system, a forerunner
of the systems that would become commonplace by the 1990s. Nonlinear editing relies
on a digital copy of the movie rather than physical filmstrips, enabling editors to access
any shot of the movie with ease without harming the integrity of the original. Software
is used to create a list of edits and to make changes to the digital source. As movies are
increasingly filmed in high-resolution digital format to incorporate computer-
generated imagery and theaters shift to digital projection, the use of photographic film
in movies is on the wane and will likely disappear altogether.
See also: Edison, Thomas Alva; Eisenstein, Sergei; Griffith, D. W.; Méliès, Georges;
New Technologies in Filmmaking; Welles, Orson

References
Crittenden, Roger. The Thomas & Holden Manual of Film Editing. New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1981.
Dmytryk, Edward. On Film Editing: An Introduction to the Art of Film Construction. Boston:
Focal Press, 1984.
Giannetti, Louis. Understanding Movies, 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education,
2008.

—Erika Holst

FILM NOIR. Although the term is French, film noir is a distinctively American cin-
ematic category. Its most notable examples were produced in Hollywood in the 1940s
and 1950s. The dates are conjectural, and many film scholars would argue for the
inclusion of films made both before and after that period. Scholarly opinion would
also vary on what constitutes the definitive noir style. There would be no disagreement,
however, that the most enduring examples of classic film noir, those films now consid-
ered definitive, were produced in the period from 1941 to 1955. There is also a general
consensus that if a strict chronology needed to be imposed, the first of the classic noir

951
Film Noir

films was John Huston’s The Mal-

tese Falcon (1941), and the last,
Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly
(1955).
Other films that fit into an
expanded noir classification can
be termed either “proto-noir,” or
“neo-noir.” Proto-noir would
include, for example, Fritz Lang’s
M, made in Germany in 1931,
well before film noir had coa-
lesced into a distinctive category,
but containing many noir charac-
teristics. Neo-noir applies to films
that were made in a later period,
and based on scripts that incorpo-
rate and imitate Noir characteris-
tics, often as an homage to
the genre. Notable examples
would include two Raymond
Chandler novels: Farewell My
Lovely (1975), directed by Dick
Richards (previously filmed
in 1944 by Edward Dmytryk
Scene from the 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, directed by Robert with the title Murder My Sweet),
Aldrich. Shown is Gaby Rodgers. (Photofest) and The Long Goodbye (1973),
directed by Robert Aldrich.
Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) is a laudable contribution to the genre, and Law-
rence Kasdan made his directorial debut with the impressive Body Heat (1981). The
best of the neo-noir films to date, however, is undoubtedly Roman Polanski’s China-
town (1974), for which screenwriter Robert Towne won an Academy Award for Best
Original Script.
The term film noir, which means “black” or, more accurately, “dark” film, denotes a
motion picture of omnipresent darkness, both literally and psychologically. Notable
exceptions notwithstanding, the popular Hollywood films produced in the years prior
to 1941 and America’s entry into World War II, were characterized by the high-key
lighting and luxurious settings of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals, and the
cheerful screwball comedies of the 1930s. In 1940, as the forces of Nazi Germany
swept across the European continent, the export market for American films was
abruptly closed, and they disappeared from European theaters. By 1946, when a back-
log of motion pictures began to return to Europe, French critics, in particular, took
note of something new and different, a pervasive darkness in both story and visual
style. Cineaste Nino Frank is generally credited with being the first to identify such
films with the term film noir.

952
 Film Noir

The distinctive “look” of classic noir is largely owing to unique cinematography and
creative lighting. A typical noir film is shot in black and white with much of the action
taking place in urban settings, at night, on wet streets, deliberately made wet to enhance
the dramatic contrast of black-and-white photography. The template for this effective
visual contrast was created by legendary cameraman Gregg Toland for a film few if
any would place in the category of film noir: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Charles
Foster Kane (Welles) first meets Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) on a rainy eve-
ning in front of a drugstore, but the meeting is far from being as visually dramatic as
Toland’s deep-focus mise-en-scène. The brilliant chiaroscuro lighting of this definitive
shot has been widely imitated, but never surpassed. Shots such as Toland’s in Citizen
Kane inspired directors and cinematographers to experiment further with the potential
of black-and-white photography on the gray scale. A slow-speed film stock, indirect,
low-key lighting, and a variety of light bounces were utilized with telling effect, as
American films of the ’40s brought black-and-white cinematography to its pinnacle of
aesthetic accomplishment. These technical breakthroughs in cinematography were
occurring not only in the resource-rich big studios, but in small studio and independent
productions as well. In an A-film, such as Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), the
photography and lighting of George Barnes is truly ingenious, and no less so is the work
of cinematographer Louis Gruenberg in Gordon Wiles’s B-film The Gangster (1947).
The cinematography in film noir, however, is designed to abet the characteristic
mood and tone of the story line. In the typical noir script, there is a pervasive aura of
claustrophobia, betrayal, and distrust. The protagonist, most often male, is usually
on a quest to solve a mystery or unravel a conspiracy in which he has become unwit-
tingly implicated or involved by actions he has taken; actions retrospectively seen as
taken against better judgment. The protagonist may be weak or helpless in some fash-
ion, the victim of malevolent forces against which he or she is ultimately powerless.
Particularly effective examples of such protagonists are found in noir films such as
Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), in which an ex-boxer, played by Burt Lancaster
(in his screen debut), passively lies in bed awaiting those who are coming to kill him.
In Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), a bedridden Barbara Stanwyck (one
of the few female protagonists in noir films) attempts to fend off her impending doom
with telephone calls that bring no help. A telephone also figures in the demise of the
luckless drifter played by Tom Neal in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945). In Rudolph
Maté’s D.O.A. (1950), the hapless Edmond O’Brien tries desperately, throughout the
course of the film, to discover why and by whom he has been given a deadly and
slow-acting poison.
In other noir films, particularly those that have the widest following, the typical
protagonist is neither weak nor helpless, nor is he unduly passive or desperate. He is
the existential, self-contained loner, a pragmatist who has long since divested himself
of ideals, and has no illusions about the shadowy world in which he makes his living.
He is adept at handling himself on either side of the law, toughened by years of dealing
with the coarser element of humanity. He lives on the fringe of society in a state of
alienation. He has within a core of personal integrity, but it is hardly a guiding princi-
ple in his life, and becomes manifest only in moments of crisis. He trusts no one, but is

953
Film Noir

frequently seduced, and often betrayed, by a woman. Notable examples of this form of
noir hero are found in Alan Ladd’s performance as politico bodyguard Ed Beaumont
in Stuart Heisler’s The Glass Key (1942), Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade in John
Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), Ralph Meeker’s amoral Mike Hammer in Robert
Aldrich’s adaptation of the Mickey Spillane novel Kiss Me Deadly, and the quintessen-
tial exponent of the noir hero, Robert Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey in Jacques Tourneur’s Out
of the Past (1947).
A number of film historians find sociopolitical elements at least partly responsible
for the dark mood of film noir. The world of the 1940s and early ’50s endured the
anxiety of a desperate war fought for the survival of Western democracy. Victory for
the Allied powers of the west brought the revelation of the ancillary horrors of the
war, most notably the Holocaust and the use of nuclear energy as the ultimate weapon
capable of destroying all life on earth. The cessation of the war in Europe and the
Pacific segued almost immediately into a “cold war” of standoff diplomacy, and an
armed conflict in Korea between the Western democracies and the USSR/Communist
China alliance. In the film industry, the preliminary Washington hearings held by the
House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1947 resulted in the black-
listing of anyone in the industry who, under oath, would not deny any affiliation with
the Communist Party, or who refused to “name names” of individuals whom they sus-
pected of being Communists. First Amendment rights succumbed to widespread para-
noia, the fear that Communists were seeking control of the film industry as a means of
indoctrinating the American public using subtle forms of propaganda. The years in
which film noir flourished correspond with those in which anxiety and despair domi-
nated the minds of many of our best writers and artists.
The degree to which such political turmoil actively helped to shape film noir is
hypothetical, but it is clear that the genre owes its inception to a variety of influences
that gradually coalesced into a more or less singular creative effort. Among these influ-
ences was German expressionism. In the 1930s, Hollywood experienced an influx of
European directors, particularly those who had fled the growing repression of Nazi
Germany. These directors included many who would later become stalwart figures of
the industry, including Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Max Ophuls, William Dieterle,
Robert Siodmak, and Otto Preminger. Many of these directors began their careers at
UFA, the German studio that produced a number of proto-noir films such as Robert
Wiene’s renowned The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). The pervasive shadows; oblique,
surrealistic camera angles; and contrasting wedges of dark and light (many painted in
place if the desired lighting could not be achieved) were characteristic of German
expressionism, and were gradually assimilated into American film.
In a more distinctively American vein, many of the basic tenets of the dark world of
Hollywood noir were derived from what was generally recognized as “pulp” fiction, so
called because such fiction was published in small, inexpensive magazines on the cheap-
est form of coarse, wood pulp paper. It was the venue for the initial appearance of stories
and novels written by Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and
Cornell Woolrich. Chandler made an even more direct contribution to film noir, sharing
the screenwriting credit for Double Indemnity (1944) with director Billy Wilder.

954
 French New Wave

Particularly influential were pulp fiction crime stories of a type published in the
1920s and ’30s in magazines such as Black Mask, where in 1934 Chandler’s Philip
Marlowe, the central character in two classic noir and three neo-noir films, first
appeared. Pulp fiction’s primary contribution to film noir was the “hardboiled” detec-
tive, private investigators (“private eyes”) such as Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s
Marlowe. Both detectives were memorably portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in the noir
classics The Maltese Falcon and Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946), respectively.
Philip Marlowe had previously been creditably portrayed by Dick Powell in Edward
Dmytryk’s Murder My Sweet (1944), an outstanding noir film that constituted Powell’s
breakaway role from his many screen performances as a song and dance man in Busby
Berkeley musicals. James Garner played Philip Marlowe in Paul Bogart’s Marlowe, a
neo-noir effort filmed in 1969, and Elliott Gould reprised the role of Marlowe in Robert
Altman’s neo-noir The Long Goodbye (1973).
Film noir proved to be an enduring form, despite the fact that although hundreds of
films fall into the noir genre, a comprehensive and succinct definition that can be com-
monly agreed on remains elusive. The cinematography of low-key lighting developed
and gradually enhanced by those working in the noir medium continued to dominate
Hollywood films of many genres, until black-and-white cinematography became com-
pletely outmoded. Color photography of the 1940s, primitive by modern standards,
had, with a few exceptions such as John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and Lewis
Allen’s Desert Fury (1947), been considered too garish and upbeat for the serious and
somber mood of the story lines common to noir films, indeed, for any film making a
serious statement, and was relegated to travelogues, musicals, and epics. By the late
’50s, however, color had come completely into its own. Neo-noir has become an inde-
pendent genre, although elements of the antecedent form from which it is derived
remain clearly recognizable.
See also: Big Sleep, The; Citizen Kane; Double Indemnity; French New Wave;
Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The; Maltese Falcon, The

References
Krutnik, Frank. In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity. London and New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Richardson, Carl. Autopsy: An Element of Realism in Film Noir. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press,
1992.
Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, 3rd
ed. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1992.
—Richard C. Keenan

FRENCH NEW WAVE. The French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) cinematic
movement refers to the work of select French filmmakers that appeared between the
years of 1958 and 1964. The term “Nouvelle Vague” (literally “new wave”) was first
used by French journalist Françoise Giroud in his 1957 film-related articles published

955
French New Wave

Scene from the 1959 French film Breathless (aka À Bout de souffle), directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
Shown (from left) are Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. (Photofest)

in the French weekly news magazine L’Express. In 1959, L’Express adopted the term in
an article on an emerging group of directors who premiered films at the Cannes Film
Festival that year. Working under the watchful eye of André Bazin and Jacques
Doniol-Valcroze, these young, sometimes brash directors had already begun to estab-
lish themselves as original voices in French filmmaking by publishing critical essays
in a new journal called Cahiers du cinéma.
One of the leading figures of the burgeoning New Wave movement, and a major
contributor to Cahiers du cinéma, François Truffaut went so far as to suggest that direc-
tors, at least good ones, were not just part of the filmmaking process but auteurs, liter-
ally “authors” of their films. Representative of this idea of the director as auteur, argued
Truffaut and other critics, were French filmmakers such as Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, and
Robert Bresson, and American filmmakers such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred
Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray, and Orson Welles. Taking their cue from these

956
 French New Wave

auteurs, New Wave directors such as Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric
Rohmer, Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnès Varda, and Claude Chabrol became
prominent, and prolific, filmmakers in their own right. Indeed, between 1959 and
1966, the five principal New Wave directors—Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette,
and Rohmer—completed 32 films. In general, their films were geared toward younger,
more intellectually inclined audiences and were radically different from anything the
French cinematic community had ever experienced.
Seeking to break free from the ideological and literal boundaries of traditional film-
making, New Wave directors used the cinematic technology of the time to shift their
work outside the studio, shooting their films on location in the streets, buildings,
and countrysides of France. Using handheld cameras, faster film stock, and sound
and lighting units that were much more mobile than those employed by their prede-
cessors, these directors worked quickly and efficiently. Freed from the logistical con-
straints of traditional filmmaking, New Wave directors began to experiment and
improvise on their shoots. This led to the production of films that had a more casual
and natural style, one that reinforced the personal qualities of the work. Further, the
films of these directors did not follow traditional editing styles or rules. One of their
favored techniques was the “jump cut,” or the insertion of material that did not follow
the logic or flow of the narrative. Godard, for instance, often used jump cuts as a way
to break up lengthy conversations between characters in the same room. “Long
takes”—single extended shots without cuts—and the use of real time were also tech-
niques commonly employed by New Wave filmmakers.
Acting styles also changed. Actors working on New Wave films were often given a
storyline and encouraged to improvise their lines to fit within the preestablished plot.
In Godard’s À bout de souffle (1959), viewers witness actors interrupting and talking
over each other, as would be the case when people are conversing in real life. Mono-
logues and voice-overs during montages were frequently used to set the scene or
advance plotlines mid-film.
Additionally, French New Wave films changed the way women’s parts were written.
Instead of the “leading lady” roles that were typical of Hollywood films at the time,
New Wave female characters were often complex and integral to the plot. It should
be noted that most of the actors in these films were far from famous before they began
working with this group of directors. However, thanks to the success of the New Wave
in France, actors such as Brigitte Bardot, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Pierre Léaud,
Corinne Marchand, and Jeanne Moreau gained increasing fame in Europe and ulti-
mately in the United States.
Producing on average two films per year between 1960 and 1966, Godard was,
unquestionably, the most prolific of all the major directors of the movement. Many
of his films, for example Le petit soldat (1963) and Pierrot le fou (1965), featured
troubled male leads who are in some way existentially unfulfilled and who are search-
ing for something to make their lives better. His films from the 1960s forward are also
heavily infused with political themes.
Truffaut was known as much known for his film criticism as for his groundbreak-
ing cinematic works (his Les quatre cent coups of 1959, for example, won the Grand

957
French New Wave

Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year). He was one of the principal critics for
(and eventually editor of ) Cahiers. He was known for being extremely harsh in his
reviews, so much so that he was banned from the Cannes Film Festival in 1958.
His seminal 1954 article “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” critiqued the
state of French cinema and insulted many of the major filmmakers and producers
of the era.
Agnès Varda, the leading female filmmaker of the New Wave, used the skills she
acquired as a professional photographer to make visually nuanced, moving films. Her
films of the 1960s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) and Le bonheur (1969) challenged bourgeois
moral codes and made a lasting impression on French cinema thanks to complex,
“real” characters, skilled editing, and visually compelling montages. Later in her career,
Varda became a renowned documentarian.
Though there is some debate surrounding what exactly should be considered the
first New Wave film, most cinema scholars agree that shorts produced in the mid-
1950s, such as Jacques Rivette’s Le coup du berger (1956) and François Truffaut’s Les
mistons (1957), constituted the first films of French New Wave Cinema. In 1959, three
critical New Wave films emerged: François Truffaut’s Les quatre cent coups, Alain
Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour, and Godard’s À bout de souffle. These are considered
seminal films of the movement.
The French New Wave movement has maintained a lasting influence over
international film production. In contemporary film, we see many of the same
stylistic techniques and thematic tendencies that were used by New Wave directors
like Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, and Chabrol. These techniques include long and
continuous takes, jump cuts, natural lighting, improvised dialogue and/or
plot, and direct sound recording. Common themes include personal drama (relation-
ships, personal crises, etc.) and character types such as the antihero, loners, as well as
antiauthoritarian and marginalized figures. The films of international contemporary
directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar Wai, Wes Anderson, Jean-Pierre
Jeunet, Thomas Vinterberg, and Lars von Trier use many of the same production
techniques, themes, and character types seen in French New Wave films of the
1950s and 1960s; a testament to the power and influence of this crucial cinematic
movement.
See also: Film Criticism; Film Noir; Truffaut, François

References
Allen, Don. Finally Truffaut. London: Paladin, 1986.
Cowie, Peter. Revolution: The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties. London: Faber & Faber,
2005.
Greene, Naomi. French New Wave: A New Look. London: Wallflower, 2008.
Marie, Michel. The French New Wave: An Artistic School. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2002.
Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2002.

958
 French New Wave

Sellier, Geneviève. 2008. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008.
Vincendeau, Ginette, and Peter Graham, eds. The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks.
Hampshire, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.
Williams, Phillip. “The French New Wave Revisited: Nouvelle Vogue Moviemakers Were True
Founders of the Independent Film Movement; Their Influence Continues . . .” MovieMaker:
The Art and Business of Making Movies, July 2, 2002. http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/
article/the_french_new_wave_revisited_3366/.
—Jen Westmoreland Bouchard

959
This page intentionally left blank
 v
G
GANGSTER FILM, THE. Crime was one of the first subjects explored in American
cinema. Vivid portraits of organized criminals appear in silent-era films like D. W.
Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912). At the end of the 1920s, however, the advent
of sound cinema made it possible to portray realistic machine guns, blaring sirens,
screeching tires, and the colorful dialogue of streetwise hoodlums. This technological
change came amidst the spread of criminal syndicates during the Prohibition era and
the loss of economic opportunities brought on by the Great Depression. Suddenly,
conditions were right for exploring a new kind of criminal antihero: the gangster.
Three films launched the gangster genre in the early 1930s, each highlighting a sin-
gle character who was as tough and ruthless as he was ambitious and stylish. The first
was Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931), starring Edward G. Robinson as Rico Bandello.
Loosely based on the life of Al Capone, Little Caesar established the pattern of the
early gangster film by showing Rico’s rapid rise in Chicago’s criminal world followed
by his inevitable fall. The same pattern appears in William Wellman’s The Public
Enemy (1931), starring James Cagney as the fast-talking, free-swinging Tom Powers.
Initially cast in a minor role, Cagney’s talent was so obvious that Wellman gave him
the lead after viewing some early rushes. The scene where he smashes a grapefruit
into the face of a girlfriend (Mae Clarke) is still a landmark portrayal of gangster
viciousness. But the most brutal image of the early gangster appears in Howard
Hawks’s Scarface (1932), starring Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, another ersatz Al
Capone. The incessant violence, which includes many stylized murders of rivals
during Camonte’s ascent, is concluded by a prolonged machine gun shootout.
By the mid-1930s, groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency were protesting the
gangster genre’s glorification of criminals. Despite their tragic endings, gangsters
indulged a fantasy of wealth and power: donning expensive suits, cavorting with beau-
tiful women, firing tommy guns, and dying in a blaze of glory. The Hays Office
demanded changes, and studios responded by shifting the focus from criminals to cops
in films like William Keighley’s G-Men (1935), which starred Cagney as a sadistic law
enforcement officer. Another approach, taken in Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty

961
Gangster Film, The

Scene from the 1931 film Little Caesar, starring Edward G. Robinson. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy.
(Photofest)

Faces (1938), had Cagney again playing a hardened criminal, but paired against his fre-
quent co-star Pat O’Brien playing a heroic priest.
Warner Bros. created the most memorable gangster movies of the 1930s. The studio
that pioneered sound cinema had contracts on “tough-guy” stars like Cagney and
Humphrey Bogart. Both appeared in Raoul Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939) as
friends whose bootlegging ambitions ultimately lead to betrayal. With its nostalgic
sweep of the decade and soundtrack full of period songs, The Roaring Twenties closed
a chapter on the classic gangster era.
During the 1940s, much of the energy of the gangster’s rise and fall plotline was
channeled into the stylistics of film noir. Crime films of the World War II era used
low-key lighting and voice-over narration to explore the psychological states of dam-
aged protagonists. Rather than the grandly ambitious, headline-grabbing gangster, film
noir tended to focus on the petty criminals, shadow-dwelling detectives, and femmes
fatale struggling to survive in corrupt and dangerous cities. Still, gangster content often
overlapped with noir form to provide interesting results. In Raoul Walsh’s White Heat
(1949) James Cagney, after a 10-year hiatus from gangster roles, played Cody Jarrett, a
vulnerable noir antihero with the ambition and volatility of a classic-era gangster. His
final shout of “Top of the world, Ma!” before exploding a gas tank he stands atop
was a nihilistic scream bridging America’s gangster era past to its Cold War future.

962
 Gangster Film, The

Film noir’s dark style and darker themes continued to influence gangster films of the
1950s, taking the genre in several different directions. The alienated individual sur-
rounded by corruption was the theme of Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), in which
Sgt. Bannion (Glenn Ford) is a lone policeman battling powerful gangsters. He pays
a high price for taking on the mob, as does Lt. Diamond (Cornel Wilde) in Joseph
H. Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955), which has a similar theme. Other films expressed
the futility of human endeavors, highlighting a perfectly planned criminal caper that
gradually unravels. John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Stanley Kubrick’s
The Killing (1956) are noteworthy examples of this type. Not all was noir in the
1950s, however. Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed one of the few gangster musicals, Guys
and Dolls (1955), and many biopics were made from the lives of actual gangsters,
including Don Siegel’s Baby Face Nelson (1957), Roger Corman’s Machine Gun Kelly
(1958), and Richard Wilson’s Al Capone (1959).
The most influential gangster film of the 1960s was Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde
(1967). Although set in the Depression-era 1930s, Bonnie and Clyde spoke to alienated
youth during a time of cultural upheaval. The legend of the star-crossed crime duo had
been put on-screen several times before, but the naive glamour of Warren Beatty and
Faye Dunaway captured the spirit of the era like no other couple on the run had. Audi-
ences were completely unprepared for the highly choreographed slaughter at the end,
in which cops fire hundreds of machine gun rounds into the couple, setting new stan-
dards for graphic movie violence. Bonnie and Clyde’s commercial success signaled the
dawn of a new gangster era that would open doors for young, independent filmmakers
like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
The Godfather (1972), Coppola’s realization of Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel, was
unlike any gangster film preceding it in terms of its epic scope and artistic aspirations.
Placing the gangster at the intersection of new-world American capitalism and old-
world family traditions, The Godfather mixed the warm rituals of Italian life with the
cold brutality of illegal business. Coppola intercuts weddings, baptisms, and family
dinners with beatings, betrayals, and assassinations. After Don Corleone (Marlon
Brando) is gunned down, his youngest son Michael (Al Pacino) transforms from a
college-educated war hero with no interest in his father’s business into the undisputed
head of the mafia’s five families. The movie won an Academy Award for best picture,
screenplay, leading actor (Brando), and had three cast members (James Caan, Robert
Duvall, and Pacino) competing for best supporting actor. Together with The
Godfather: Part II (1974), which serves as both prequel and sequel to the original,
The Godfather is recognized as the artistic pinnacle of the gangster genre.
Eschewing Coppola’s flair for epic grandeur, Martin Scorsese used an intimate
home-movie style in Mean Streets (1973), showing the vulgar humor as well as the
petty failures of small-time mobsters in New York’s Little Italy. With frequent collabo-
rators Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, Scorsese returned to the same turf to make Good-
fellas (1990), which tells the story of penitent “wiseguy” Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) using
a tightly integrated pop/rock soundtrack and allegorical links between gangster brav-
ado and American consumerism. The film touched off a flurry of retro-gangster films

963
German Expressionism

in the 1990s, with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994)
among the most notable.
Between Scorsese’s two gangster classics, Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) remake
showed the genre’s enduring ability to showcase the stories of immigrant outsiders
for whom traffic in illegal substances becomes the sole means of realizing the American
Dream. Where the original Tony Camonte was an Italian “rum runner,” the remake’s
Tony Montana (Al Pacino) is a Cuban cocaine dealer. De Palma’s Scarface also updates
the firepower and violence while commenting on the failed drug war and the greed that
characterized the Reagan era.
Scarface had a major influence on “gangsta” rappers, who in turn influenced film-
makers like John Singleton. At 24, Singleton had the distinction of being the youngest
director ever nominated for an Academy Award. His Boyz N’ the Hood (1991), like
Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City (1991), and the Hughes brothers’ Menace II Society
(1993), highlight urban drug culture and the effects of gang violence on African
American youth. Gangsta films often featured authentic gangster rappers. The star of
Jim Sheridan’s Get Rich or Die Trying (2005), Curtis “50-Cent” Jackson, took gangsta
“street cred” about as far as it could go by surviving after being shot nine times.
The gangster genre continues to evolve, not just in the United States, where it
responds to the unique circumstances of different ethnic groups struggling to master
the American system, but globally where cinematic versions of Japan’s yakuza or Hong
Kong’s triads are as familiar as Sicilian mafiosi. Even with these developments, the pub-
lic’s fascination with brash capitalists backed by guns has not changed since the 1930s.
See also: Bonnie and Clyde; Coppola, Francis Ford; Film Noir; Godfather Trilogy,
The; Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The; Pulp Fiction; Scarface: The Shame of a
Nation; Scorsese, Martin

References
Shadoian, Jack. Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1977.
Stephens, Michael L. Gangster Films: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference to People, Films, and
Terms. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996.
Yaquinto, Marilyn. Pump ’Em Full of Lead: A Look at Gangsters on Film. New York: Twayne,
1998.

—Joseph Christopher Schaub

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM. German expressionist film is commonly identified

with the interwar Weimar period (1918–1933). Expressionist films typically challenge
bourgeois ideas about nature, power, and human behavior in the industrialized world,
and are characterized by experimentation in virtually every element of production: set
design, lighting, and plot are intentionally designed to provoke, not simply entertain,
audiences. Whereas earlier filmmakers had used the camera to simply record actors’
performances, expressionist directors experimented with the new technology’s

964
 German Expressionism

potential. Irregular camera angles,

stark, often asymmetrical set
designs, and harsh chiaroscuro
lighting, along with a disjointed
narrative structure, characterize
expressionist films. The ability to
record both audio and visual
images simultaneously allowed
filmmakers to produce a multi-
sensory experience, which they
used to further the sense of disso-
nance that characterizes expres-
sionist film.
Although associated—even
equated—with Weimar culture,
German expressionism was in fact
an international movement that
spanned political epochs. Many
“German” actors, directors, and
producers, for example, came from
outside Weimar, and certainly per-
formed in an international cin-
ematic community. Similarly,
expressionist traits can be seen in
German films as early as 1913,
and although World War I cer- Scene from the 1922 German film Dr. Mabuse, directed by
tainly informed interwar culture, Fritz Lang. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
expressionist movies shared the
big screen with musicals and other lighthearted genres in the 1920 and 1930s. However,
while the latter offered German moviegoers a temporary escape from the stressors of daily
life in their war-torn and economically depressed nation, expressionist cinema gave voice
to widespread concerns about the frailty of modern industrialized society. As totalitarian
governments led Europe into yet another global war, expressionism’s cynicism and
emphasis on the subjective nature of reality found ever-broader audiences.
Most influential figures in German expressionist film began their careers in live the-
ater, and were drawn to the technological potential offered by cinematic production.
Paul Wegener (1874–1948), for example, was a stage actor who focused on film writ-
ing, directing, and acting from about 1920 onward. Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871–1943)
similarly crossed genres, having worked previously as a novelist, poet, and art critic
before writing his pioneering work, The Student of Prague (1913). Actor Robert Wiene
(1873–1938) turned to directing and screenwriting after 1910; his The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari (1919), together with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), epitomizes the expres-
sionist horror film in Germany. Above all, Fritz Lang (1890–1976) exemplifies the
internationalism of German expressionist film artists. Born in Vienna, Lang directed

965
German Expressionism

numerous German films during the 1920s—including Destiny (1921), Dr. Mabuse
(1922), and Metropolis (1927)—before emigrating to the United States, where he also
earned acclaim as a director of science fiction films and westerns.
The expressionist film movement had a lasting influence both within Germany and
internationally. Prior to 1918, film was seen by the German cultural elite as a vulgar,
working-class diversion, unworthy of upper-class, educated consumers. By the mid-
1920s, however, both Erich Pommer’s short-lived Decla Studios and the better-
known Universum Film Studios (UFA) were successfully marketing expressionists’
cutting-edge cinematic technology and provocative narratives as art, not entertain-
ment. As a result, Germany quickly developed an international reputation for high-
quality art films, and the UFA studios outside Berlin attracted world-renowned writers,
actors, and directors. This reputation offset anti-German sentiments in other nations,
but by the mid-1930s, also attracted the attention of the Nazi regime, which drove
numerous expressionist filmmakers into exile. Paradoxically, this facilitated the spread
of expressionist techniques, as many continued their careers in Hollywood.
Scholars continue to debate the significance of German expressionist cinema, but
most agree on several broad generalizations. Culturally, expressionist films challenged
Germany’s staid political ideas and conservative social institutions, and resonated with
both working-class and intellectual communities. Technologically, the innovations
developed and exported by German expressionists informed genres such as American
film noir and science fiction. Philosophically, expressionism is sometimes interpreted
as the artistic voice of a defeated and demoralized nation, or linked to a German
national character that was unprepared for the strains of twentieth-century society.
More modestly, others see expressionism as a form of personal—and cultural—intro-
spection, sparked by the anonymity and isolation of modern life. This latter interpre-
tation found widespread resonance after World War II, and continues to shape
cinematic production today.
See also: Metropolis

References
Coates, Paul. The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror. Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Gordon, Donald. Expressionism: Art and Idea. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
Scheunemann, Dietrich. Expressionist Film: New Perspectives. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell &
Brewer, 2006.
Weisstein, Ulrich, “German Literary Expressionism: An Anatomy.” German Quarterly 54(3):
262–83.
—Kimberly A. Redding

966
 v
H
HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE FILM, THE. Though often regarded as a peculiar
variant of the film noir genre, “hard-boiled” detective movies may well deserve a genre
label all their own. Boasting an iconic hero/antihero whose exploits and ethical con-
flicts constitute their dramatic focus, hard-boiled detective movies create action narra-
tives that actively resist the undertow of fatalism and amoral passivity that characterizes
so much of what historians define as noir. And though they are descended from the
same pulp-fiction sources that gave birth to the film noir era, hard-boiled movies often
move toward an ironic affirmation of the social contract and of an uncorrupted (and
possibly incorruptible) individualism that is recognizably American.
Unlike their more cerebral, drawing-room predecessors, hard-boiled private eyes
generally lack the social graces and aristocratic connections of a Sherlock Holmes or
an Hercule Poirot. If they have not actually been cashiered from an official position
with the district attorney’s office (Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, for example),
then, like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, they inhabit a moral gray zone where they
are trusted by neither the police nor their underworld clients, yet are still able to move
about in both worlds. There is more than a hint of amorality—sexual as well as profes-
sional—in the hard-boiled “shamus,” and there may even be a whiff of potential crimi-
nality in such figures, as well. However, such traits are often balanced out by the
presence of a personal code that functions in much the same way that an ethical system
would, constraining and validating their behavior at the same time. In The Maltese Fal-
con, for example, Sam Spade speaks for the entire fraternity of private investigators
who, like Spade himself, inhabit the margins of the world of law and order when he
reflects on the moral and emotional ambiguities of his job:

Listen. This isn’t a damned bit of good. You’ll never understand me, but I’ll try once
more and then we’ll give up. Listen. When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to
do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He
was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we
were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it’s
bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around—bad for that one

967
Hard-Boiled Detective Film, The

organization, bad for every detective everywhere. . . . Don’t be too sure I’m as
crooked as I’m supposed to be. That kind of reputation might be good business—
bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.

Not exactly a categorical imperative, but still proof of a moral backbone that helps
to differentiate the hard-boiled private eye from the shady, and occasionally homicidal,
clients with whom he has to work.
Of equal importance, however, is the hard-boiled private eye’s lack of social stand-
ing, or to put it more explicitly, his disdain for status and social pretension. Perhaps
the best example of this peculiar (and for some, morally endearing) trait can be found
in the following dialogue between the wealthy and beautiful Vivian Sternwood and an
obviously unimpressed Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep:

Vivian: You know, I don’t see what there is to be cagey about, Mr. Marlowe. And I don’t
like your manners.
Marlowe: I’m not crazy about yours. I didn’t ask to see you. I don’t mind if you don’t like
my manners. I don’t like them myself. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them long winter eve-
nings. And I don’t mind your ritzing me, or drinking your lunch out of a bottle, but don’t
waste your time trying to cross-examine me.
Vivian: People don’t talk to me like that.
Marlowe: Ohhh.
Vivian: Do you always think you can handle people like, uh, trained seals?
Marlowe: Uh, huh. I usually get away with it, too.

Marlowe’s attitude in this scene, and throughout the film, reflects a specifically class-
based, outsider’s view of the conspicuously affluent clients he depends on for his live-
lihood, and while such arrogance in the face of money and power makes no sense pro-
fessionally, it establishes at least one critical sociological truth: Marlowe and his fellow
“dicks” are essentially proletarian heroes who have no emotional investment in the sur-
vival of the Sternwoods and their kind. The Marlowe of Farewell, My Lovely bluntly
refers to the upper-class (and invariably indulged) women who pant after him as “rich
bitches,” and his misogyny aside, contempt for the privileged few is a constant in both
hard-boiled literature and the films they engender. Crime levels all socioeconomic dis-
tinctions here, and at last the law makes no distinction between a well-heeled crook
and a penniless one, except that the former pays better and can often manage to elude
the long arm of justice, if only temporarily.
Two films from the 1940s best illustrate the character-types and sensibility of hard-
boiled cinema: John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of
the Past (1947), and each in its way establishes cinematic precedents that later, lesser
filmmakers would follow. The Maltese Falcon, for one, introduces Humphrey Bogart’s
paradigmatic tough guy, Sam Spade, to the world in Huston’s nearly literal adaptation
of Dashiell Hammett’s novel. Brash, seemingly cynical, a born risk-taker who will
gamble his life to get to the bottom of a mystery, Bogart’s hero is also a closet romantic

968
 Hays Office and Censorship, The

who understands, as he puts it (paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Prospero), “the stuff that

dreams are made of.” He is quite capable of outwitting a ruthless villain, falling danger-
ously in love with a femme fatale, and then turning her over to the police to clear him-
self of suspicion for the murder of his partner. The hierarchy of values in Huston’s
hard-boiled drama is thus quite clear: professional integrity first, something like per-
sonal honor second, and romantic love a very distant third—a striking departure from
later soft-boiled crime dramas like Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944) where
a much-battered private eye gets the girl in the end.
Out of the Past, like The Maltese Falcon, takes its basic plot from a similarly pulpy
novel (Daniel Mainwaring’s Build My Gallows High), but places its ex-private eye pro-
tagonist, Jeff Markham, in a far more dangerous and morally compromised situation
than anything Sam Spade would have thrown himself into. As Robert Mitchum inter-
prets this role, Markham is basically a decent man, haunted by a shady past that has left
him scarred and determined to find a new life and a new identity to go along with it. In
true film noir fashion, however, that past catches up with him and drags him back into
a world of criminality and multiple betrayals, until the only choice with which he is left
is a reasonably honorable death. The seemingly ineluctable nature of Markham’s fate
gives Tourneur’s film a much darker outlook than Huston’s—indeed, an almost
despairing view of both life and love—but at the same time manages to allow its hero
to plumb depths of self-understanding that a less violent and self-destructive denoue-
ment would stifle or trivialize. What Out of the Past accomplishes, then, is the transfor-
mation of a stereotypical gumshoe action-hero into a genuinely tragic figure, an
accomplishment that relatively few of its many imitators managed to replicate, either
during this decade or in the decades that followed.
See also: Big Heat, The; Big Sleep, The; Chinatown; Fargo; Film Noir; Huston,
John; Maltese Falcon, The

References
Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999.
Grant, Barry Keith, ed. Film Genre Reader III. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1981.

—Robert Platzner

HAYS OFFICE AND CENSORSHIP, THE. Concerns over the negative influence
of movies on American morals, and calls for censorship, are as old as the film industry
itself. By the early twentieth century, local officials, often under pressure from religious
groups, created a variety of state and municipal censorship boards that varied widely in
their regulatory powers and principles. The effect of this patchwork of policies pro-
vided the impetus to develop some sort of national standard; but not until 1930 did
the industry adopt the Production Code—popularly known as the Hays Code—that

969
Hays Office and Censorship, The

governed the content of American film for over 30 years. Technically, the Hays Code did
not entail formal censorship: compliance remained voluntary and the role of the Produc-
tion Code Administration (PCA) was, in theory, only advisory, although sanctions carried
heavy fines. Implicitly, however, the Code imposed a de facto censorship on American
filmmaking that was grounded in a religious, specifically Catholic, moral ideology.
Censorship had long been a sticking point in an industry that viewed filmmaking as
a form of artistic expression, and thus an activity protected by the free speech clause of
the First Amendment. When the Supreme Court, however, ruled unanimously in 1915
that motion pictures were commodities designed principally for entertainment and
profit, and thus were subject to commercial regulations that varied from state to state,
the industry realized the need to establish its own parameters that would be applicable
nationwide. Initial efforts to control content, however, were meager until a series of
spectacular scandals rocked Hollywood in the 1920s, underscoring the contentions
of critics that “immoral” behavior on-screen could easily translate into depravity off-
screen. Thus, the newly created Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
(MPPDA) looked to its first president, a Midwesterner named Will Hays, to restore
Hollywood’s tarnished image.
Hays was a devout Presbyterian elder and a determined social conservative, but his
1927 list of 36 “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” lacked any real mechanism for enforcement
and was largely ignored. Three years later, he tried again with a more substantial set
of guidelines that had been proposed by Fr. Daniel Lord, a Jesuit priest, and Martin
Quigley, a Catholic layman who published an industry trade journal. This document,
which began with a set of general principles followed by specific violations organized
under 12 separate headings, was adopted by the MPPDA as its own Production Code.
Still, it would be another four years before the MPPDA created an enforcement
agency, the PCA, headed by another Catholic layman named Joseph Ignatius Breen,
and imposed a monetary penalty of $25,000 on any film that was distributed without
its seal of approval.
Without doubt, most Americans would have found the substantial involvement of
Catholics in the development of the Code and in the administration of the PCA sur-
prising, since Catholicism was still viewed with great suspicion by most Protestants,
who held that Catholic doctrines often ran counter to American values. Indeed, the de-
cade of the 1920s would witness both the bitter defeat of the first Catholic candidate
for the presidency in 1928, and the rise of the “second” Ku Klux Klan that was as
anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic as it was racist. But Catholics had long been involved
in issues of movie censorship, and in that same decade, diocesan councils and other
Catholic organizations began the practice of rating films according to their moral con-
tent. In the same year that Breen was hired to lead the PCA (1934), a new Catholic
pressure group, the Legion of Decency, had made its influence felt by organizing a
national boycott against offensive films and offending studios. As a devout Catholic
familiar with the industry—he and Quigley had collaborated on the filming of the
1926 International Eucharistic Congress held in Chicago—Breen brought to his role
as the enforcer of the Code the unequivocal backing of the Legion with its latent but
lethal power of public boycott. During his 20 years as the head of the PCA, Breen

970
 Hollywood Blacklist, The

edited scripts and screenplays to conform to his own devoutly Catholic reading of the
Code, and thus imposed his own moral vision on issues ranging from sexuality to
political corruption to social reform.
To be sure, much of the Code reflected conventional values that few Americans
would have identified as uniquely Catholic. In always depicting the detrimental conse-
quences of illicit sex or lawless behavior, American films during the Code era reflected a
morality that was as bourgeois as it was expressly religious. Rather, the influence of the
Code on American attitudes toward Catholics was more subtle. Of Irish heritage,
Breen usually objected to the repetition of negative stereotypes, both of Irish and Italian
characters, who, if not explicitly depicted as such, were implicitly regarded as
Catholic. Further, the Code prohibited negative portrayals of any religion, and
forbade ridiculing clerical characters or presenting them as villains. Fearful of
unintentionally crossing these lines, cautious directors often hired priests to serve as
advisors on the set, or allowed priests who worked with the Legion to recommend
script revisions. Little wonder that the figure of the Catholic priest as a personifica-
tion of moral conscience soon became a staple in films that dealt with controversial
issues or problematic characters.
Breen retired from the PCA in 1954 and his successor, Geoffrey Shurlock, amended
the Code to reflect changing mores. But the Code remained inflexible in presenting a
singular and simplistic moral truth that made no allowances for serious films with
adult themes. After United Artists released Otto Preminger’s The Moon is Blue in
1953 without the MPPDA seal but with no loss of profits, the Code died a slow death
and was finally replaced by the ratings system in 1968.
See also: Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA); Reli-
gion and Censorship in Film

References
Black, Gregory D. Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code
Administration. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Maltby, Richard. “The Production Code and the Hays Office.” In Balio, Tino, ed. Grand
Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939. New York: Scribners,
1993: 37–72.
—Rodger M. Payne

HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST, THE. The Hollywood Blacklist was a product of

the virulent anticommunism of Cold War America. Hearings by the House Un-
American Activities Committee (HUAC) began shortly after World War II and contin-
ued through the 1950s, resulting in more than 300 screenwriters, directors, actors, and
others in the film industry being barred from working in films and television. Despite
little or no evidence that accused individuals were affiliated with the Communist Party,
many careers were temporarily derailed or permanently ruined.

971
Hollywood Blacklist, The

Lillian Hellman, a playwright and screenwriter with left-leaning politics, was called before the
House Un-American Activities Committee. Her refusal to cooperate with the committee caused
her to be blacklisted in Hollywood for over a decade. (Library of Congress)

Concern about leftist infiltration into American entertainment had begun in the
1930s, when the Dies Committee investigated charges of communist influence in the
New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project, ending its funding. It was in those Depression
years that left-wing attacks on capitalism and racism resonated with some Americans,
including people in the arts and entertainment. During World War II, when the USSR
joined the Allies’ efforts against Germany and Japan, public attention was focused
more on fighting fascism, and Americans could see positive images of Soviet Russia
on-screen (as in Mission to Moscow, 1943, and Song of Russia, 1944). The production
of war news and propaganda arose from the notion that films are powerful means of
swaying public opinion, and they appeared successful.
By 1945, however, the Cold War was well underway, and fighting communist
domination became central to American policy at home and abroad. Now the same
potential of films so useful in supporting the war was suspect, especially if it had fallen
into the hands of dissidents while no one was watching. Not surprisingly, screenwriters
came under the closest scrutiny, but more interesting is the fear that the offscreen poli-
tics of directors and actors, besides generally poisoning the production climate, might

972
 Hollywood Blacklist, The

seep into the theaters via subtle means. The policing of film content was hardly new—
the Hollywood Code created in the 1930s was still in force—but now the federal
government added its voice and determination to expose subversive plots.
In this climate, HUAC investigations into communist influence in Hollywood
began in October 1947, helping to create the hysteria associated with Joseph McCarthy’s
crusade. The format and dynamics of these early hearings quickly became standard
procedure for the era: witnesses were asked whether they were or had ever been com-
munists; but the response was less important than their willingness to testify, name
the names of other suspected communists, and publicly denounce communism. No
evidence was needed for someone to be suspected, and one was “guilty” until proven
innocent (by naming others). Of more than 40 individuals first called, the majority
were “friendly,” or compliant with HUAC, but 19 refused to cooperate, a number that
eventually shrank to the “unfriendly” Hollywood Ten, convicted of contempt and sen-
tenced to prison terms: screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr., John
Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, and Dalton Trumbo; director Edward
Dmytryk (who later cooperated); director/screenwriter Herbert Biberman; and pro-
ducer/screenwriter Robert Adrian Scott.
Additional hearings in 1951–52 generated the bulk of the blacklist, which was then
used by the industry on both coasts to control who was hired. In addition, the 1950
publication Red Channels listed 151 suspects, and hearings on a smaller scale continued
through the decade. Friendly witnesses included actors Lloyd Bridges, Lee J. Cobb,
Gary Cooper, Robert Montgomery, Ronald Reagan, and Robert Taylor; studio heads
Walt Disney, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner; and director Elia Kazan (whose com-
pliance generated controversy over honoring him in the 1990s). Among the hundreds
named were Eddie Albert, Richard Attenborough, Lucille Ball (who testified but satis-
fied the committee without naming others), Will Geer, Charlie Chaplin, Howard da
Silva, Lee Grant, Lillian Hellman, Kim Hunter, Norman Lloyd, Arthur Miller, Zero
Mostel, Dorothy Parker, Paul Robeson, and Lionel Stander.
The results were devastating for many on the list. Some changed careers while
others left the United States or, if screenwriters, worked under pseudonyms and used
“fronts” to sell their scripts (the subject of Woody Allen’s 1976 parody, The Front).
Banning some of the industry’s most creative people also affected the era’s films, which
one blacklist victim termed “void of content” due to the fear of appearing political in
any way.
See also: Front, The; HUAC Hearings, The

References
Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Commu-
nity 1930–1960. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Navasky, Victor. Naming Names, rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.
Vaughn, Robert. Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. New York: Putnam’s, 1972;
New York: Limelight, 2004.
—Vicki L. Eaklor

973
HUAC Hearings, The

HUAC HEARINGS, THE. The hearings of the House Un-American Activities

Committee on communism in Hollywood were pivotal in the history of American
film; they were the U.S. government’s most direct involvement with the film industry
and a public expression of the anticommunism of the mid-twentieth century. The
hearings ran from 1947 through 1954 and resulted in the blacklisting of over 300 peo-
ple, most prominently the Hollywood Ten, a group of “unfriendly” witnesses who
refused to testify.
The HUAC hearings involved the convergence of several historical factors in
American politics and culture. First, after the 1915 Supreme Court decision in Mutual
Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, films were no longer protected as
free speech, allowing for potential government regulation. Second, Hollywood had a
significant organized labor movement, including some organizations with communist
ties. Prominent in certain of these organizations were screenwriters, whose late entry
into the film industry—after the advent of sound—found them excluded from stand-
ing economic agreements. Third, after the birth of the Soviet Union, the United States
had become increasingly concerned with communist influence in America. Congress
formed multiple committees starting in the 1920s to investigate international political

Ten Hollywood personalities, the “Hollywood Ten,” stand with their attorneys on January 9, 1948,
outside of a district court after being charged in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with
the House Un-American Activities Committee. (AP/Wide World Photos)

974
 HUAC Hearings, The

threats; one of those committees, that formed by Martin Dies Jr., was the most direct
ancestor of the HUAC.
In 1946, Congress formed a committee for the investigation of “Un-American
Activities.” This committee was chaired by J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ), with help from
John Rankin (D-MS), and it included future president Richard M. Nixon (R-CA).
Hollywood communists had been a focus of the Dies Committee in the 1930s, but
the focus shifted to European fascism during the buildup to World War II. With the
escalating Cold War, attention returned to communism, and the committee once again
focused on Hollywood. This was so for two important reasons: first, this postwar com-
mittee functioned as an extension of the Dies Committee and its investigations into
Hollywood and the Federal Theater Project; second, the investigation was a way of
gaining publicity for the committee and its work.
Between 1947 and 1954, HUAC called witnesses from various parts of the film
industry to testify regarding communist influence in Hollywood. The committee
sought to root out communist propaganda in Hollywood films and started by calling
“friendly” witnesses, those who were willing to name names and answer questions.
Prominent among these early witnesses were Walt Disney of Disney Studios, Jack
Warner of Warner Brothers Studios, and Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen
Actors Guild. However, these cooperative witnesses could not give the committee what
it wanted—authoritative information on communist influences in Hollywood—and
so HUAC called a second round of witnesses. Some of these figures, such as Elia Kazan
and Roy Huggins, cooperated, but many, “unfriendly witnesses,” did not.
The best known of these unfriendly witnesses were a group of nine screenwriters
(Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson,
Albert Maltz, Sam Ornitz, Robert Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo) and one director
(Edward Dmytryk), known collectively as the Hollywood Ten. The Hollywood Ten
went before HUAC with intentions of challenging the committee’s authority, revealing
underlying political agendas, and highlighting the unconstitutional nature of the inves-
tigation. However, things did not go well for them. Most were denied the right to read
prepared statements before the committee, and their questioning by the committee
was often quite hostile. A group of Hollywood professionals, including such promi-
nent figures as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and John Huston, formed the Com-
mittee for the First Amendment and came to Washington to testify on behalf of the
accused; they were met with hostility by both HUAC and the Hollywood Ten, how-
ever, with members of the latter group feeling the efforts of the CFA undermined their
strategy.
Ultimately, the Hollywood Ten’s refusal to answer questions led to a citation for
contempt of Congress on November 24, 1947. While they would later appeal the deci-
sion, they were ultimately sentenced to prison terms between six months and a year.
Shortly afterwards, a group of Hollywood executives met and declared that the Holly-
wood Ten would be suspended without pay and that Hollywood would no longer
employ communists.
The HUAC hearings on Hollywood continued into the 1950s under the direction
of John S. Wood (R-GA), and the names of the Hollywood Ten ultimately became

975
HUAC Hearings, The

part of a blacklist, an unofficial list of 324 people who were associated with the Com-
munist Party. This list was assembled by the studios based partially on HUAC testi-
mony. Of these 324 people, an estimated 212 were working in Hollywood and
eventually lost their jobs. Some of these people were successful in extending their
careers by working under pseudonyms, most prominently Dalton Trumbo, whose
screenplay for The Brave One (1956), written under the name of Robert Rich, won
an Academy Award. However, most on the blacklist were unemployable until the
ban was lifted in 1960.
Significantly, studios began to produce films about the HUAC hearings in the
1950s. Some of these films were positive about the committee and its hearings: Big
Jim McLain (1952), for instance, focused on an agent for the HUAC fighting commu-
nists in Hawaii; and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) was a defense of his own
decision to name names. Other films, however, were more critical: High Noon (1952)
served as an allegory for the experience of the accused, with the sheriff searching for
someone to stand with him but finding himself abandoned; and Daniel Taradash’s
Storm Center (1956) told the story of a librarian who was persecuted for refusing to
remove a book about communism from her library. The liberal impulses of the latter
films survived in small independent films such as Salt of the Earth (1954), made by
blacklisted artists about labor conflict in a mining town. The film was broadly pro-
tested by the American Legion and only saw small distribution, though it remained a
favorite on college campuses. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Hollywood recovered suffi-
ciently to criticize directly the divisive and destructive effects of the committee with
films like The Way We Were (1973) and The Front (1976), both of which took a critical
view of the HUAC hearings and the process of blacklisting.
See also: Hollywood Blacklist, The; Politics and Film; Way We Were, The

References
Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Commu-
nity 1930–1960. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1980.
Christensen, Terry, and Peter J. Haas. Projecting Politics: Political Messages in American Films.
Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005.
Gladchuck, John Joseph. Hollywood and Anticommunism: HUAC and the Evolution of the Red
Menace, 1935–1950. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Goodman, Walter. The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-
American Activities. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968.
—B. Grantham Aldred

976
 v
I
INDEPENDENT FILM, THE. With $250 million in worldwide box-office receipts,
The Blair Witch Project renewed America’s interest in the history and cultural significance
of independent filmmaking. In a variety of ways, historians, scholars, and those in the
film industry have used the term “independent” for 100 years. Understanding the impor-
tance of independent films requires a working definition. Generally, independent film-
making consists of low-budget projects made by primarily young filmmakers with a
unique personal vision away from the pressure of the few major conglomerates that
tightly control the film industry (King, 2005). Commonly understood characteristics of
independent filmmaking are unique storytelling, technological advancements, and inno-
vative narrative styles that make the landscape rich, variable, and fascinating.
During the “studio era” from the mid-1910s through the late 1940s, independent
filmmakers sought to define their place in American culture by breaking away from
the Big Five American film companies: Paramount, Loew’s (MGM), Twentieth
Century-Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO. The Big Five controlled production, distribu-
tion, and exhibition of American films, leaving many independent filmmakers margin-
alized and monopolized by the larger corporate structure. A landmark event occurred
in 1919 with the formation of the production-distribution company United Artists,
which boasted industry stalwarts Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks
Sr., and D. W. Griffith. United Artists was created with the intent of breaking away
from the big business and oligopolistic market structure of the Big Five. They became
the most prestigious and influential avenue for independent production for the next
30 years. Using scientific audience research and presold properties like Shakespearean
plays and best-selling novels as subject matter, United Artists and other independent
filmmakers released movies such as Gone with the Wind (1939), The Best Years of Our
Lives (1946), and Duel in the Sun (1946), which often critically and commercially out-
performed films from the larger studios (Tzioumakis, 2006).
The mid-1940s through the late 1960s was a culturally significant period for
American independent cinema. The first critical change was the landmark Paramount
Decree of 1948 signed by the Big Five, which was a reaction to being found guilty of
monopolistic trade practices by the U.S. Supreme Court. Primarily, the decree called

977
Independent Film, The

for studios to separate themselves from theater control, which resulted in a seismic
upheaval of the structure of the American motion picture industry. Independent film-
makers now had more opportunities to distribute their works on a broader, national
level. The second culturally important change in independent films was the emergence
of the teenager and youth audience. Seen as a special and like-minded community, not
only in age but also in rank, teenagers would spend their disposable income on leisure
activities and cultural products, maintaining the lion’s share of total box-office receipts.
While major studios often ignored this influential audience, independent film compa-
nies like American International Pictures produced teen-focused films such as Rock All
Night (1957) and The Wild Angels (1966). The power of these films rested on a rebel-
lious narrative style that spoke directly to the consumer-oriented, carefree lifestyle of
teenagers and young adults.
From the late 1960s through the late 1970s, American independent cinema went
through numerous changes reflected by the ongoing shifts in social and cultural atti-
tudes in America. Independent film studios created a unique framework of autonomy,
but were often dependent on the major studios. Films like The Graduate and Bonnie
and Clyde (both 1967), Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy (both 1969) were autono-
mous because they questioned established Hollywood traditions, targeted a young
audience, and catered to racy and controversial subject matter, such as sex, violence,
and drugs (Tzioumakis, 2006). However, these groundbreaking films were dependent
on major studio assistance for domestic and worldwide distribution.
Independent filmmaking would undergo further changes in the early 1980s, creat-
ing the initial framework of what would become today’s American contemporary inde-
pendent cinema. Rising to fill the void left by American International Pictures and
other independent production-distribution outfits, studios like Orion, Miramax, and
New Line emerged as newly formed major independents. These studios began utilizing
technological advancements like the VCR and cable television as well as foreign mar-
kets to create varied distribution outlets for consumers. Using their distributive influ-
ence, major independents retained larger corporate characteristics, but were allowed
to make films catering to more niche audiences. Films such as The Terminator
(1984), Dances with Wolves (1990), and series like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Teen-
age Mutant Ninja Turtles allowed the major independents continued viability due not
only to box-office success, but home video and foreign revenues as well.
The mid-1990s witnessed American independent cinema firmly establish itself as a
relatively distinct category of filmmaking in the broader global market, as well as in
public discourse. Leading the charge were New Line and Miramax. They had the
financial resources and distribution ability to make niche films with high or low pro-
duction costs. Major independent productions like Chasing Amy (1997) and Full
Frontal (2002) could be juxtaposed against films like Gangs of New York (2002) and
the Spy Kids trilogy. All of these films were produced by New Line and Miramax,
and they varied in production costs, narrative style, and audience, yet were all profitable
and crossed over to a wider market.
Moving into the twenty-first century, the Internet has infused new life into indepen-
dent filmmaking and major independent studios. Mentioned at the outset, The Blair

978
 Intellectual Montage

Witch Project (1999) became the juggernaut of Internet marketing and buzz. Made for
a reported $30,000, the film’s success was fueled by media and Internet speculation as
to whether the story was true or urban legend.
Today, independent filmmakers and studios have the ability to reach a global audi-
ence. Utilizing the Internet and proven corporate strategies, studios can efficiently pro-
mote, discuss, and market their films to niche as well as crossover markets. Coupling
new marketplace savvy with a rich history fueled by the spirit of innovation, storytell-
ing, and technological advancements, independent films are now an institutional staple
in American society and will be for years to come.

References
King, Geoff. American Independent Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
Tzioumakis, Yannis. American Independent Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2006.

—Lucas Calhoun

INTELLECTUAL MONTAGE. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s view of montage

was more radical than Lev Kuleshov’s. While Kuleshov believed in shots making links
and thus making up a sequence, Eisenstein believed not only in mere juxtaposing of
images, but in harsh conflict among those images. According to Eisenstein, montage
is “intellectually conceived” (Eisenstein, 1992, 154) as opposed to the conventional
editing technique advocated by classical narrative films that can only be descriptive.
In interaction, shots must collide, creating a shock for the spectator, which was the
basis for intellectual montage—one of the five montage techniques Eisenstein distin-
guished in “Methods of Montage.” Intellectual montage can be seen as the elaborate
application of the other four techniques: metric (cuts based on the number of frames);
rhythmic (cuts based on time and visual composition); tonal (based on the emotional
content of a shot); and overtonal (the combination of the previous three techniques)
(Stam, 2000). In Eisenstein’s view, “montage is an idea that arises from the collision
of independent shots—shots even opposite to one another,” as opposed to the idea of
montage as discussed by Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin, according to which “mont-
age is the means of unrolling an idea with the help of single shots” (Eisenstein, 1992)
that result in the narrative style of classical Hollywood films.
A simple example of the dynamic process of intellectual montage can be the follow-
ing thematic conflict: the first shot depicts a poor woman and her undernourished
child seated at a table on which there is an empty bowl. There is then a cut to the sec-
ond shot, which depicts an overweight man with a golden watch and chain stretched
over his fat belly. He is seated at a table groaning with food. The rapid juxtaposition
of these two sets of images through quick editing creates a collision that, in turn, cre-
ates a third set of images in the spectator’s mind: that of the oppression of the poor
by the rich, which is further translated into political terms in the oppression of the

979
Italian Neorealism

proletariat by the bourgeoisie. Eisenstein’s principle of editing is then a rapid alterna-

tion between sets of shots whose significance occurs at the point of their collision.
According to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, a typical formulaic and nar-
rative device to introduce intellectual montage is the nondiegetic insert: an insertion
“of one or more shots depicting space and time unrelated to those of the story events
in the film.” An example of such an insert is the scene from Eisenstein’s 1925 film
Strike, commemorating the suppression of a 1912 factory strike in Tsarist Russia, in
which he constructs a parallel between the bloodbaths of the slaughtering of a bull
and that of the workers. As Bordwell and Thompson explain, the image of the bull
being slaughtered juxtaposed to the deaths of the workers creates a metaphorical point
that lets the spectators deduce that the workers are slaughtered like animals. This is a
“third meaning” that none of the shots contain in themselves, and no causal connec-
tion exists between them (hence the formula of 1+1=3 that illustrates the creation of
a third, intellectual image by two separate images): it is the filmmaker’s use of montage
that “leads the audience to create a general concept that links them” (Bordwell and
Thompson, 1994).
In Eisenstein’s view, the shot—or rather, the “montage cell” (Eisenstein 1992)—is
the raw material that filmmakers and spectators use to construct meaning. He thought
that the conflict arising in montage “creates a third meaning whose relevance bears
directly on the revolutionary history of the Soviet Union” (Hayward, 2000). Montage
is, in Eisenstein’s view, a manifestation of Marx’s dialectical materialism in filmic form:
one that grasps the “external events of the world” (Eisenstein, 1992) and thus can be
used as a highly effective propaganda tool. The dialectic logic is introduced in visual
and thematic levels simultaneously inasmuch as one montage cell (thesis) is put into
conflict with another (antithesis), and the result of this conflict is realized in a kind
of synthesis in the spectator’s mind (Eisenstein, 1992) that triggers social activism.
See also: Editing; Eisenstein, Sergei

References
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film History: An Introduction. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1994.
Eisenstein, Sergei. “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” In Mast, Gerald, et al., eds. Film
Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press,
1992: 138–54.
Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2000.
Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000.

—Zoltán Dragon

ITALIAN NEOREALISM. Neorealism is a distinct film movement that originated

in Italy, initially addressing local concerns but ultimately influencing, both stylistically
and thematically, cinema in France, the United States, and elsewhere. The movement
emerged during World War II and continued to develop in postwar Italy. Seeking to

980
 Italian Neorealism

Promotional poster for Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8 21. (Getty Images)

address the brutality of this second great global conflict, writers like Cesare Zavattini
and Umberto Barbaro became virtual theorists of a new cinematic style, which they
deemed “neo-realist.” Stressing that neorealist films must be characterized by an overtly
political message, they focused their efforts on exposing the social and economic mis-
ery caused by fascism and Nazism.
Initially, neorealist filmmakers were largely concerned with depicting the despair
experienced by those who were subject to Italian fascism and the Nazi occupation of
Italy. Necessarily restricted by material constraints, these filmmakers used nonprofes-
sional actors and shot on location in particularly dangerous environments, most nota-
bly in Rome. As a result, neorealist films, although narrative works, have an undeniable
documentary feel. Consciously blurring the lines between fact and dramatization, neo-
realist filmmakers sometimes used a narrator to describe the action in their pictures,
reinforcing a sense of documentary “objectivity,” while also relying on artistic devices
to manipulate the emotions of their viewers.
The movement must be placed against the background of an already active Italian
film industry and the fascination that Italian audiences had for the cinema during
the fascist era. Conscious of the power of the modern media, Mussolini spurred the
growth of Italian cinema by funding construction of large film studios like Cinecitta
near Rome. The films Italians embraced before the war were period-piece spectacles

981
Italian Neorealism

designed to appeal to popular tastes. Although their films were radically different in
tone, neorealist directors nevertheless found receptive audiences for their works.
Now, though, instead of viewing films about the past, these 1940s audiences were pro-
vided with disturbing images of the world in which they lived.
Early signs of this shift in cinematic direction can be detected in the work of
Luchino Visconti, whose Ossessioni (1942) anticipated neorealism. Although extremely
powerful, Visconti’s work did not reflect the explicitly political perspective being
expressed in the work of writers like Zavattini. Rather, Visconti tended to push politi-
cal questions to the ideological margins and to focus his films on the squalid banality of
the pursuit, by average people, of sex and money.
It may be argued that the neorealist perspective demanded by Zavattini was articu-
lated in the work of directors such as Roberto Rossellini, who, in pictures such as
Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), depicted the struggle and desperation of
Italian society as the reality of an Allied victory became increasingly apparent. Rossellini
used a static camera and little embellishment to define subtly complex scenes in which
the mythic figures of the past were replaced by the ordinary people of the present, some
of whom reached soaring heights but most of whom simply endured the hopelessness
and tragedy forced upon them by an uncaring world.
In his early films, made during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Vittorio De Sica
explored the desperate poverty and constant struggle for existence that defined the lives
of postwar Italians. Films such as Shoeshine (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948), and
Umberto D (1952) were heralded by critics, fellow filmmakers, and audiences, and ulti-
mately became film classics. Embodying the theoretical goals of neorealist artistic
engagement first articulated by writers like Zavattini, works like those by De Sica
began to define the movement as essentially left-wing and socialist. Indeed, these films,
with their scathing exposés of postwar life lived on Italy’s societal margins, were
embraced by socialists and used to motivate people to demand change.
As with nineteenth-century social realism, neorealism’s power and aesthetic possibil-
ities were undeniable and its adherents grew both in Italy and elsewhere. Nevertheless,
its stylistic consistency and strict social message began to seem artistically limiting,
even to those who considered themselves neorealist filmmakers, and the movement
began to redefine itself. One of the most important directors in moving Italian cinema
in a different direction was Federico Fellini. Fellini had worked with Rossellini as a
writer, and was clearly influenced by the cinematic style of early neorealist filmmakers.
However, in films like Variety Lights (1950), The White Sheik (1952), and I Vitelloni
(1953), Fellini began to include personal touches that inspired the audience to think
about the psychological nature of the characters. The lives of the filmic characters
who existed on the cultural periphery were tenuous and sad, but like one of his cin-
ematic heroes, Charlie Chaplin, Fellini sought to disclose the spiritual depths of these
characters. Framing his characters within a landscape of misery and desperation, in the
manner of other neorealist directors, Fellini nevertheless suggested that they might
experience some sort of religious redemption. Fellini’s critics excoriated him, claiming
that his pictures were not only overly sentimental but also unfaithful to the fundamen-
tals of neorealist filmmaking. For his part, Fellini ignored his critics and continued to

982
 Italian Neorealism

produce complex films that plumbed the psychological depths of their characters.
Maintaining his artistic independence, he dazzled film audiences with works such as
I Notti di Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, and 8 1/2. By the 1960s, Fellini’s films began to have
an almost surrealistic feel; and along with directors like Michelangelo Antonioni, he
began to define the end of the Italian neorealist movement. Although the movement
effectively ended in the 1960s, the works produced by its filmmakers have had a pro-
found effect on the cinematic world.

References
Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum,
2001.
Calvino, Italo. The Road to San Giovanni. New York: Random House, 1994.
Cardullo, Bert. Vittorio De Sica: Director, Actor, Screenwriter. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.
Gallagher, Tag. The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini. New York: Da Capo, 1998.
—Alexander Varias

983
This page intentionally left blank
 v
J
JUDAISM AND FILM. Hollywood has played a critical role in shaping popular
American conceptions of Judaism. Because most Americans, especially in rural areas,
have had little or no personal contact with Jews, for millions the mass-mediated image
of the Jew is uniquely authoritative. From its beginnings Jews have held key executive
positions within the film industry, which has also employed many Jewish screenwriters
and directors. Thus, movies have offered a way for one part of the Jewish community
to choose consciously how to represent their tradition to the general public.
Although filmmakers have produced hundreds of films depicting Jews, relatively
few have probed in depth the particularities of Jewish belief or rituals. Instead Holly-
wood has emphasized aspects of immigrant and ethnic identity that are universal
enough to appeal to a mass audience composed mostly of Christians. Since the silent
era, a central theme has been the Jewish desire for assimilation and upward mobility.
Orthodox Judaism has been represented sympathetically in only a handful of movies,
and traditionalism invariably loses out to modernism. Jews, Hollywood has always
stressed, are as fully American and progressive as any other ethnic group (Erens,
1984; Gabler, 1989).
The production of Hungry Hearts by Samuel Goldwyn in 1922 offers an excellent
illustration of Americanization at work. The film was based on a collection of autobio-
graphical short stories by Anzia Yezierska, a Russian Jew who had migrated to the United
States as a child about 1890, and who had worked for many years in a New York sweat-
shop. When Goldwyn purchased the rights to her book in 1920 for $10,000 and brought
Yezierska to Hollywood to write for the studio, newspapers hailed her as the ultimate
American success story, the “Sweatshop Cinderella” who had climbed “from Hester
Street to Hollywood.” Yezierska, a socialist who despised the wealthy, soon realized with
horror that Goldwyn had no intention of actually producing a movie that conveyed her
beliefs. Desiring to address themes such as justice, guilt, and redemption, she soon dis-
covered that Goldwyn wanted exciting plots about immigrants becoming successful
Americans, not “Jewish propaganda” films (Birmingham, 1984; Brownlow, 1987).
Some primitive movies blatantly exploited long-entrenched anti-Semitic stereo-
types. In The Fights of Nations (1907), a segment entitled “Our Hebrew Friends”

985
Judaism and Film

depicts a Jewish merchant and his Jewish customer engaged in an argument that soon
turns into a physical assault. The two men have the stereotyped features and clothing
of vaudeville Jews, with large noses, dark hair, moustaches, and beards. When the police
arrive, one Jew pays them off and both men then rejoice together at their cleverness, their
argument forgotten. The film also depicts Mexicans, Africans, Spaniards, Scotsmen, and
Irishmen engaged in brawls, but only the Jews are shown as resolving their conflict
through bribery. The Fights of Nations ends with all the characters standing hand in hand
below a banner that proclaims “America—Land of the Free” (Erens, 1984).
The following year Biograph released a film scripted by D. W. Griffith, Old Isaacs,
the Pawnbroker (1908), which retained many of the standard stereotypes but attempted
a more positive portrayal of Jewish character. When a sick mother and her daughter are
faced with eviction, the little girl tries unsuccessfully to secure a loan from a bank. She
then attempts to pawn her doll, hoping to make enough to pay the rent. The tender-
hearted old Isaac, with long nose and long beard, takes the little girl home and pays
all the family’s bills. Biograph advertised the film as a corrective to anti-Semitic slurs
on the Jewish race (Erens, 1984).
During the silent era, Biograph, Vitagraph, Thanhauser, Lubin, and Keystone pro-
duced many melodramas and comedies about Jews, frequently depicting the challenges
of ghetto life. Dramas like Romance of a Jewess (1908), Child of the Ghetto (1910), The
Broker’s Daughter (1910), The Ghetto Seamstress (1910), and The Girls of the Ghetto
(1910) all highlighted the poverty and poor working conditions that many Jewish
workers faced, with women receiving special attention.
Although allusions to Jewish religious practices appear sporadically throughout
these films, the earliest movie to focus heavily on Jewish religious life was Kalem Com-
pany’s A Passover Miracle (1914). Working closely with the Bureau of Education of the
Jewish Community, NY, which advised Kalem and helped distribute the film, the pro-
ducers hired leading Jewish actors to play the part of Orthodox Jew Joseph Ratkowitz
and his son Sam. Sam is the first of a type of Jewish character that has remained
commonplace in cinematic history—the prodigal son. Hoping to leave the ghetto
behind, Sam goes off to college to study medicine, supported by his selfless foster sister
and sweetheart Lena, who labors in a sweatshop. When the upwardly aspiring youth
falls in love with a more stylish stenographer and forgets Lena, the elder Ratkowitz dis-
owns him. Predictably, Sam eventually loses the stenographer and decides to return
home, where he arrives on Passover eve in the midst of the Seder. When Lena goes to
the door to welcome Elijah into the home, she finds the humbled Sam weeping in
the hallway. At first his father refuses to forgive him, but in the end love triumphs
and Sam is returned to father and sweetheart, the reconciliation framed by a highly
authentic depiction of the Jewish Passover ceremony (Erens, 1984).
This theme of the prodigal Jewish son has surfaced repeatedly, perhaps most notably
in the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer, which premiered on Yom Kippur Eve, October 6,
1927. The Jazz Singer is among the most important movies in history, launching Al
Jolson into stardom and establishing Warner Bros. as a major studio. Unlike earlier
Jewish films, The Jazz Singer was viewed by millions of Americans in theatres across
the nation, many of them completely unfamiliar with Jewish life. To aid these viewers,

986
 Judaism and Film

Warner Bros. distributed a program that explained key Jewish terms and Yiddish
phrases.
Like A Passover Miracle, the story hinges on conflict between an Orthodox
immigrant father and an assimilationist son, but the ending of The Jazz Singer differs
significantly. Jakie (Jolson) is the talented son of Cantor Rabinowitz, depicted as a
devoutly religious man with flowing beard, dark suit, and square black hat who is stub-
bornly committed to the ancient traditions of Judaism. He demands that Jakie follow
him as Cantor, but Jakie despises what he sees as antiquated relics of an Old World that
has no meaning for him. He instead becomes a jazz singer, performing in bars and
nightclubs, and is disowned by his father. Jakie changes his name to Jack Robin, mar-
ries a beautiful gentile woman named Mary, and becomes a successful singer with
Broadway prospects. On the night of his Broadway debut, Yom Kippur Eve, he learns
that his father is dying and wants him to take his place in the synagogue. Initially refus-
ing, at length he surrenders to “the call of the ages” and leaves the theatre, endangering
his career in the process. He reconciles with his dying father, and sings “Kol Nidre” in
the synagogue. The film ends a week later with his triumphant return to Broadway,
where his mother and wife Mary sit together side by side, watching him perform.
The Jazz Singer respectfully acknowledges Jewish tradition, “the call of the ages,” but
the driving theme of generational conflict is resolved with Jack married to a gentile and
thoroughly enfolded into the modern secular world. In the end, his traditionalist father
dies and his mother comes to the theatre, demonstrating her acceptance of his chosen
way of life. The Jazz Singer brought to Main Street America themes that were prevalent
in Jewish films of the 1920s: the drive to get ahead in America, acceptance of mixed
marriage, and the nostalgic but necessary goodbye to old-world tradition. Christian
American moviegoers, reading their programs for The Jazz Singer, could enjoy learning
more about the Jewish roots of their own faith, while at the same time taking comfort
in knowing that American Jews were basically just like them.
Jakie’s character in some ways did resemble many of Hollywood’s Jewish filmmakers
and actors, who often changed their names (e.g., Samuel Goldfish became Samuel
Goldwyn), and frequently divorced their Jewish wives to remarry gentile women
(e.g., Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, David O. Selznick, Otto Preminger).
The late 1920s and 1930s, the era that film transitioned to sound and Hollywood stu-
dios grew into behemoths, witnessed intense xenophobia in the United States. With
political and social leaders pushing aggressively for immigration restriction and her-
alding the ideal of the melting pot, Jewish filmmakers quietly downplayed their eth-
nic and religious identities, cast gentile actors for Jewish parts, rewrote scripts to
convert Jewish characters into gentiles, and generally avoided producing stories that
focused on distinctively Jewish themes. Although small independent New York com-
panies continued to make Yiddish films up until World War II, after The Jazz
Singer, Hollywood virtually abandoned Judaism as a theme until the late 1950s
(Erens, 1984; Birmingham, 1984).
Perhaps to avoid losing the lucrative German market, Hollywood did not aggres-
sively critique Nazi anti-Semitism until after war broke out. Charlie Chaplin’s satirical
comedy The Great Dictator (1940) was the first major American film to highlight the

987
Judaism and Film

plight of Europe’s Jews (Erens, 1984; Doneson, 2002). During World War II, Holly-
wood produced a series of anti-Nazi movies, many of them including Jewish American
soldiers among the characters, again reaffirming the message that American society was
a successful melting pot. Then, with the heightened public awareness of the Holocaust
following the war, two important films sought to probe explicitly the problem of anti-
Semitism in the United States: Crossfire (1947) and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947).
Crossfire, a low-budget police thriller, was the brainchild of producer Adrian Scott
and director Edward Dmytryk, both gentiles, who wanted to collaborate on a film
about the destructive nature of anti-Semitism. They adapted The Brick Foxhole, a novel
by Richard Brooks about a murdered homosexual, replacing the homosexual victim
with a Jew. RKO’s head of production, Dore Schary, a devout Jew, gave the proposal
his strong support. The plot revolves around two racist veterans who meet the Jewish
Samuels at a bar and follow him back to his apartment. In a series of flashbacks the
audience watches the two drunken racists become progressively violent in their insults,
until finally one of the men murders Samuels.
Crossfire was favorably received by the public, but Jewish reaction to the film was
mixed. In prerelease private screenings, conducted with the assistance of the Ant-
Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, psychologists measured the impact of the
movie on audience attitudes. Concluding that Crossfire did help to change racial atti-
tudes at least temporarily, the Anti-Defamation League gave the movie strong support.
However, Elliot Cohen, editor of the American Jewish Committee’s magazine Com-
mentary, attacked the film as superficial and likely to do more harm than good. Anti-
Semites, Cohen argued, would be galvanized by screened depictions of racists who
shared their prejudice (Erens, 1984).
Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement, released the same year as Crossfire, was a far big-
ger success, garnering three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Gregory Peck
played the role of crusading journalist Schuyler Green, who poses as a Jew in order
to study anti-Semitism as an insider. Phil quickly finds out that being a “Jew” changes
everything in his life, including his relationship with his fiancée who does not want to
hear about the problem of anti-Semitism. Phil experiences overt and subtle discrimina-
tion in countless ways, and comes to the realization that all of American society is
responsible for the perpetuation of anti-Semitism, not merely a handful of extremists.
Unlike Crossfire, Gentleman’s Agreement constituted a frontal assault on American racism.
In raising the issue of anti-Semitism in America, however, both Crossfire and Gentle-
man’s Agreement conformed to Hollywood’s program of assimilation. The films stressed
that Jews are Americans and challenged racial prejudice that would deny them their
place in the melting pot. Neither movie discussed American Jews as a distinctive ethnic
group with beliefs and customs that differed from mainstream culture. Hollywood still
avoided portraying the uniqueness of Judaism.
Hollywood treatments of the Holocaust have likewise tended to reflect the univer-
salizing tendencies of the film industry. Perhaps because American society did not
directly experience the Holocaust, cinematic representations in the United States have
downplayed the specifically Jewish context of the event and instead have used it to por-
tray the sort of inhumanity that Americans and all people of goodwill ought to oppose.

988
 Judaism and Film

The first major Hollywood treatment of the Holocaust, The Diary of Anne Frank
(1959), significantly is set not in a concentration camp, but in the attic of a Dutch
Christian family. Although the Jewish identity of the Franks is obvious, they are por-
trayed as a warm and loving family, not unlike middle-class American families, who
are hidden away from evildoers by Christian rescuers who are not unlike American
Christians who had recently fought against the Nazis in World War II. The screenwriters
eliminated numerous references in Anne Frank’s diary to distinctively Jewish customs,
but tellingly built the climax of the film around a Hanukkah celebration, despite
Anne’s statement in her diary that her family paid little attention to the holiday. This
change reflected the desire of the writers to establish a strong point of contact with
mainstream Americans, who could easily associate the Jewish festival with Christmas.
The screenwriters for the same reason rejected advice from Los Angeles Rabbi Max
Nussbaum, a Holocaust survivor, to have the Franks recite the Hanukkah prayers in
Hebrew, believing that American viewers would better identify with the characters
if they prayed in English (Doneson, 2002).
The Americanization of Jews in cinema during the 1950s also extended to represen-
tations of Old Testament Israel (Mart, 2004). The Biblical epic reached the zenith of
its popularity during the decade, in part because it served as an excellent vehicle for
Cold War commentary. In movies like Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Ten Com-
mandments (1956), filmmakers drew clear parallels between ancient Israel’s struggles
against its enemies and modern America’s crusade against atheistic communism.
In this fight, Jews and Christians stood together against the forces of paganism and
tyranny (Pratt and Reynolds, 1989; Mart, 2004). During the 1950s it became
commonplace for American leaders to speak of a common “Judeo-Christian” heritage.
Jewish scholar Will Herberg, who taught in a Christian theological seminary, cap-
tured the spirit of the era in his best-selling book Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955),
in which he argued that all three religions constituted diverse but equally legitimate
expressions of a common religion that could be summarized as the American
Way of Life (Herberg, 1955). Hollywood filmmakers faithfully reflected this ecu-
menical spirit.
During the 1950s, a host of Jewish authors rose to prominence in the American
literary scene, including Herman Wouk, Norman Mailer, Leon Uris, Saul Bellow,
Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. These authors affirmed their identity as Americans,
yet also insisted on the need for American Jews to claim their distinctive heritage and
to live apart from the mainstream. Ethnic pride was beginning to reawaken in other
minority communities at the same time, setting the stage for what in the 1960s became
a widespread rejection of the melting pot and a growing market for ethnic products of
all sorts. Within this context, the 1960s witnessed a renaissance in Jewish films that
lasted a generation (Erens, 1984).
Jewish directors Mel Brooks and Woody Allen made a string of hit comedies that
often incorporated Jewish themes. Barbra Streisand achieved superstardom playing
explicitly Jewish roles. Popular novels and Broadway plays by Jewish writers were
adapted for film, including the hit musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Philip Roth’s
best sellers Goodbye Columbus (1969) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1972). Although Main

989
Judaism and Film

Street America enthusiastically embraced these movies, some Jewish leaders

expressed concern that too many Jewish directors were engaging in a form of self-
hatred that played into anti-Semitic impulses within society. Many movies of the
1970s and 1980s seemed to focus on stereotyped Jewish characters, such as the
Jewish Princess, the suffocating Jewish mother, and the neurotic Jewish intellectual.
Few presented distinctively Jewish beliefs and customs in a serious and respectful
light (Erens, 1984).
One important exception is The Chosen (1982), directed by Jeremy Kagan,
which offers arguably the most sensitive and sympathetic portrayal of Orthodox Ju-
daism in the history of American cinema. Adapted from a novel by Chaim Potok,
The Chosen is unique in being entirely set within a Jewish American world. The
story probes the friendship between two Jewish boys growing up in World War II–era
Brooklyn, Reuven Malter (Barry Miller) and Danny Saunders (Robby Benson),
whose fathers represent two different expressions of Jewish belief and practice.
Danny’s father (Rod Steiger) is a Hasidic rabbi, a tzaddik, who believes that there
must be no Jewish state without the Messiah. Reuven’s father (Maximilian Schell)
is a secular scholar and passionate Zionist who works tirelessly for the cause of
Israel. The Chosen sympathetically examines both points of view as it unfolds the
deepening friendship between the sons and the challenges that their friendship gen-
erates for their fathers.
Kagan, wanting The Chosen to be as visually accurate as possible, enlisted the help of
Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson on many aspects of the set, costumes,
and script. For the first time in American cinema audiences saw Hasidic family
life and religious worship portrayed in detail and with great respect. Breaking with
generations of precedent, Kagan’s film allows his characters to be fully part of American
life and at the same time fully committed to their distinctively Jewish communities.
Yentl (1983), an adaptation of a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer that stars Barbra Strei-
sand as a young girl who longs to study Talmud, also portrayed Jewish Orthodoxy with
great sympathy, but unlike The Chosen was a fantasy set in the Old World. To date, The
Chosen stands alone in its realistic depiction of American Jewish life and thought
(Miles, 1997).
See also: Religion and Censorship in Film; Religion and Nationalism in Film

References
Birmingham, Stephen. “The Rest of Us”: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1984.
Brownlow, Kevin. “Hungry Hearts: A Hollywood Social Problem Film of the 1920s.” Film His-
tory 1, 1987: 113–25.
Doneson, Judith E. The Holocaust in American Film. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
2002.
Erens, Patricia. The Jew in American Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Anchor,
1989.

990
 Judaism and Film

Herberg, Will. Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. New York:

Doubleday, 1955.
Mart, Michelle. “The ‘Christianization’ of Israel and Jews in 1950s America.” Religion and
American Culture 14, 2004: 109–46.
Miles, Margaret R. Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies. Boston: Beacon,
1997.
Pratt, George C., and Herbert Reynolds, “Forty-Five Years of Picture Making: An Interview
with Cecil B. DeMille.” Film History 3, 1989: 133–45.
—James Rohrer

991
This page intentionally left blank
 v
K
KULESHOV EFFECT, THE. The “Kuleshov effect” refers to an experiment con-
ducted in the 1910s by Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov, who sought to demonstrate the
significance of montage in filmmaking. The aim of the experiment was to show that
editing could engender emotions and associations in the spectator that went far beyond
the content of individual shots.
For Kuleshov and other Soviet montage theorists, this technique had “become the
indisputable axiom on which the worldwide culture of the cinema has been built.”
They insisted on the idea that the filmic shot, as the basic element of the film, had
no “intrinsic meaning prior to its placement within a montage structure.” A shot’s
meaning arose only in its relation to other shots in the same sequence. While the par-
ticular views on montage among Soviet filmmakers differed, they agreed that what dis-
tinguished the cinema from other arts was its capacity of the montage to organize
disjointed fragments into meaningful, rhythmical sequence (Stam, 2000).
Kuleshov’s principle was that if each shot is like a building block and derives its
meaning from its context (that is, the shots placed around it), then if the context of
the shot is changed by placing it in a different sequence, the whole meaning of the shot
and the sequence changes. In the experiment, Kuleshov juxtaposed several shots taken
from different pieces of films, which he then edited into a sequence. He used one close-up
still shot of the expressionless face of Ivan Mozzhukhin (a Tsarist matinee actor) and
juxtaposed it to three other, completely different shots: a plate of soup; a dead woman
in her coffin,; and a child playing. The effect of this juxtaposition for the spectator was
that the actor’s image, which remained the same in each sequence, was said by the
viewer to express hunger, sadness, or joy depending on its pairing with either the
shot of the soup, the dead woman, or the child. What this demonstrated, suggested
Kuleshov, was that it was film technique, montage, rather than “reality” that generated
the emotional response of the spectators.
Kuleshov and his colleagues were forced to use preexisting shots and pieces of
existing film sequences for their experiments, as after the Revolution of 1917, virtually
no film stock was available to them, nor were there many professionals who could assist
them in developing the new film industry (Kepley, 1991). While Kuleshov is usually

993
Kuleshov Effect, The

credited as the inventor of Soviet montage, he used the ideas of Vladimir Gardin “who
(in 1919)—basing his ideas on this economic necessity of re-editing—advocated
montage as a fundamental practice of a new film aesthetics” (Hayward, 2000). The
montage technique reflected the revolutionary atmosphere of the age in formal terms,
but was pushed entirely to the background during the 1930s, with the ideological shift
that came with the reign of Joseph Stalin.
See also: Editing

References
Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2000.
Kepley, Vance, Jr. “The Origins of Soviet Cinema: A Study in Industry Development.” In
Christie, Ian, and Richard Taylor, eds. Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian
and Soviet Cinema. London: Routledge, 1991: 61–80.
Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000.
—Zoltán Dragon

994
 v
M
MALE GAZE, THE. The “male gaze” is a phrase coined by Laura Mulvey in her
seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” originally published in the
British film journal Screen in 1975. One of the most important texts of psychoanalytic
feminist film criticism, this article has greatly influenced both film and media studies
theorists. In “Visual Pleasure,” Mulvey argues that a new mode of making and inter-
preting films is necessary because film audiences—both male and female—view cin-
ematic images through a male gaze, unconsciously identifying with a (white)
heterosexual, male perspective and conforming to the patriarchal ideology that defines
classical narrative films and acts to objectify women.
Mulvey claims that visual pleasure is the key to our fascination with the movies;
indeed, she argues, our unrelenting desire for visual pleasure is the very thing that
insures the success of the dominant narrative cinema. According to Mulvey, film-
makers—mostly male—manipulate cinematic images in order to induce erotic ways
of watching. Thus, in classical narrative cinema the man is the bearer of the gaze while
the woman appears as the object of this active gaze. Glamorously sexualized, the
woman provides erotic visual pleasure for male viewers, but also reminds them of the
threat of castration (an idea first posited by Freud and later elaborated on by French
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan). The dominant narrative cinema, suggests Mulvey, subtly
codes filmic sexual elements, building on the voyeuristic fantasies of the spectator and
presenting viewers with an illusory world wherein pleasure in looking is split between
the dominant role of the active participant (the man), who is endowed with the male
gaze, and the submissive position of the passive object (the woman), who is gazed at.
Mulvey focuses on three different ways in which the images of women are associated
with cinema, which she calls “looks.” These looks, says Mulvey, express different
aspects of the male gaze. The first look is produced by the camera and reflects conven-
tional recording practices that place women at the center of traditional filmic expres-
sions of pleasure. In this context, women become the focus of scopophilic drives
(meaning “pleasure in looking,” the term scopophilia was coined by Freud, who distin-
guished between active scopophilia, or voyeurism, and passive pleasure, or exhibition-
ism). Women in films are presented as exhibitionistic or pseudo-narcissistic objects,

995
Male Gaze, The

coded for strong erotic impact, that provide visual pleasure for the voyeuristic specta-
tor. This potential for impact, Mulvey’s notion of “to-be-looked-at-ness,” is strongly con-
nected to the concepts of the gaze and the look. Mulvey uses these two concepts
interchangeably; for her, both represent an intentional directing of vision toward a body
on display. The second of the three looks, as Mulvey defines it, is associated with the way
spectators are conditioned to watch the iconography of the final product. The notion of
to-be-looked-at-ness is also related to the third look, which involves the way characters
look at each other within the screen story. Mulvey suggests that the conventions of narra-
tive film subordinate the first two looks to the third so that the spectator forgets about the
presence of the manipulative camera; the viewer therefore easily identifies with a specific
character in the film and is effectively influenced by how and what the story conveys.
In order to achieve an authentic image of women based on sexual balance and
empirical reality, feminist theorists envisage a counter-cinema that aims to break apart
the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions and to abolish the male
gaze by freeing the look of the camera in order to liberate the look of the audience.
The goal of counter-cinema, then, is to destroy the visual pleasure evoked by the false
image of the filmic woman. Mulvey claims that revisionary filmmakers must disengage
the agency of the male gaze by implementing an alternative cinematic praxis. She put
her theory into practice, directing and producing, with Peter Wollen, Riddles of the
Sphinx (1977), an experimental work in which panoramic shots were used—as
opposed to the traditional 180-degree shots used in mainstream filmmaking—to avoid
the implications of the male gaze. Mulvey and Wollen employed the documentary style
with intertitles and various points of view, and disrupted the narrative flow of the
events throughout the 13 sections of the film in order to obstruct visual pleasure and
unsettle the viewer’s experience.
Mulvey went on to write a sequel to “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Enti-
tled “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King
Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” the article was published in Framework in 1981.
Although it continues to explore the concept of the male gaze and to maintain Mulvey’s
previous critical position, “Afterthoughts” suggests the possibility of a female spectator
who is able to break open the masculine framework of patriarchal cinema, and in so
doing, to experience a sense of control over the filmic world that identification with
the protagonist provides.
See also: Feminist Film Criticism; Mulvey, Laura; Women in Film

References
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Thornham, Sue, ed. Feminist Film
Theory. A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King
Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” In Thornham, Sue, ed. Feminist Film Theory. A Reader.
New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992.

—Réka M. Cristian

996
 Melodrama, The

MELODRAMA, THE. If in life it is difficult to distinguish the good guys from

the bad, in melodrama, the distinction is clear. According to film scholar Linda
Williams, the function of melodrama is to orchestrate moral legibility. Virtue is made
obvious, visible, in scenarios of pathos and action. Characters suffer, evoking our
tears, and this suffering justifies subsequent action, which thrills us. The dialectic of
pathos and action, tears and thrills, is melodrama’s essential feature, as evidenced in
films ranging from D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) to James Cameron’s
Titanic (1997).
In Birth of a Nation, set during and after the American Civil War, alternating scenes
of pathos and action are designed to “birth” a white supremacist nation made up of
white victim-heroes and African American villains. In one scene, a typical example of
the “last-minute rescue” for which Griffith is renowned, Griffith intercuts between
three lines of action, shortening each successive sequence of shots in order to increase
the speed of the chase until the lines converge toward a thrilling climax. Little Sister
(Mae Marsh), a morally legible character, a Southern belle representing white virtue
and innocence, cavorts in the woods while making her way to a spring to fetch water.
A Northern renegade, the villainous Gus (Walter Long, in blackface) suddenly appears
and demands her hand in marriage. Mortified by the black man’s proposal, Little Sister
flees, initiating one line of action that Griffith intercuts with a second—Gus, in hot

Scene of debauchery in an opium den from the film Broken Blossoms, or The Yellow Man and the
Girl, directed by D. W. Griffith for United Artists. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

997
Melodrama, The

pursuit. Meanwhile, back at the plantation, white hero Ben Cameron (Henry
B. Walthall), a colonel in the Confederate army, learns that Little Sister has entered
the woods alone and, concerned for her safety, sets out in search of her, initiating a
third line of action. Will the hero arrive in the nick of time to rescue Little Sister, or
will he be too late? Williams’s argument about the dialectic of pathos and action in
melodrama would demand that the thrills Griffith creates by intercutting between
multiple lines of action be answered with a paroxysm of pathos. This is precisely what
happens. Desperate to escape the clutches of the evil Gus, Little Sister jumps off a cliff,
preserving her honor upon pain of death. Arriving too late to save her, Ben gathers her
in his arms and holds her as the life drains from her broken body. The tears that
accompany such a pathetic tableau are, for Williams, “proof of a virtue that, at another
point in the narrative, can give moral authority to action” (32). Ben subsequently leads
members of the Ku Klux Klan on a “morally justified” murderous rampage against Gus
and other African American characters in the film.
In melodrama, virtue and villainy are figured by characters in ways that accord with
the ideologies of race and gender dominant in society at the time the film is produced.
Birth of a Nation features a white man as the hero, a black man as the villain, and a
white girl as the innocent victim. The film was a catalyst for gangs of whites to attack
blacks and for the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
In Broken Blossoms, a film Griffith made four years after Birth of a Nation, the hero
is a Chinese man, an immigrant to the West (the so-called “Yellow Man,” played by
white actor Richard Barthelmess), the villain is a white man, an alcoholic prizefighter,
Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), and the innocent victim is, once again, a white girl,
Battling’s abused daughter Lucy (Lillian Gish). The film is set in London, in the
poverty-stricken Limehouse district, but was released during a period of strong anti-
Chinese feeling is the United States, occasioned by fear of Chinese immigration (a fear
known as the Yellow Peril). In portraying the Yellow Man as the hero, Griffith intended
to promote a message of tolerance. The film generates a great deal of pathos out of the
social oppression experienced by the Yellow Man as an Asian immigrant in a majority
white society, and by Lucy, whose options as a poor young woman in a male-dominated
society are limited to self-sacrificing motherhood or prostitution. Visually, the two charac-
ters are matched in gesture and demeanor, helpless creatures in a hostile world.
After a vicious beating by her father, Lucy collapses on the doorstep of the shop
owned by the Yellow Man. He takes her in and cares for her, treating her like a prin-
cess, making her up like a little Asian doll. A romance blossoms between them but is
doomed from the start. A happy ending to the story of an interracial romance between
an Asian man and a young white woman is not possible in 1919 America, given the
ideologies of gender, race, and sexuality. The situation can only be resolved with the
deaths of both characters.
A thrilling but failed last-minute rescue precedes the pathetic deaths of Lucy and the
Yellow Man. Desperate to escape her father’s cruel abuses, Lucy hides in a closet. The
villainous Battling Burrows takes a hatchet to the closet door, breaks through it, and
proceeds to whip Lucy. Typical of melodrama, the disparity between the brutality of
the villain and the vulnerability of the victim is extreme. This is not a fair fight. Our

998
 Melodrama, The

tears are mixed with feelings of outrage at the injustice of this situation. Shots of Bat-
tling whipping Lucy are intercut with shots of the Yellow Man racing to the rescue.
Unfortunately, the Yellow Man arrives too late to save Lucy, further encouraging our
tears. A final showdown between the hero and villain, another unfair fight, culminates
in their mutual deaths, compounding our feelings of pathos and moral indignation.
In melodrama, according to Robert Kolker, “repressed sexuality is a standard starting
point, liberated sexuality its apparent goal, moderated sexuality its favored closure”
(239). The liberation of desire is central to the production of pleasure in melodrama,
but as we have seen, it can also pose problems from an ideological standpoint when the
object of desire is somehow “inappropriate” given the values of the society. In Broken Blos-
soms, the “problem” is interracial romance, which cannot be tolerated in 1919 America. In
All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955), the “problem” is class and age difference—
Cary ( Jane Wyman), an upper-middle-class widow, falls in love with Ron (Rock Hudson),
a younger man, her gardener, who is of a lower-class standing. In Now, Voyager (Irving
Rapper, 1942), Charlotte (Bette Davis) is oppressed by a controlling mother but liberated
sexually when she meets Jerry (Paul Henreid) on a vacation cruise. The “problem” is that
Jerry is a married man. The pattern in melodrama is to negotiate a solution to the problem
that satisfies the dominant ideologies of the society at the time the film is made. Female
sexual desire, in particular, is often redirected into maternal love, which is considered more
socially acceptable for women. In Now, Voyager, once Charlotte’s desire for Jerry is
acknowledged as a problem, she abandons the possibility of a sexual relationship with
him and adopts the more socially acceptable role as mother-substitute for his emotionally
troubled daughter. A similar displacement occurs in All That Heaven Allows, as Cary
adopts a maternal rather than sexual attitude toward Ron in the wake of his accident.
James Cameron’s Titanic is set in 1912 but has much to say about the values of
American society today, especially regarding gender, class, and race. As young Rose,
her fiancé Cal, and her mother Ruth board the ship, a heavenly white light shines down
upon them. They are the blessed, the wealthy, the virtuous, rising above the less privi-
leged masses clamoring on the boardwalk below. The whole scene is suffused with nos-
talgia for an America that once was, despite its class disparities. Rose’s “experience of
it”—of Titanic and, by analogy, of America—is “somewhat different,” however. “It
was a ship of dreams, to everyone else,” she narrates, “but to me, it was a slave ship, tak-
ing me back to America in chains. Outwardly, I was everything a well brought up girl
should be. Inside, I was screaming.”
That Rose invokes the notion of a “slave ship” in order to express her feelings about
gender oppression is in keeping with Williams’s observations about recognizing virtue
in melodrama. In the American tradition, at least, white characters sometimes appro-
priate the virtue associated with the suffering of black slaves. In Gone with the Wind,
for example, Scarlett’s virtue is partially located in her connection to the land—not
Tara as slave-owning plantation but as “Terra,” as dirt worked by slaves—and is trans-
acted in those moments in which she is “doubled” with slaves, including the house
slave Prissy and the field slave Sam. Like Scarlett, Rose in Titanic momentarily adopts
a kind of “metaphorical blackface” by way of bolstering her own moral legitimacy,
which is actually located in gender rather than race oppression.

999
Melodrama, The

Rose’s oppression as an upper-class woman versus Jack’s freedom as a working-class

man is the central binary opposition in Titanic. Whereas she boards the Titanic “in
chains,” “screaming” inside, Jack pronounces himself one of the “luckiest sons of
bitches in the world,” having won his ticket in a poker game just five minutes prior.
One scene in particular captures the sense of freedom that Jack has and Rose wants.
Jack, along with Fabrizio, a friend from steerage, climbs up on the railings in the
bow of the ship in order to experience more fully the exhilaration of speed and move-
ment as the Titanic sets out for America, full steam ahead. As pistons engage, dolphins
leap, and heavily synthesized music swells, Fabrizio, the hopeful immigrant, shouts
excitedly that he can “see the Statue of Liberty already,” while Jack throws his arms
open wide and declares himself “the king of the world.” This is a sensation scene,
designed less for the purposes of advancing the narrative than to evoke the feelings
associated with being alive—or, to be more specific, with being a male body in the
world. The extent to which that body might be oppressed or trapped by virtue of its
class status is for the most part elided in the film. Jack is not “rowing with the slaves
down below,” contrary to his joking aside to Rose—yet another instance of “meta-
phorical blackface.” He is an artist, a “tumbleweed” who revels in “waking up in the
morning not knowing what’s going to happen, who I’m going to meet, where I’m
going to wind up.”
Contrary to logical expectation, then, class oppression is not located with working-
class Jack but with aristocratic Rose and the constraints of society on the “upper deck.”
In displacing the experience of class oppression from Jack to Rose, the film is able to
qualify Rose’s experience of gender oppression as specific to her membership in the
upper class. This is confirmed in two scenes that contrast the formality of dinner in
first class with the “real party” in steerage. The first-class dinner is a regimented affair
that has Rose predicting to Jack what will happen next, and that culminates with the
ritual exclusion of women from matters of importance as the men retreat for brandy
and cigars. Children are nowhere to be seen. The party in steerage, on the other hand,
engages men, women, and children together in a chaotic, exhilarating dance. Women
participate in games and guzzle beer right alongside the men. Rose may feel oppressed
as a woman, but there is no evidence to suggest that the working-class and immigrant
women in steerage feel the same way. The implication is that gender oppression will
disappear along with the stuffy old-world, aristocratic society that supports it. Whether
this is indeed the case is left for contemporary viewers of the film to ponder.
See also: Birth of a Nation, The; Gone with the Wind; Griffith, D. W.

References
Kolker, Robert. Film, Form, and Culture, 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J.
Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
—Carol Donelan

1000
 Method Acting

METHOD ACTING. The Method, especially with regard to cinematic acting, typ-
ically refers to a school of training associated with Lee Strasberg (1901–1982). Origi-
nally an acting style in the realist tradition of American theater, the Method proved
amenable to Hollywood films, and rose to prominence in the 1950s. It was devised
as a strategy for achieving cinematic and performative realism through techniques
thought to heighten the illusion of seamlessness between actor and character.
Strasberg’s theory is rooted in the teachings of legendary Russian theater director
and founder of the Moscow Art Theater, Constantin Stanislavsky (1863–-1938),
which aimed at psychological realism and differed from the more gestural acting styles
dominating theater in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Stanislavsky recom-
mended players take an intellectual and imaginative approach to their roles, interpret-
ing the script in detail in order to posit clear objectives for each of their character’s
actions. Strasberg’s Method differs with respect to the actor’s experience. It focuses
on the actor’s emotions, which are to be derived from personal experiences, memories,
and the subconscious. Thus, Strasberg concentrates heavily on Stanislavsky’s notion of
“affective memory” (or “sense memory,” as it is sometimes called). Strasberg’s training
intends to develop the actors’ ability to recall sensations and emotions from their own
lives, enabling them to recreate “real” experiences during a performance, which will,
in turn, increase the spectator’s impression of realism. In this sense, a major aim for
Strasberg was for the art of acting to function therapeutically for the actor, who
achieves psychological freedom by working through past traumas, breaking down
inhibitions, and finding inner truths.
Strasberg first began developing his Method as the co-founder of the Group Theater
(with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford) in New York in 1931. In 1937, Strasberg
left the Group after a falling out with another teacher, Stella Adler, over his commitment
to affective memory. Then, in 1948, he accepted a position at the Actors Studio, a
seminal institution founded by Crawford and Group Theater alumni Elia Kazan
and Robert Lewis. Strasberg soon became the sole teacher and artistic director of
the Actors Studio, and it was there that he continued to develop the Method, working
on ways of theatricalizing his students’ inner discoveries and experiences. Besides
memory work, other techniques used in training and rehearsal foster improvisation,
relaxation, and attending to the handling of objects as a tool for indicating characters’
repressed feelings.
During the 1950s, the Method became widely celebrated on stage and screen; per-
haps its attention to memory, the private life of emotion, and personal exploration
appealed to postwar America (which in many ways turned away from explicitly social
and political matters). Largely due to the idea that the Method celebrated the individ-
ual, it was touted as uniquely American. The actor was believed to be playing “herself,”
and so, the Method privileged identity. The Method’s stress on an actor’s personal his-
tory remains controversial in theories of acting, for it suggests that actors manifest
themselves in their performances, which, in turn, means that the roles they play are
always, and in an important sense, themselves. Interestingly, it may be this fusion of
actor and character that allowed the Method to transition to Hollywood, whose star
system, after all, classically invited such equation.

1001
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)

The cinematic actors most associated with the Method are Marlon Brando, Mont-
gomery Clift, and James Dean. To a greater and lesser extent, each of these stars
emerged as emblems of masculine rebellion in the 1950s, a fact that resonates with
the technique’s emphasis on the individual (and, by extension, individuation). Ironi-
cally, these actors were not principally trained by Strasberg or the Actors Studio. Kazan,
though, did direct On the Waterfront (1954), and Brando’s performance in that film is
regarded as the prototypical cinematic Method performance. Other influential students
of the Actors Studio under Strasberg’s tutelage are Ellen Burstyn, Robert De Niro, Jane
Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, the late Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, and Al Pacino.

References
Blum, Richard. American Film Acting: The Stanislavsky Heritage. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Research Press, 1984.
Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Stanislavsky, Konstantin. An Actor Prepares. Trans. by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. New York:
Theatre Arts, 1936.
Strasberg, Lee. A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method. Morphos, Evangeline, ed.
New York: Plume, 1988.
Wright Wexman, Virginia. Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

—Kyle Stevens

MOTION PICTURE PRODUCERS AND DISTRIBUTORS OF AMERICA

(MPPDA). The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)
was founded in 1922 in order to advance the interests of the film industry, in particular
with regard to censorship and distribution legislation both in the United States and
abroad.
It was preceded by many other trade associations, including the Motion Picture Pat-
ents Company (1908); the Independent Film Protective Association (1909); the
National Independent Moving Picture Alliance (1909); the Motion Picture League
of America (1911); and the Film Boards of Trade (1912). These groups sought to
standardize industry practices, integrate new technologies of film production and dis-
tribution, and fight censorship legislation to advance the industry’s business interests.
The main reason for the founding of the MPPDA was the scattershot forms of censor-
ship imposed on the industry by state and local officials. In 1910, an organization called
the National Board of Censorship was set up with the cooperation and participation of
civic groups, industry representatives, and a citizen watch group called the People’s Insti-
tute. Yet state and local laws continued to be at variance with each other. Moreover, there
was a series of scandals that outraged the public about the morality of the film industry.
These included the murder of director William Desmond, the divorce of Mary Pickford
and Douglas Fairbanks, and the death by overdose of actor Wallace Reid. Most infa-
mously, in 1921, the actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was accused of raping and

1002
 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)

murdering a young aspiring actress. Public outrage over the immorality of Hollywood
gave rise to even more demands for reform by civic and religious groups. At the same
time, the industry was facing a backlash in Europe because of the dominance of
Hollywood films over indigenous productions. The work of the MPPDA, therefore,
was to deal with censorship issues at home and attempts at restricting trade abroad.
The first president of the MPPDA was Will H. Hays. Hays was a lawyer, former
chairman of the Republican National Committee, adviser in the presidential campaign
of Warren Harding, and postmaster general. His political experience and connections
were crucial to making him an effective liaison among lawmakers, civic groups, and
the industry. By maintaining his headquarters in New York rather than Los Angeles,
he projected an image of neutrality with groups critical of the film industry, such as
the Boy Scouts of America and the National Council of Catholic Women.
Hays introduced the Production Code in 1930, a document that provided guide-
lines for censorship. Studios were not consistently compliant with the guidelines, fur-
ther raising the ire of civic groups such as the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency.
In 1934, Hays appointed Joseph Breen to enforce the compliance of the Code, after
which studios agreed to seek Code approval and certification before distributing films.
The Code served to restrict language and content in films and focused on regulating
representations of sexuality, crime, religion, miscegenation, and adultery.
Hays also created a foreign department in the mid-1920s headed by Major Frederick
L. Herron, which mediated conflicts among foreign nations, the State Department, and
the industry. These conflicts often included accusations of monopolistic distribution
practices, such as the practice of block booking, in which distributors sell films as a block
in order to ensure audiences for poorly performing films.
In 1945, Hays retired and was replaced by Eric Johnston. The organization then
became known as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The Code
remained until 1968, when it was replaced by the ratings system we have today. The
duties undertaken by the MPPDA are now directed by two affiliated organizations.
The MPAA deals with domestic distribution and organizes films within the ratings sys-
tem. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) deals with international distribution issues.
See also: Hays Office and Censorship, The

References
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film
Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code
Administration. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Higson, Andrew, and Richard Maltby, eds. “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Com-
merce, and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1999.
Moley, Raymond. The Hays Office. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1945.
Trumpbour, John. Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the
Global Film Industry, 1920–1950. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

—Babli Sinha

1003
Movie Star, The

MOVIE STAR, THE. During the early twentieth century, Hollywood studios
became the birthplace of “movie stars” and of the star system in general. Before the
advent of this cinematic system, films were released as productions populated by
anonymous actors, as only the studios that produced these pictures were credited. Cer-
tain screen performers, however, enjoyed wider popularity than others, and the films in
which they acted appeared to do better at the box office. Once they realized the poten-
tial profits to be made by creating motion picture “stars,” studios began to exploit the
capital value of their most popular performers by connecting their productions with
the names of the actors who were appearing in their films.
In 1910, film distribution mogul Carl Laemmle of the Independent Motion Picture
Company made public the name of actress Florence Lawrence; this event signaled the begin-
ning of the star system. To boost publicity around The Broken Oath (1910), in which Law-
rence was starring, Laemmle issued an ominous press release with the news that the actress
had died in a terrible accident. When the story broke, film fans were shocked; Laemmle,
of course, had planted the story—Lawrence was very much alive. Taking out an advertise-
ment that declared “We Nail a Lie,” Laemmle actually went so far as to accuse rival studio
Biograph of releasing the story in an attempt to smear IMP’s new film. In the end, Laemmle
got just what he wanted: publicity for his new film and for its star, Florence Lawrence.
The popularity of their newly minted movie stars led studios to create new modes of
industry advertising: trade photographs, posters, postcards, and fan magazines (Motion
Picture Story Magazine, Photoplay), all of which accompanied the release of their films.
Now studios began to create archetypal identities for their stars: females tended to be
portrayed as vamps, virgins, and sex goddesses, while males tended to be portrayed as
swashbuckling heroes who were irresistible to women. The more specific construction
of gender identity varied from the “girlish” image of Lillian Gish to the “diva” image of
Bette Davis; Marlene Dietrich was elegantly seductive, while Greta Garbo’s sensuality
smoldered just beneath an icy exterior. Male stars such as Rudolph Valentino and
Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and later, John Wayne and Rock Hudson, embodied “manli-
ness”—they were “men’s men.” (Ironically, Valentino, who was swooned over by
women, was constantly “accused,” usually by envious males, of being gay, or at least
bisexual, throughout his career; while Hudson, who was considered one of the sexiest
men in Hollywood, was forced to hide his homosexuality from an adoring public until
very late in his life.) Racial and ethnic minorities (Native Americans, African Americans,
Hispanics, and Asian Americans) were also subject to stereotyping, most often being
portrayed on-screen as villains or at least as marginalized figures.
Significantly, the concept of stardom reflects an almost surrealistic duality that exists
between the actual people and the larger-than-life filmic characters they play on-screen.
Today’s technology—the Internet, Webcams, chat rooms, blogs, Twitter—which
allows the most intimate information to be transferred around the world almost
instantaneously, has only made it easier for these bizarre hybrid figures to be created.
Stars, it seems, have become ideological constructs, representing specific social phe-
nomena characteristic of a certain time and place. Although many of today’s stars have
become fabulously wealthy power players in the film industry, the hyperreal lives that
they are forced to lead appear also to make them incredibly fragile human beings.

1004
 Music in Film

See also: Studio System, The

References
Dyer, Richard. “Charisma (from Stars).” In Gledhill, Christine, ed. Stardom: Industry of Desire.
New York: Routledge, 1999: 57–59.
Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Staiger, Janet “Seeing Stars.” In Gledhill, Christine, ed. Stardom: Industry of Desire. New York:
Routledge, 1999: 3–16.
Wees, William C. “The Ambiguous Aura of Hollywood Stars in Avant-Garde Found-Footage
Films.” Cinema Journal 41(2), Winter 2002: 3–18.
—Réka M. Cristian

MUSIC IN FILM. American film music fulfills numerous dramatic and narrative
functions. Chief among these is its ability to enhance the emotional impact of a film
by helping to establish time, place, mood, and situation (Brown, 1994). Two broad
categories of film music are generally recognized: diegetic source music and nondie-
getic underscoring (Brown, 1994; Buhler, 2001). Diegetic music exists within the story
itself and can be heard by a film’s characters, whether or not they are listening. It is
often merely part of the background soundscape, such as when heard on a radio,
played at a wedding, or sung at a funeral. In some cases, the source of the music may
not be visible in the frame. Musical performances foregrounded in the story are also
diegetic. Films about musicians, such as 8 Mile (2002), Walk the Line (2005), and
August Rush (2007), typically include numerous instances of this type of diegetic
music, but they also occur in other types of film. When Pippin sings “The Edge of
Night” for Denethor in the award-winning The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King (2003), the audience witnesses a diegetic musical moment. Nondiegetic under-
scoring exists outside of the story. Although a film’s characters do not hear this music,
it can influence how audiences experience a film. Many love scenes and action sequen-
ces, for example, are accompanied by nondiegetic music.
Composers and music supervisors regularly blur these distinctions. Music first pre-
sented as diegetic may accompany a scene that crosscuts between the musical perfor-
mance and other, visually unrelated images. Diegetic music can also spill over scene
changes. Some films have also treated these musical conventions comically. Never-
theless, these categories, whether flexibly employed or not, have enabled film composers
and music supervisors to draw on diverse musical styles and repertories. The resulting
scores and their associated films have thus exposed American audiences to many
different types of music, and the manner in which those have been used has rein-
forced the evolving construction of American identities in film.
American film has been accompanied by music from early in its history. Edison’s
Kinetophone (1895) paired moving pictures with phonographic recordings, while live
piano and orchestral music was played as films were projected by his Vitascope (1896).
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, American vaudeville theaters

1005
Music in Film

Grace Kelly stands behind James Stewart while he uses the telephoto lens of his camera to spy on his
neighbors in a still from director Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window, 1954. (Paramount Pictures/
Courtesy of Getty Images)

presented increasing numbers of motion pictures, and their orchestras regularly pro-
vided accompaniment. By the 1920s, theater organs were widespread, and many the-
ater musicians employed cue sheets and compilation scores of nineteenth-century
classical music to accompany films (Hickman, 2006; Wierzbicki, 2009; Cooke,
2008). Since the invention of sound-on-film technologies in the late 1920s, the unique
musical soundtrack—often consisting wholly of newly composed music—that is pre-
recorded and precisely synchronized with the specific imagetrack of a particular film
has dominated American commercial film production.
Musical theater and nineteenth-century operas and symphonies inspired the style
and provided many of the sources of film music in the silent era, and they continued
to influence film scores in the sound era. Several important Hollywood film composers
in the 1930s, including Max Steiner (1888–1971) and Erich Korngold (1897–1957),
were from Europe and had been trained in those traditions. They established many of
the narrative practices and devices of American film music that remain operative today
(Prendergast, 1992). Steiner’s score for King Kong (1933) is an outstanding example
from the early sound era and demonstrates how European classical music shaped
American film music in its formative period.
The many orchestral underscores composed for films from the 1930s through the
1950s, and again since the late 1970s, have maintained the close relationship between

1006
 Music in Film

classical music and film music. They have also been one of the primary means by
which many Americans have been exposed to orchestral music in a broadly classical
style (Prendergast, 1992). Furthermore, the changing character of orchestral under-
scoring has tracked the evolution of classical music in the twentieth century. The score
to The Red Pony (1949) by Aaron Copland (1900–1990), a leading American classical
composer during the early and mid-twentieth century, is representative of classically
influenced scores from before the 1950s. (Copland even arranged portions of the score
for concert performance.) However, since the 1950s, new timbres, including those of
electronic music, a wide array of non-western instruments, and more dissonant harmo-
nies have been heard in many film soundtracks. This mirrors postwar developments
in music for the concert hall. The screeching string music by Bernard Herrmann
(1911–1975) that accompanies the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
(1960); the cue “The Land of the Sandpeople,” with its pounding percussion, from
the score by John Williams (b. 1932) to Star Wars (1977); and the underscoring by
Marco Beltrami (b. 1966) for numerous action sequences in 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
attest to these transformations. Furthermore, some film soundtracks, such as those to
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining (1980), have incorpo-
rated postwar, avant-garde concert pieces, while others, such as the score to The Hours
(2002) by Philip Glass (b. 1937), have adopted the sound of American minimalism
and postminimalism. Nevertheless, orchestral film scores have generally been more
conservative in style than contemporaneous concert music, as is apparent when com-
paring the film and concert repertories of John Williams.
Classical music has played a significant role in the history of underscoring in American
films, but it has not been the only musical style heard in those films. From the late
1950s through the 1970s, jazz, rock, soul, and funk underscoring was common, and
hip-hop has been included in films since the early 1990s (Cooke, 2008). Many sound-
tracks utilize a variety of musical styles, both classical and popular, and so can be con-
sidered composite soundtracks. The scores to the popular and award-winning films
Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Wall-E (2008) are recent examples. Composite scores differ
from anthology or compilation scores or soundtracks, which are pieced together solely
from preexisting music (Donnelly, 2001). In the early decades of the twentieth century,
the stylistic differences among opera and symphony, musical theater, and popular song
were less acute than they have become since the 1950s. Thus in Rose Marie (1936),
Rudolf Friml’s famous song “Indian Love Call” exists alongside excerpts from Puccini’s
opera Tosca, but the differences in terms of musical style (and vocal timbre) are minute
when compared to those heard in some films today.
American films with composite soundtracks that incorporate varied styles expose
audiences to a broad sampling of American musical culture. As different genres and
styles interact (and even collide)—for example, when diegetic material from an earlier
era is framed by more contemporary orchestral underscoring—a soundtrack’s musical
coherence may break down for lack of consistency of style. Yet the soundtrack holds
together because each of the various styles signifies an aspect of the American experi-
ence. Rear Window (1954), for example, includes representative pieces from several
American musical repertories. Although none is limited strictly to either diegetic or

1007
Music in Film

nondiegetic purposes, in many composite soundtracks, classical-style orchestral music

serves as nondiegetic underscoring, while jazz and popular styles function diegetically.
This is the case in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), with its score by Bernard
Herrmann, and in Malcolm X (1992), with its score by Terence Blanchard (b. 1962). In
Bathing Beauty (1944), these contrasting styles are set at odds with each other within
the plot. Yet these roles—classical underscoring and popular diegetic music—are not
universal. Throughout Forrest Gump (1994), country, gospel, rock, and classical music
are set side-by-side. The classical-style music exists almost entirely as nondiegetic
underscoring and tends to highlight the individual and personal experiences of Forrest
or other main characters. However, when a more corporate or national experience is
invoked, such as during several scenes in Vietnam, popular music from the historical
period depicted is regularly used as nondiegetic underscoring. Similarly, in Pleasantville
(1998), orchestral underscoring highlights emotionally charged interactions between
main characters, but some music from the 1950s functions nondiegetically, such as
when several teenagers ask Bud and Mary Sue questions about the world beyond Pleas-
antville. Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” (1959) accompanies this scene, but it was not yet
released in 1958, the year in which the movie supposedly occurs. Nevertheless, most of
the popular music in Forrest Gump and Pleasantville is diegetic.
One of the most common ways composite soundtracks have been created is through
the inclusion of songs. These may be newly composed for their films. “When You Wish
Upon a Star” (Pinocchio, 1940); “The Ballad of High Noon” (“Do Not Forsake Me”)
(High Noon, 1952); the “Theme from Shaft” (Shaft, 1971); “My Heart Will Go On”
(Titanic, 1997); and “Lose Yourself ” (8 Mile) are all examples that won Academy
Awards for Best Original Songs. Other songs are drawn from preexisting American folk,
patriotic, and popular repertories. For example, “Oh My Darling, Clementine” appears
in both Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and John Ford’s My Darling
Clementine (1946), while “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is sung during a church
service in High Noon, and “Amazing Grace” is heard prior to a hanging in True Grit
(1969). “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” from Hello, Dolly (1964) is used to great effect
in Wall-E, while songs from several genres and decades saturate Moulin Rouge!
The cinema has had a central role in disseminating popular music (Cooke, 2008);
therefore, it is not surprising that the history of songs in film reflects the broader his-
tory of popular music in America. Films whose stories take place in their own time
(i.e., in the period of their production) have necessarily drawn on ever-changing forms
of contemporary musical expression. Thus, for example, when comparing songs
included in scenes representing an evening’s entertainment—whether these occur at
lounges, elegant restaurants, theaters, or nightclubs—we find country music sung by
Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Dale Evans in the 1930s and 1940s; big band and small
combo jazz in Cabin in the Sky (1943), Bathing Beauty, The Wrong Man (1956), and
Anatomy of a Murder (1959), among other films from the 1940s and 1950s; and ’60s
rock in With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), ’70s soul in Super Fly, and late ‘80s jazz and
rap in Mo’ Better Blues (1990). This suggests that mainstream and popular American
song styles in earlier decades may seem old-fashioned, culturally irrelevant, and not
particularly “American” to later audiences. Indeed, the popularity of film musicals,

1008
 Music in Film

which are built around songs, declined after the 1950s until new film musicals incor-
porating more up-to-date musical styles, plots and characters, and/or production val-
ues began to be created. The success of Grease (1978), Moulin Rouge!, Chicago
(2002), and even Disney’s High School Musical 3 (2008), as well as its string of ani-
mated film musicals starting with The Little Mermaid (1989), demonstrate this point.
Of these films, Moulin Rouge! may be the most contemporary in terms of its score both
because of the repertory of songs it incorporates and because of the postmodern man-
ner in which it juxtaposes disparate and anachronistic musical styles and repertories.
Whether newly composed or preexisting, prominently or briefly used, or currently
popular or old-fashioned, songs in film soundtracks fulfill numerous diegetic and non-
diegetic roles. Many accompany title sequences, and their lyrics may reinforce the the-
matic content or reveal plot elements of their films. This occurs across genres.
Examples from westerns of the 1950s and 1960s include High Noon, The Man from
Laramie (1955), and True Grit; examples from urban/blaxploitation films of the
1970s include Halls of Anger (1970), Shaft, and Super Fly (1972). Some songs, such
as “Someday My Prince Will Come” (Snow White, 1937), “Over the Rainbow” (The
Wizard of Oz, 1939), “Anything You Can Do” (Annie Get Your Gun, 1950), and
“A Whole New World” (Aladdin, 1992), reveal characters’ feelings or desires. Others
compress dramatic time or narrate more compellingly than would simple dialogue.
“One Last Hope” (Hercules, 1997), “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” (Mulan, 1998),
and “When She Loved Me” (Toy Story 2, 1999) are examples from Disney’s recent
animated films.
Songs, even when sung, can form part of a film’s nondiegetic underscoring (see the
discussion of Forrest Gump and Pleasantville above). Moreover, instrumental arrange-
ments allow melodies of songs within film soundtracks whose underscoring is pri-
marily orchestral to wander between diegetic and nondiegetic registers. This extends
the potential narrative power of a song beyond the moment at which it occurs diegeti-
cally. “The Ballad of High Noon,” for example, is first performed as a nondiegetic song
during the title sequence and introduces background information. Its melody later
recurs as part of the orchestral underscore, but it also appears in the diegesis when
one of Frank Miller’s men plays it on a harmonica. Similar situations arise in the
soundtracks to such varied films as Bathing Beauty and Super Fly. Furthermore, they
undermine the strict distinctions some have drawn among song, (under)score, and
soundtrack. In contrast, other songs in American films have served primarily as perfor-
mance vehicles for their actor-singers. In these cases, the distinction between songs and
scores is more apparent.
When they operate as diegetic music in American films, songs often enhance the
realism of the portrayals of the textures of daily life by establishing a sense of time,
place, and situation. Even “old-fashioned” repertories are frequently employed in this
role in film soundtracks to establish a sense of the American past. American Graffiti
(1973), Back to the Future (1985), Stand By Me (1986), Malcolm X, Forrest Gump, Pan-
ther (all 1995), Apollo 13 (1995), Boogie Nights (1997), and Pleasantville are examples
of films that include songs from the earlier decades that they portray in order to
enhance their historical verisimilitude. Such songs are often merely decorative, but

1009
Music in Film

they can also emphasize events in the films’ narratives, in which case they may reveal a
director’s reading of the American experience, past and present. Forrest Gump and Pan-
ther are roughly contemporaneous and partially overlap in terms of the periods that
they recreate, yet they contain very different music and construct radically opposed
perspectives on American identity and experience.
The history of music in American film can be interpreted, therefore, as a record of
how American ethnic, cultural, and political identities have been depicted. Both songs
and orchestral underscoring in film mark social and cultural boundaries, and both the
music present in and absent from a film soundtrack implicitly answer such questions as
“Who is American?” and “What is American?”
Just as music has been used to construct a sense of time and place in American films,
it has also been employed to represent ethnic, cultural, and national identities. Simi-
larly, just as styles of music used in films to represent historical periods have not always
been thoroughly accurate when recreating the actual musical soundscape of the past,
well-established musical clichés understood to denote race, ethnicity, and nationality
have regularly replaced authentic forms of musical expression. This suggests that per-
ceptions of time, place, and people shared by both filmmakers and audiences have
often governed the selection of music to a greater degree than has concern for absolute
historical accuracy or ethnographic realism. This is true both for films set in their own
time and for those that look back in time. Crude representations of ethnic music in
film are not always merely about ethnicity, however. They often participate, albeit neg-
atively, in the construction of American identities. We can see this in the contrast
between the heroic presentation of “America the Beautiful” and the exoticized “Arabic”
music (played during Harry Bannerman’s daydreams about his wife) in Rally ’Round the
Flag, Boys (1958), a darkly humorous treatment of American suburban life set against
the backdrop of national security concerns in the early Cold War.
Westerns provide numerous additional examples. The singing cowboys and particu-
larly Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, who enjoyed such popularity through radio, record-
ings, and film during the 1930s and 1940s, can be interpreted as representatives of an
idealized American male in the early twentieth century. Clean-cut, chivalrous, law-
abiding, and white, these actor-characters were always good, always protected the
rights of individuals (and their property), and always won. Their songs were well
within the mainstream of American commercial music of the time, and some have
remained within the American musical consciousness. When the cowboy chorus “Sons
of the Pioneers” is fused with a nineteenth-century cavalry troop on patrol against
Apaches in John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950), the implicit political and cultural meanings
of the wholesome, white, and singing agents of law and order are magnified. Con-
trarily, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans were margin-
alized as villains, thieves, victims, or members of an underclass in westerns prior to
the 1960s. Their music was likewise relegated to the margins, to be heard only in
run-down Mexican saloons or in dangerous or exotic places, such as Native villages.
Thus in The Man from Laramie, the music used to represent both murderous Apaches
and peaceful Pueblos is virtually the same, while the very title Distant Drums (1951)
shows how music itself, authentic or not, can stand in for the threatening Other

1010
 Music in Film

(in this case, Seminoles). The implication is that such people and their music were not
“American.” Contrarily, in High Noon, white, Protestant hymn singing occurs in
church, at the center of the community, at the site where important political and social
debate—democracy—takes place. Although revisionist westerns, such as the drama
Dances with Wolves (1990) and the comedy Shanghai Noon (2000), may undermine
and even mock common misrepresentations of ethnic minorities in the genre, revision-
ist westerns have been faulted for reinforcing their own era’s lingering misconceptions.
Orchestral underscoring can also construct American identities. Westerns and war
films do so through their brassy, heroic march themes. Moreover, quotations of the
melodies of American folk and patriotic songs thrust American identity to the fore-
ground of film narratives. Steiner quotes several such songs in his orchestral under-
scores for Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Old Maid (1939) even as these films
wrestle with the personal and societal significance of the American Civil War. Likewise,
his score to Watch on the Rhine (1943) weaves together fragments of the melodies of
“My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “The Star Spangled Banner” to suggest the signifi-
cance of American political ideals during World War II. Those same ideals are at the
heart of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Dimitri Tiomkin (1894–1979) highlighted
them during the montage of Washington landmarks with an American musical mosaic
consisting of quotations of the melodies of “Yankee Doodle,” “My Country, ’Tis of
Thee,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Taps,”
and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Representations of American ideals—the American moral geography—are neither
timeless nor uncontested, and differences among regions of America, rural and urban
settings, and, increasingly, minority experiences are reflected in film music. Thus the
visual construction of the nation created as Forrest Gump runs across the country is
accompanied by very different music compared to the scores of Steiner and Tiomkin,
while Panther employs a rock version of “America the Beautiful” for very different ends
in a scene in which the Black Panthers occupy the California State Capitol. Likewise,
the hip-hop song “Jazz Thing,” which plays over the final credits in Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better
Blues, summarizes jazz history and gives voice to the long legacy of conflict between
different ethnic populations in America. Traces of those conflicts persist in American
film today. Nevertheless, the popular and critical reception of Slumdog Millionaire
(2008) and its soundtrack in America may point to a greater appreciation for diverse
forms of cultural expression among the filmgoing public today than in past decades.
American film music has fulfilled numerous dramatic functions. It has also served as a
cipher of contemporaneous (and contested) attitudes about American identity and expe-
rience. Yet film music also holds out the possibility of cultural and social reconciliation as
the many stories it tells continue to be widely circulated by the films it accompanies.
See also: Musical, The

References
Brown, Royal S. Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994.

1011
Musical, The

Buhler, James. “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (II): Analyzing Interac-
tions of Music and Film.” In Donnelly, K. J., ed. Film Music: Critical Approaches. New York:
Continuum, 2001.
Cooke, Mervyn. A History of Film Music. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Donnelly, K. J. “Performance and the Composite Film Score.” In Donnelly, K. J., ed. Film
Music: Critical Approaches. New York: Continuum, 2001.
Hickman, Roger. Reel Music: Exploring 100 Years of Film Music. New York: W. W. Norton,
2006.
Prendergast, Roy M. Film Music: A Neglected Art, 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
Wierzbicki, James. Film Music: A History. New York: Routledge, 2009.
—Stanley C. Pelkey II

MUSICAL, THE. The American movie musical has been called “the most complex
art form ever devised,” with the power to transport audiences across time and space.
Even when grounded in an historical or contemporary “reality,” film musicals operate
in a hyperbolic universe to which the viewer has access only for the duration of the
movie experience. Spectators are urged to suspend disbelief, as characters sing and
dance in a variety of situations, usually spontaneously and always with perfect pitch
and rhythm.

Scene from the 2001 film Moulin Rouge, directed by Baz Luhrmann. Shown: (left to right) John
Leguizamo (as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec), Garry McDonald (as the Doctor), Matthew Whittet
(as Satie), Jim Broadbent (as Harold Zidler), Nicole Kidman (as Satine), Jacek Koman (as The
Narcoleptic Argentinean). (Photofest)

1012
 Musical, The

Significantly, the rise of movie musicals paralleled the emergence of talking pictures.
The first “talkie,” 1927’s The Jazz Singer, is a musical film, and its immediate popular-
ity prompted studio heads (most notably MGM) to begin producing musicals by the
score from the late 1920s forward. From the beginning, musicals were a hybrid form
of entertainment, not easily identifiable as a unique “genre.” They borrowed from virtu-
ally every other form of art and entertainment, from opera to ballet to theatre to vaude-
ville, and their hybrid roots are especially evident in early musical films. Following The
Jazz Singer, studios first produced a series of plot-light, music-heavy melodramas and
musical revues, such as The Singing Fool (1928), and The Broadway Melody (1929).
Immensely popular, these films were often vehicles for stars and up-and-comers, such
as Al Jolson, Jack Benny, and Bing Crosby, that the studios wished to showcase.
Musicals have tended to subordinate plot to character and are usually marked by
happy endings and the triumph of domesticity and value-laden normativity. Several
scholars, however, have argued that beneath the spectacle of choreographed numbers
and show-stopping songs, musicals serve a number of important cultural purposes.
For instance, these films have, at times, assuaged social anxieties about the seemingly
incompatible worlds of men and women in the wake of women’s liberation (Altman,
1987), while also putting the male body on display, an act that challenges traditional
gender and social hierarchies (Cohen, 2002). Indeed, musicals challenging traditional
ideas about gender and sexuality, such as Easter Parade (1948), Some Like It Hot
(1959), Cabaret (1972), High School Musical (2006), Mamma Mia! (2008), and Were
the World Mine (2009), have long been popular.
Musicals have also pressured attitudes about race, ethnicity, and class. Not only did
they provide actors, singers, and dancers of color work in white Hollywood, their
deceptively simple and upbeat formats allowed them to call into question racial hierar-
chies in a relatively nonthreatening manner. The 1951 version of Kern and Hammer-
stein’s Show Boat (despite its many flaws), for example, exposed the problematic
treatment of African Americans and “mulattoes” during both the antebellum period
of the nineteenth century and the pre–Civil Rights era of the early twentieth century,
and in so doing, drew attention to America’s still unresolved racial tension. In much
the same way, West Side Story (1961) called attention to the unfair treatment of immi-
grants in urban America, while the animated Cats Don’t Dance (1997) critiqued segre-
gation in Hollywood.
In regard to issues of class, film musicals such as 1982’s Annie, Thoroughly Modern
Millie (1967), Daddy Long Legs (1955), and Bundle of Joy—a 1956 remake of 1939’s
Bachelor Mother—all depict the arbitrariness of constructions of class identity, and, in
many cases, the enduring spirit and determination of the poor.
Perhaps the most important cultural function of the movie musical is its ability to
articulate American values and myths. Regardless of its temporal or geographic setting,
the musical tends always to be nostalgic and uniquely American. The protagonists are
almost always admirable, or become so over the course of the film, and in a particularly
American way. For instance, in Stanley Donen’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954),
the central male characters grow to maturity under the eye of God-fearing and inde-
pendent Millie, who teaches them to respect women and take responsibility for their

1013
Musical, The

lives, both traditional “American values.” Similarly, in Lerner and Lowe’s Brigadoon
(1954), the American protagonists come to understand that “anything is possible” in
the hills of far-off Scotland; because this is an “American value,” however, it cannot
be realized in Scotland, only discovered there, and thus the heroes must ultimately
return to their homeland rather than remaining in Europe. Especially in depicting
the past, the movie musical is capable of espousing a particular picture of the American
story—one in which (usually white) Americans are industrious and prosperous, and in
their righteousness and desire to do right, are granted access to their American Dream,
no matter how seemingly out of reach. Notable examples of musicals with this theme
are The Little Colonel (1935), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Singin’ in the Rain
(1952), 1776 (1972), and the animated An American Tail (1986).
Not all movie musicals end happily, however, and not all end with a triumphant
espousal of the American Dream. The 1968 film Funny Girl (and its 1975 sequel,
Funny Lady), for example, tells the story of Fanny Brice, whose American Dreams force
her to make a painful choice: she can have either love and family or fame and fortune—
she cannot have both. Although at the end of Funny Lady, Fanny’s character declares
herself happy having made her choice for the life of a performer, the film acts to subvert
the traditional “musical promise” that American Dreams always come true. Tom Hanks
extends this theme in his 1996 That Thing You Do, whose characters, performers like
Fanny, must make choices about how far they are willing to go for fame. Choosing to
follow their artistic dreams, however, the protagonists discover that no matter how hard
they work, or how pure their intentions, true fame eludes them.
Traditionally, the goal of those films that do romanticize the idea of the American
Dream tended to be to establish rural and small-town America as utopian. Clearly evi-
dent in films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and Okla-
homa! (1955), the expression of this utopian vision has the effect of reassuring
audiences by providing them with a dominant historical narrative. Interestingly, this
model of American Dreams being realized in rural utopia is troped in pictures such
as On the Town (1949) and Gypsy! (1962), which reimagine not only the dream, now
less nostalgic for small-town simplicity, but also the utopian space itself, now defined
in relation to urban centers and industrial progress.
In the 1930s and 1940s, musicals became increasingly popular, and studios began
producing dozens per year. Many of the great stars of the day rose to fame at this time,
including Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Vera-Ellen, Betty Garrett, Gene
Kelly, Ann Miller, Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra, and Shirley Temple. But as popular as
musicals were in these years, the genre reached the height of its popularity in the
1950s—the golden age of movie musicals. The decade saw the rise of Leslie Caron,
Howard Keel, and, among many others, and produced some of the most popular
musicals of the twentieth century, including White Christmas (1954), Gigi (1958),
Some Like It Hot (1959), Oklahoma! (1955), and A Star Is Born (1954). Many of the
films from this period are also lauded for their innovation; most especially for their
marriage of music and realism. Films such as Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis
and Donen’s Seven Brides skillfully interjected the standard traits of the musical genre
(spontaneous dancing and singing, for example) into the plot, creating the impression

1014
 Musical, The

that these elements were actually diegetic to the film. For example, all but one number
in Seven Brides are choreographed to make the protagonists look as though they are not
in fact dancing. So too in St. Louis, the music comes about as a consequence of the
plot, as Judy Garland’s character is asked to perform or to sing her sister to sleep.
By the 1960s, the musical was losing its widespread popularity. Despite the endur-
ing popularity of films such as West Side Story (1961), Hello, Dolly! (1969) and The
Sound of Music (1965), the allure of the musical was starting to dim among younger
generations, who saw these pictures as overly nostalgic and not representative of con-
temporary American life or concerns. The musical declined still more in the 1970s,
with most successes either animated, or based in rock and roll or disco (Jesus Christ
Superstar, Rocky Horror Picture Show). Those films that did emerge as box-office and
critical successes in this period were often categorized as cynical, such as 1971’s Fiddler
on the Roof; though by the end of the decade, movies such as the celebrated The Muppet
Movie (1979) and coming-of-age pictures such as Grease (1978) and Fame (1980)
seemed to signal a desire by audiences to return to the idealism and levity of earlier
musicals. Despite these successes, however, by the early 1980s, even with gems such as
Annie and Victor Victoria (both 1982), it seemed as though the musical might die out.
In the late 1980s, however, salvation came from an unlikely source—Walt Disney
Studios and its animated feature The Little Mermaid (1989). Disney had previously
produced a large number of animated films, many of them musicals, but Mermaid’s
timely appearance in many ways saved the movie musical from obscurity. Its immense
popularity prompted Disney to make over its production department, which in turn
led to the rapid production and release of some of the most beloved American films
in recent memory. Notable among these were Beauty and the Beast (1991) (the only
animated film ever to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar), Aladdin (1992), and
The Lion King (1994).
Although the popularity of Disney’s animated features eventually declined after the
studio released Mulan in 1998, the movie musical reemerged in exciting new ways in
the 1990s. Beginning with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996), with its ensemble
cast of popular young actors and its pounding soundtrack, musicals began to attract
the kinds of audiences that these films had not drawn since the 1940s and ’50s. Indeed,
the release of pictures such as Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) (which featured Nic-
ole Kidman and Ewan McGregor as unlikely yet, as it turned out, brilliant protago-
nists); 2002’s Best Picture Chicago (which again presented audiences with performers
in starring roles who initially seemed like odd choices—Richard Gere, Renée Zell-
weger, Catherine Zeta-Jones—but who proved just how versatile and talented they
are); The Producers (2005) (a remake of Mel Brooks’s 1968 film, this time starring
Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick); and the dazzling Across the Universe and
Enchanted (both 2007), made it clear that musicals could still thrill movie audiences.
See also: Music in Film
References
Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Altman, Rick, ed. Genre: The Musical. New York: Routledge, 1981.

1015
Musical, The

Cohan, Steven. Hollywood Musicals: A Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Dixon, Wheeler W. Genre 2000: New Critical Essays. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000.
Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005.
Marsden, Michael T. Movies as Artifacts: Cultural Criticism of Popular Film. Chicago: Nelson-
Hall, 1982.

—Caitlin Gallogly

1016
 v
N
NATIVE AMERICANS IN FILM. Cinema has influenced society’s view of Native
Americans more than, perhaps, any other racial or ethnic group. While hundreds of
tribes, each with their own culture and traditions, comprise the indigenous people
known as Native Americans, films have been largely responsible for the oversimplifica-
tion of this diversity and the perpetuation of the myth of the homogeneous American
Indian. Building on the inaccurate portrayals of Native Americans established in the
nineteenth-century novels of authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Robert Bird,
early westerns created stereotypes that dominated Hollywood’s Indian characters for
decades. Changes in American society resulted in changes in these stereotypes, most
notably a shift from highly negative portrayals toward more sympathetic ones; but
despite this, the film industry has still relied largely on stereotypes rather than histori-
cally accurate representations. Furthermore, while Indians have long provided Holly-
wood with a long line of movie characters, those roles have often gone to non-Native
American performers. Beginning in the 1990s, however, Native actors and filmmakers
have begun to increasingly reverse these trends, providing more accurate screen repre-
sentations of their people.
Westerns rose to prominence during the silent era, and it was during this period that
Hollywood established the stereotypes that would come to dominate its later portrayals
of Native Americans. The bloodthirsty savage, intent on massacring whites, and the
noble savage, the last remnant of a dying race, were the two most common images of
American Indians presented by the movies. Since the nation was still struggling with
its attempts to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream society, these stereotypes
helped to reinforce the prevailing view of Indians-as-primitives and emphasize the
necessity of assimilation. Plains tribes, such as the Sioux and Cheyenne, became the
predominant on-screen Indians, for the wars they fought against westward expansion
in the late nineteenth century made ideal fodder for westerns. Because many Americans’
only contact with Indians was at the movies, much of the population came to accept the
accuracy of these stereotypes, as well as aspects of the Plains culture, including feathered
headdresses, war paint, and tepees, as being part of the culture of all Native American
tribes.

1017
Native Americans in Film

While the silent era introduced the stereotypes that dominated later cinematic Indians,
those stereotypes were not yet firmly established, allowing for more progressive, albeit
short-lived, portrayals. Some filmmakers, including D. W. Griffith and Thomas Ince,
made films that featured all-Native American casts and attempted to show sympathetic,
if historically inaccurate, depictions of Native life. Furthermore, a handful of Native
Americans, such as filmmaker James Young Deer, worked within the Hollywood system
during the silent era and attempted to challenge the conventions of the western genre.
Young Deer’s 1910 cinematic love story Young Deer’s Return, for instance, inverted the
traditional white/Indian romance. In the film, a young Indian man falls in love with a
white woman and eventually convinces her initially resistant father to accept their inter-
racial relationship. However, when his lover offers her hand in marriage, the Indian
refuses, preferring to return to the reservation and marry an Indian woman, showing that
strengthening the future of the tribe was more important than assimilating into white
society.
The stereotypes first established during the silent era became cemented during the
1930s. Eliminating more nuanced portrayals of Native Americans, Hollywood
focused on the two most prominent images, those of the bloodthirsty savage and the
noble savage. In the uncomplicated westerns of the 1930s, Indians served as conven-
ient enemies for white heroes, and since the vast majority of the American moviegoing
public was white, there was little demand for the more sophisticated Indian films of
the silent years. By the late 1930s, the savage Indian had become a staple of the
western and permeated big-budget pictures as well as serials and B-productions. Films
such as Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific (1937) and John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939)
depict rampaging Indian tribes attacking white travelers in the Old West, while Ford’s
Drums along the Mohawk (1939) and King Vidor’s Northwest Passage (1940) feature
similar attacks during the Colonial Era. These movies provide little to no explanation
for why their murderous Indians are on the warpath, but simply imply that attacking
whites was what Indians always did, and that peace and “civilization” could only come
with their defeat.
Not all westerns made during these decades adopted the virulently racist stereotype
of the savage Indian, however. Some viewed the plight of Native Americans with sym-
pathy, seeing them as hindrances to white expansion but also empathizing with them as
members of a dying race. While still an erroneous stereotype that failed to accurately
portray Native culture, these pictures did recognize the tragedy of their defeat. Raoul
Walsh’s They Died with Their Boots On (1941) and Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), for
example, provide far more sympathetic views of Indian characters than other westerns
of the era. These films view Indians less as outright villains than simply obstacles to
westward expansion, and suggest that while their defeat was unfortunate, it was also
necessary for the nation’s progress. They show whites, often corrupt businessmen, pro-
voking otherwise peaceful Indians into action, but once the wronged Indians go to war,
the army has no choice but to deal with them forcefully. The films’ white protagonists
respect their Indian foes and are sympathetic to their plight, going so far as to vainly
argue on behalf of the Indians and against the predations of the corrupt whites respon-
sible for the Indians’ hostility.

1018
 Native Americans in Film

Sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans increased in number and scope during

the 1950s, fueled by broader trends in American society. Due to World War II,
Germans and Japanese provided Hollywood with new villains for its action-oriented
movies, freeing Indians from the role which they had most commonly filled on-
screen. Additionally, progressive films of this era, such as Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow
(1950) and Ford’s The Searchers (1956), examine racism through the lens of the
western, commenting on the civil rights movement by using their Indian characters as
stand-ins for African Americans. Broken Arrow focuses on an army scout ( James Stewart)
who achieves understanding and, ultimately, friendship with Apache chief Cochise (Jeff
Chandler), only to see racist whites break the peace and murder the Indian woman he
loves. In The Searchers, an ex-soldier (John Wayne) spends five years combing the West
for his niece who was abducted during a Comanche raid, but plans to kill her rather than
rescue her. Overcome by his racism, he believes the time she has spent among the
Comanche has irreversibly tainted her. By examining racism in such a manner, these
films, and others like them, foreshadowed more significant changes to come.
By the late 1960s, the combined influences of the New Left, the counterculture, and
the Vietnam War led to a radical shift in the way Hollywood films presented American
Indians. Revisionist westerns such as Ralph Nelson’s Soldier Blue and Arthur Penn’s
Little Big Man, both produced in 1970, no longer showed Indians as vicious savages,
or even as unfortunate obstacles standing in the way of American progress. Instead,
they now served as stand-ins for the Vietnamese, appearing as paragons of decency
who are victimized by the racist, bloodthirsty American army. Both films prominently
feature massacres of Indian villages at the hands of the now-barbaric cavalry, drawing
direct comparisons to the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Additionally, reflecting the
views of the counterculture, the films show Indians living at one with nature while
depicting white society as greedy and corrupt. Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), the pro-
tagonist of Little Big Man, moves back and forth between the two cultures, and while
his experiences among the Sioux are uniformly positive, those among whites are miser-
able and violent. However, while these films present Indian characters in a far more
sympathetic light than previous westerns, their portrayals are no more historically
accurate. They simply offer new, more positive stereotypes in place of the old, negative
ones, using these inaccurate portrayals to criticize contemporary American society.
With the western out of vogue, Native Americans appeared in few films during the
late 1970s and 1980s, but in the early 1990s, Hollywood produced a new wave of films
focusing on Indian characters. Influenced by factors such as the American Indian
movement and a growing awareness of the mistreatment of Native Americans by the
United States government, these pictures proved to be far more sympathetic toward
Indian characters than their predecessors. Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990)
was the most prominent of these, winning Academy Awards for Best Picture and
Director. The story of a Civil War officer who abandons white society and is accepted
as a member of a band of Lakota Sioux, the film presents its Indian characters in a
highly positive light. Dances with Wolves retains trappings of earlier westerns, present-
ing its Pawnee villains as stereotypical bloodthirsty savages, telling the film from the
perspective of its white protagonist, and finding a convenient romantic lead for

1019
Native Americans in Film

Costner in a white woman living with the Sioux. However, it also attempts to accu-
rately portray life among the Sioux; sees its Indian characters as real individuals who
express humor, sorrow, and anger; and uses the Lakota language and English subtitles
rather than employing the stereotypical broken English of earlier films.
This trend toward more accurate and sympathetic portrayals of Indians is reflected
in the films that both preceded and followed Dances with Wolves, such as the
modern-day road picture Powwow Highway (1989); Thunderheart (1992), an FBI
thriller set on a Sioux reservation; and Michael Mann’s retelling of Last of the Mohicans
(1992). These pictures attempt to show a greater respect for Native American culture,
view the plight of their Indian characters with great sympathy, and present them as
fully developed individuals. For instance, although appearing at first glance to be a
stereotypical bloodthirsty savage, Magua (Wes Studi), the villain of Last of the Mohicans,
is actually driven by a lust for revenge after the murder of his family by the British, the
type of individual motivation missing from earlier Indian heavies.
Smoke Signals, released in 1998, was a major landmark for Native Americans in cin-
ema, as it was the first film to be written, produced, and directed by Native filmmakers.
Directed by Chris Eyre and written by Sherman Alexie, from his own short story, the
film won the prestigious Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and launched
the career of Native American actor Adam Beach. Smoke Signals’ subject matter—a
modern-day road picture that presents a realistic, unflinching look at the difficulties
of reservation life—is indicative of the concerns of most Native filmmakers. Rather
than focusing on the conflict between whites and Indians that dominate many west-
erns, Native American writers and directors generally attempt to reveal the issues that
face their people today, such as poverty, alcoholism, and dislocation. Eyre has gone
on to direct several films, as well as television adaptations of Tony Hillerman’s Jim
Chee/Joe Leaphorn mysteries starring Beach and Studi, and Alexie made his own
directorial debut in 2002 with The Business of Fancydancing.
While Hollywood prominently featured Indians in hundreds of films throughout
its history, major Indian roles have rarely gone to Native American actors. Driven by
box-office concerns, filmmakers relied on non-Native performers with familiar names
in order to draw in audiences. White actors, such as Jeff Chandler (Broken Arrow)
and Rock Hudson (Taza, Son of Cochise), and Latinos, such as Anthony Quinn (They
Died with Their Boots On) and Jorge Rivero (Soldier Blue) often filled major Indian
roles, while Native performers were generally relegated to minor parts or appearances
as extras. Even a director as prominent as Ford was not immune from this trend. When
casting Cheyenne Autumn, his final western, Ford wanted to feature Native American
actors in all the Indian parts, but was told by the studio that bigger name stars were
needed, necessitating the casting of Italian American Sal Mineo and Latinos Ricardo
Montalban, Gilbert Roland, and Dolores del Rio, instead.
Few Native American actors successfully broke through in Hollywood until recent
years. Jay Silverheels, best known as Tonto in the long-running The Lone Ranger televi-
sion series, appeared in numerous films from the 1940s through the 1970s, while Chief
Yowlachie and Chief John Big Tree appeared in prominent westerns, as well. In the
1970s, Chief Dan George achieved great success in a pair of important westerns, Little

1020
 Native Americans in Film

Big Man and The Outlaw Josey Wales, receiving an Academy Award nomination as
Best Supporting Actor for the former. Already in his sixties at the time, George
specialized in playing wise and witty Indians who always seem to be slightly
bemused by the ways of white culture. Ironically, however, one of the most success-
ful “Native American” actors in Hollywood history turned out to be no such thing.
Iron-Eyes Cody, who appeared in over 100 films and was best known as the Indian
shedding a single tear over a polluted landscape in a 1970s television commercial,
claimed to be half-Cree and half-Cherokee but was recently revealed to be of Italian,
not Native American, descent.
In recent years, Hollywood films have moved increasingly toward casting Native
Americans in Indian roles, and this practice has led to a handful of Native actors
achieving a level of stardom within the industry. By casting Native Americans in all
the Indian roles of Dances with Wolves, Costner helped launch the careers of Graham
Greene and Studi, two of Hollywood’s most prominent Native actors. Greene, whose
work on the film garnered him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, has gone
on to a successful career as perhaps Hollywood’s best-known Native American actor,
appearing in films such as The Green Mile (1999) and Transamerica (2005). Studi,
who had a small but important role as a Pawnee villain in Dances with Wolves, rose
to prominence two years later in Last of the Mohicans, appeared as the title character
in Walter Hill’s Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), and has worked steadily since.
In the late 1990s, Beach joined Greene and Studi as a third Native American star in
Hollywood, originally gaining notice in Smoke Signals, and then starring in the big-
budget World War II dramas Windtalkers (2001) and Flags of Our Fathers (2006).
Unfortunately, while some Native American actresses, such as Tantoo Cardinal (Smoke
Signals) and Sheila Tousey (Thunderheart) find regular work in Hollywood, none have
achieved the level of success of their male counterparts.
See also: Ethnic and Immigrant Culture Cinema; Western, The

References
Aleiss, Angela. Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.
Berkhofer, Robert Jr. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to
the Present. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Buscombe, Edward. Injuns! Native Americans in the Movies. London: Reaktion, 2006.
Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004.
Ford, Dan. Pappy: The Life of John Ford. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979.
Georgakas, Dan. “They Have Not Spoken: American Indians in Film.” Film Quarterly 23,
1972: 26–32.
Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999.
Price, John A. “The Stereotyping of North American Indians in Motion Pictures.” Ethnohistory
20, 1973: 153–71.

—Bryan Kvet

1021
New Technologies in Film

NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN FILM. Film undergoes technical, cultural, and insti-

tutional changes that transform the roles and rules of the cinema in today’s societies.
New technologies introduced with the arrival of digitalization have democratized film-
making, making it “open source,” and ultimately software-based.
By the end of the twentieth century, film has “become embedded in—or perhaps
lost in—the new technologies that surround it” (Friedberg, 2000), as the differences
among medial forms have diminished. The introduction of computer-generated
imagery, computer-based editing, and digital filmmaking technologies created an inter-
medial digital space. Due to the technological leap from hardware to software, medium
is no longer the message itself, as Marshall McLuhan proclaimed in the 1960s; but, as
Nicolas Negroponte suggested, an embodiment of it that can be derived and regener-
ated from the same data (Negroponte, 1995). Instead of the traditional narrative tech-
niques, technological changes are introducing database and game logic into films (Peter
Howitt’s 1998 Sliding Doors or Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run of the same year are
notable early examples) that testifies to the “softwarization” (Manovich, 2008) of the
entire film industry—both in terms of production and reception, or aesthetics.
Celluloid-based, traditional filmmaking is being rapidly overtaken by digitized
recording and data storage to match up with the already digital, software-based post-
production device, and primarily to save costs. While these devices were constructed
in the light of “remediation” (that is, software environments are designed as digital
copies of previous devices and technologies), today the mode and method of filmmak-
ing goes far beyond this. With the introduction of virtual cinematography and motion
graphics, cinematic technology entered onto a path that necessitates a redefinition of
what film and cinema mean today. Lev Manovich dates the beginning of the “velvet
revolution” in digital filmmaking to the period between 1993 and 1998, when the

Scene from the 2005 film Sin City, directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez. Pictured are
Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba. (Photofest)

1022
 New Technologies in Film

introduction of the After Effects software initiated a “gradual, almost invisible” shift in
moving-image aesthetics (Manovich, 2008).
Digital filmmaking techniques under the umbrella term “virtual cinematography”
(total or universal capture) are methods that utilize software-generated objects stored
in databases. Films like those in the Matrix series (Larry and Andy Wachowski,
1999–2003), Sin City (Robert Rodriguez, 2005), and 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007) use
digital backlots, which are composed with computer-generated scenery afterwards
(105–06); for example, in the Matrix, actors’ faces were digitally captured and later used to
manipulate facial expressions, eliminating the need for live footage shots (Borshukov et al.).
Softwarization affects not only the aesthetics of film, but also its logic of representa-
tion. Manovich’s Soft Cinema (the title alludes to software cinema) project (2005) is an
intricate combination of installation and film, practice and theory in one. Its central
part is a software algorithm that selects media objects (audio, narrative, and visual files)
from a database and creates a unique output each time the film is played. It is the soft-
ware, not the filmmaker or the spectator, which manipulates and authors the film; the
logic of creating the sequences is that of the interrelation that is established between the
algorithm and the database.
While the birth of the cinema is simultaneous with the birth of the cinematographic
camera, the emerging technology is capable of producing film without this filmic
device. The video of Radiohead’s House of Cards introduced the connection of a three
dimensional imaging software by Geometric Informatics and the Velodyne LIDAR
rotating laser scanner that recreates sets using geo-location data, resulting not only in
a unique visual aesthetic, but in a database that can be regenerated by anyone in the
world interested in making a short film. No camera or traditional filmmaking device
was used during production; even the actors were scanned and digitally reproduced.
In the twenty-first century, the term “motion graphics” (also known as “design
cinema”) is less problematic to relate to “moving picture” than film or cinema. Today,
anybody is capable of producing films with the help of new digital technologies. This
results in the democratization of motion picture production, even—to reformulate the
title of Dziga Vertov’s classic The Man with a Movie Camera (1929)—without a camera.

References
Borshukov, George, Dan Piponi, Oystein Larsen, J. P. Lewis, and Christina Tempelaar-Lietz.
“Universal Capture: Image-based Facial Animation for the ‘Matrix Reloaded.’ ” Virtual Cin-
ematography, ESC Entertainment. http://www.virtualcinematography.org/publications/
acrobat/UCap-s2003.pdf.
Friedberg, Anne. “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change.” In Gledhill,
Christine, and Linda Williams, eds. Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2000:
438–52.
Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command. 2008. November 20, 2008 version. http://
www.softwarestudies.com/softbook.
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

—Zoltán Dragon

1023
Nickelodeon Era, The

NICKELODEON ERA, THE. The Nickelodeon Era began when the commercial
exhibition of “moving pictures” suddenly became profitable in 1905. The novelty of
seeing these moving pictures continued, even though there were no plots to speak of
and the star system had not yet developed. Nickelodeon films were sold as entertain-
ment, not as art.
The term “nickelodeon” is derived from combining the term “nickel”—the price of
admission—and odeon, the Greek word for theater. Harry Davis and John Harris
opened the first theatre devoted to nickelodeons, the Nickelodeon Theatre, in Pitts-
burgh, in 1905. Davis and Harris are often erroneously credited with coining the term
“nickelodeon,” but the word had been applied to cheap entertainment since at least
1888. As news of the success of Pittsburgh’s movie-only Nickelodeon began to spread
across the country, the name came to signify a nickel-charging moving-picture show.
Davis had used a section of the arcade he owned as a small theater before recognizing
an opportunity with the Nickelodeon. Like many subsequent nickelodeon operators,
Davis located his theater next to his arcade to capitalize on the same transient market
present in the business district. The Pittsburgh theater, typical for its era, seated 200
people. Open from 8 p.m. until midnight, with shows lasting 15 to 30 minutes, the
Nickelodeon accommodated about 2,000 to 3,000 people per day. Music for the films

Barkers and ticket takers pose outside the entrance of a nickelodeon theater, 1905. (Getty Images)

1024
 Nickelodeon Era, The

was provided by a lone pianist, a form of accompaniment that subsequently became

standard in these theaters
The storefront theaters that had popped up across the United States became nickel-
odeons when changes in what can be understood as the motion picture “process” cre-
ated the conditions for owners to make enormous profits. These changes included
the emergence of a large and growing audience base, a minimal level of feature film
productions, a rental system for films, frequent program changes, and a continuous-
exhibition format. By charging a nickel for admission, the nickelodeon format suc-
ceeded because working-class men and women could easily afford to attend movies.
The price made the movies seem like a bargain to customers. For a few cents,
working-class people could enjoy an attractive space and a short show.
By the time nickelodeon theatres became popular, many films had been standard-
ized to a length of about 1,000 feet, equal to a reel of film, and contained rudimentary
plots. Sometimes two or three subjects would be joined together in order to achieve the
required 1,000 feet. Since, after a certain point, the novelty of merely watching any
moving picture wore off, theatre owners began to understand that to attract audiences,
they had to screen several different films a day. In order to fill the need of theatre owners
for an increased number of films, distribution houses, which sold films at 10 or 12 cents
per foot, and film “exchanges,” which rented films, emerged as part of a nickelodeon
market system of exchange. Eventually, theatre owners saw the wisdom in renting films,
and dozens of exchanges popped up around the country.
Nickelodeon filmmakers apparently had few artistic aspirations. They aimed simply
to capitalize on the spectacle of seeing moving pictures. Nickelodeon posters generally
mentioned only the title of the film and the production company; actors and actresses
were not featured prominently until about 1910, as the “silent film era” began to
dawn. Film companies usually produced one or two subjects per week, with directors
and actors normally working without a script.
Many nickelodeon operators entered the business because it seemed like a sure get-
rich-quick opportunity. How-to books, such as David Hulfish’s Motion Picture Work,
and national magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post, implied that theatre owners
could virtually print their own money. All described the generic nickelodeon as a busi-
ness that could be run by entrepreneurs of little means and experience. While some
nickelodeons, like the Pittsburgh establishment, resembled movie palaces, others
seated patrons in kitchen chairs that were not fastened to the floor. The theatres that
spent more money, however, proved more profitable. At the height of its popularity,
Davis and Harris’s Nickelodeon brought in 7,000 to 8,000 nickels a day.
By 1910, the movie industry had begun to mature, and moviegoers began to plan
their outings instead of just ducking into a nickelodeon on a whim. Audiences now
demanded better-quality films, as well as longer ones; and they were willing to pay
more than a nickel for the experience of seeing such elaborate moving pictures. The
Nickelodeon Era drew to a close as more and more theatres began to show the longer
narrative films that were produced during the silent era.
See also: Silent Era, The

1025
Nickelodeon Era, The

References
Aronson, Michael. Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905–1929. Pittsburgh: Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.
Bowers, Q. David. Nickelodeon Theatres and Their Music. Vestal, New York: Vestal Press, 1986.
Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Los Angeles: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1990
—Caryn E. Neumann

1026
 v
P
POLITICS AND FILM. “Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books,” Senator
Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) declares in the stirring climactic scene of Mr. Smith
Goes to Washington (1939). To the idealistic congressional neophyte, the Capitol dome
represents more than marble staircases and walls; it represents the notion that, at least
in the world of director Frank Capra, any child, “no matter what his race, color or
creed,” can grow up to stand at the desk of Daniel Webster and declare that “there’s
no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties.”
The emotional story of “a David without even a slingshot” who is convinced “to do
battle against the mighty Goliath,” Mr. Smith Goes to Washington remains the quintes-
sential film about American electoral politics (Keyishian, 2003). Giving expression to
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal philosophy, attacking political machine patronage,
and inspiring countless new members of congress to compare themselves to the uto-
pian “boy ranger,” Mr. Smith Goes to Washington demonstrated that movies can validate
the politics of a generation, repudiate corruption and demagogues, and even speculate
about the future of our most sacred civic institution.
Even before the invention of recorded sound in the cinema, the movie industry
played on audience sentiments in an effort to validate certain viewpoints and discredit
others. Director D. W. Griffith’s deeply disturbing silent film Birth of a Nation (1915),
for example—a portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as America’s last, best hope for
salvation—generated both vehement opposition and widespread popular support. Con-
demned as racist by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), Birth of a Nation not only included “depiction[s] of blacks as threatening sav-
ages,” but also encouraged revisionists to rewrite the history of Reconstruction (Chris-
tensen and Haas, 2005). Described by President Woodrow Wilson as “history written
with lightning” after the film was screened at the White House, however—Griffith even
quoted Wilson in the film to justify the Klan’s activities—Birth of a Nation’s adulatory
vision of desperate white-hooded knights galloping to prevent Congress from putting
“the white South under the heel of the black South” nevertheless became a powerful
propaganda tool, as lynchings and Jim Crow laws proliferated. While it infuriated civil

1027
Politics and Film

rights proponents, then, Griffith’s

epic validated the views of those
who still believed in the “lost
cause” of Southern Redemption.
Other early films also created
political waves, as directors and
producers began to realize the
power of the cinema to influence
public opinion. While The Birth
of a Nation valorized white
supremacy, many films produced
in the 1910s and 1920s expressed
support for populist themes that
heralded workers as the real
heroes in American society. Pro-
labor films such as What Is to Be
Done (1914), The Jungle (1914),
and The Contrast (1921) spurred
protests and vindicated oppo-
nents of the treacherous working
conditions in plants, mills, and
mines. Ironically, the Labor Film
Promotional portrait of Robert Redford (right) and Dustin Service—which produced The
Hoffman standing in front of the Washington Post Building Contrast, a popular film about
in a still from director Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 film All the Pres- striking miners in West Virginia,
ident’s Men. The actors portrayed Post reporters Bob Wood-
and in 1922 remade The Jungle,
ward and Carl Bernstein, who were the first to investigate
a film based on Upton Sinclair’s
the Watergate scandal. (Getty Images)
critique of the Chicago slaughter-
houses—sometimes had to show
populist films “in secret because
of official efforts to suppress [them] as inflammatory” (Booker, 2007). Blatant efforts
to censor films viewed as radical ultimately prompted filmmakers to treat class in “indi-
rect or allegorical ways, while avoiding any hints of support for socialism or radical
labor activism” (Booker, 2007). Indeed, it seems that government censorship, bolstered
by George Creel’s World War I–era Committee for Public Information, even affected
films like Charlie Chaplin’s powerful Modern Times (1936). Although seeking to
awaken audiences to the threat of mechanization and the dangers of technology run
amok, Chaplin’s humor tended to soften the film’s satirical edge, turning horrifying
scenes such as the one in which his lead character is literally caught in the great, grind-
ing gears of the American machine into a sort of filmic joke.
The end of World War I saw the first wave of films that questioned whether the
political benefits of military conflict warranted the human costs of war. Griffith’s Hearts
of the World, King Vidor’s The Big Parade, and Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the
Western Front (1930), for example, sought to depict the horrors of war. Significantly,

1028
 Politics and Film

while World War II generated the production of a mass of films portraying Americans
fighting and dying in “just wars,” U.S. involvement in Vietnam would once again give
rise to antiwar pictures, such as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H* (1970); Michael Cimino’s
The Deer Hunter (1978); Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979); Oliver
Stone’s trilogy, Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Heaven and
Earth (1993); and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987).
According to the American Film Institute, America’s greatest film is Citizen Kane
(1941), a picture that audiences almost never saw simply because writer-director
Orson Welles dared to repudiate the politics of newspaper magnate William Randolph
Hearst. Booed at the Academy Awards when Orson Welles shared the Oscar for writ-
ing with Herman J. Mankiewicz, the thinly veiled critique of Hearst’s machinations
spawned a battle that initially overshadowed the film. Proclaiming that people will
think “what I tell them to think,” Hearst, who served briefly in Congress, attempted to
buy up every Citizen Kane negative in order to have them burned. He also sought
to smear Welles as a communist and to blackmail theater owners and members of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences into shutting the film down. Fortunately,
Hearst’s attempts to silence Welles failed.
Oddly enough, less than a decade before he tried to strong-arm Welles, Hearst had
produced Gabriel over the White House (1933), a film that began with the Archangel
Gabriel visiting corrupt, do-nothing President Judson C. Hammond (Walter Huston)
while Hammond is in a coma after a car accident. Awakening from his coma, Hammond
becomes an advocate of federal support for unpaid veterans and unemployed
workers (an ironic twist since Hearst’s newspapers had actually condemned the
Bonus Marches carried out by veterans in 1932). Because Congress does not share
his divinely inspired animosity toward “honest graft,” the president threatens
martial law and implements a public works program to put unemployed white
men back to work. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who could not establish
a paramilitary force to overcome the “technicalities of the law,” nevertheless liked
the film, especially the rather explicit allusions to his New Deal programs: images
of the distribution of large sums in stimulus funding, farm subsidies, and requiring
banks to maintain deposit insurance.
The Great Depression also inspired The Grapes of Wrath (1940), John Steinbeck’s
story of how Tom Joad’s (Henry Fonda) poverty led him to a government farm co-
operative in California, and Stagecoach (1939), a John Ford Western that condemned
bankers and made John Wayne famous. In the 1940s, Hollywood took on fascism
and party hacks again, alluding to Nazi domination in Casablanca (1942) and nostal-
gically lauding the League of Nations in Wilson (1944). After Citizen Kane, the most
politically significant film of the 1940s may have been All the King’s Men (1949), which
chronicled Willie Stark’s (Broderick Crawford) rise from “hick” to governor. Modeling
Stark after Louisiana Governor Huey Long, writer-director Robert Rossen also “nod
[ded] at Welles with the giant portraits of Willie Stark at rallies and the director’s addi-
tion of a ‘March of Time’ sequence” (Krutnik et al., 2007). Foreshadowing the black-
lists of the 1950s, All the King’s Men did not make it to the silver screen until Rossen
agreed to sign a loyalty oath, vowing that he was not a communist.

1029
Politics and Film

The 1950s failed to produce many notable political films, but 1950s politics mat-
tered greatly to Hollywood. George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (2005),
for instance, brought the battle between Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and
Senator Joseph McCarthy into focus a half-century later. Using Murrow’s own words
and actual clips from the Army-McCarthy hearings, Good Night, and Good Luck high-
lighted both the fear that McCarthy and other red-baiters instilled in millions of
Americans and the recognition that “we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting
it at home.” Even after Murrow discredited McCarthy’s claims about communist infil-
tration of military and diplomatic agencies, “association with radical causes or radical
organizations could lead to dismissal, blacklisting, or even, as the case of the Hollywood
Ten illustrated, imprisonment” (Krutnik et al., 2007). After Dalton Trumbo, a black-
listed member of the Hollywood Ten, won an Oscar for The Brave One (1957) under
the pseudonym Robert Rich, however, “the institutional mechanisms of the blacklist
began to crumble” (Krutnik et al., 2007). Indeed, Trumbo’s and Stanley Kubrick’s
Spartacus (1960) used real names in the credits and won four Oscars.
Unlike political films that validated particular viewpoints or repudiated perceived
corruption and machine politics, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) speculated about the future of not only the
American presidency but also society itself. Bridging the gap between science fiction
and political commentary, Dr. Strangelove envisioned an inept President Merkin Muff-
ley (Peter Sellers) forced into nuclear war with the “Roosskies” by Dr. Strangelove (also
played by Sellers), a mad scientist imported from Nazi Germany, and generals who
believe that “war is too important to be left to politicians.” “I can no longer sit back
and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subver-
sion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our pre-
cious bodily fluids,” declares Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) as
an explanation for why he refused to recall nuclear bombers that he ordered to invade
Soviet airspace. In a similar vein, The Manchurian Candidate (1962) depicted the
brainwashing by communists of a rising political star. Like Dr. Strangelove, The Man-
churian Candidate explored the implications of democracy gone horrifically wrong.
Imitating art, democracy actually did go horribly wrong only a few years later when
President Richard Nixon’s aides burglarized the Democratic presidential candidate’s
headquarters in the Watergate hotel. The portrayal of Bob Woodward (Robert Redford)
and Carl Bernstein’s (Dustin Hoffman) investigation into the Nixon Administration’s
transgressions in All the President’s Men (1976) drove home the message that politics is
a dirty business. Moving Hollywood from science fiction to political realism, All the
President’s Men “followed the money” to men in the White House who suddenly
appeared vulnerable and petty. Primary Colors (1998) examined the frailty of another
presidential candidate, Governor Jack Stanton—a character clearly based on Bill
Clinton. All too human Stanton, played brilliantly by John Travolta, seeks to insure
the loyalty of campaign manager Henry Burton (Adrian Lester) by explaining to him
that his intentions make him different from those “willing to sell their souls, crawl
through sewers, lie to people, divide them, play on their worst fears . . . just for the
prize.” Ironically, though, Stanton’s most trusted operative, Libby Holden (Kathy Bates),

1030
 Politics and Film

commits suicide when she learns that Stanton and his wife Susan (Emma Thompson)
will do almost anything to win the presidency.
Nearly all American political films have featured presidents who are “white, male
and wealthy/privileged/middle class (itself an accurate reflection of elitist tendencies
in national politics in America down through the ages)” (Scott, 2000). In the handful
of films that feature women or minority presidents, the presidency only devolved from
a white man to an African American or a woman by accident or for comic relief.
Senator Douglas Dilman (James Earl Jones), for instance, accidentally became
president in The Man (1972) after the president and speaker of the house died and
the vice president was incapacitated; President Beck (Morgan Freeman) appeared only
briefly in Deep Impact (1998) to announce the end of civilization as we know it; Mays
Gilliam (Chris Rock) rose from disgraced former alderman to president in Head of
State (2003) after the president and vice president’s planes crash into each other; and
Vice President Kathryn Bennett (Glenn Close) never officially became president in
Air Force One (1997), simply because President James Marshall (Harrison Ford)
refused to resign, even though his plane had been hijacked and his wife and daughter
taken hostage. Significantly, then, critics could cite few precedents in cinematic history
for Barack Obama’s inauguration as the first African American president in 2009.
In The American President (1995), Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas), the exem-
plar of the naive, liberal, white-male president, is transformed from innocent hack to
“toughened political operator” after falling in love with lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade
(Annette Bening). In a climactic rebuke of his opponent Senator Bob Rumson
(Richard Dreyfuss), Shephard, who now, perhaps unfortunately, understands the real-
ities of the political process, declares, “Bob’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t get it. Bob’s
problem is that he can’t sell it!” (Some speculated that The American President may have
inspired Barack Obama’s speechwriters in their attempts to portray their candidate as
the better choice for chief executive: “It’s not because John McCain doesn’t care,” sug-
gested Obama as he accepted the Democratic nomination, “It’s because John McCain
doesn’t get it.”)
Wag the Dog (1997) and Bulworth (1998) both rejected the Capraesque sensibilities
of The American President in order to satirize media exposure, sex scandals, and cam-
paign finance. In Wag the Dog, a disturbing dark comedy, when the president is accused
of propositioning a “Firefly Girl,” his consultant, Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro),
decides that he needs at least the “appearance of a war” to divert the public’s attention
so that he can win reelection. The picture actually became “a zany parody of the blur-
ring of fact and fiction” when reports of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica
Lewinsky broke shortly after the film’s release and Clinton bombed Kosovo in 1998
(Foy, 2008). Although Senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) did not have a similar
counterpart making headlines, Bulworth attacked money in politics as acerbically as
Wag the Dog condemned cable news and commercials for having “destroyed the elec-
toral process.” After hiring a hitman to kill him, Bulworth changes his mind and raps
about corporate influence. Perhaps the best political film to this point in the twenty-
first century has been V for Vendetta (2005), which reminded Americans disturbed by
President George W. Bush’s push to invade Iraq, warrantless wiretapping, and black

1031
Product Placements

sites for torture that “people should not fear their governments; governments should
fear their people.”
Films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Birth of a Nation, Citizen Kane,
and Dr. Strangelove have sought to justify contemporary viewpoints, renounced politi-
cal techniques considered beyond the pale, and conjured up every president’s worst
nightmares. Voting and elections have always loomed large in the American experi-
ment, and the results, at least in the movies, have not always been flattering. Dema-
gogues, political bosses, and propagandists have time and again attempted to seduce
the American people into electing foxes to guard the henhouse. Inept presidents have
threatened nuclear war and invaded other countries on the basis of unsubstantiated
rumors and questionable motives. Yet, in a powerfully redemptive way, films about
American politics have provided audiences with happy endings and enduring heroes.
Although Mr. Smith screenwriter Sidney Buchman was blacklisted and coerced into
testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that he had
been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, in Capra’s film, Mr. Smith is
vindicated after Senator Joseph Payne (Claude Rains) has a crisis of conscience and
nearly commits suicide (Neve 1992, 40–41). The Hollywood patriot, it seems, has
only to “get up off the ground” for the antagonist to admit that “Every word that
boy said is the truth!” If only politics were that simple.
See also: Documentary, The; JFK; Nixon

References
Booker, M. Keith. From Box Office to Ballot Box: The American Political Film. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2007.
Christensen, Terry, and Peter J. Haas. Projecting Politics: Political Messages in American Films.
Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005.
Coyne, Michael. Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen. London: Reaktion,
2008.
Foy, Joseph J., ed. Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics through Popular Culture.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.
Gianos, Phillip L. Politics and Politicians in American Film. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
Keyishian, Harry. Screening Politics: The Politician in American Movies, 1931–2001. Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003.
Krutnik, Frank, et al., eds. “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
Neve, Brian. Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Scott, Ian. American Politics in Hollywood Film. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
—Alan Kennedy-Shaffer

PRODUCT PLACEMENTS. Product placements have imprinted American cul-

ture, from influencing purchasing habits—an alien’s love of Reese’s Pieces in E.T.
(1982) increased that product’s sales by 70 percent (Segrave, 2004)—to providing
iconic pop-culture phrases, such as “eat your Wheaties” in Rocky III (1982). Product

1032
 Product Tie-Ins

placement is the intentional inclusion of any type of advertising in an entertainment

film (Segrave, 2004). To be sure, product placement was used at least as early as the
1920s; but its usage was relatively insignificant until the late 1970s. Although advertisers
quickly recognized the power of movies to shape consumer purchases, the film industry
tried to limit its use, because of fear that such commercialization would repel audiences,
corrupt the art of filmmaking, and thereby negate the industry’s goals.
Developments in the post–World War II era, however, eroded the industry’s resistance
to product placement. Increasingly, directors wanted their films to convey a sense of real-
ism, but this was an expensive task unless real props were donated by advertisers eager to
have their products displayed in a film. The inclusion of advertising became an integral
component of film production, not only as a source of inexpensive props but also to help
fund rising production and promotional costs (and, as advertising, product placement
was not as obtrusive as other types of film advertisements). Indeed, not only could adver-
tisers be charged for product placement, they could also be used to provide free market-
ing, as they often developed advertising campaigns tied to their products that were
included in films. The film industry, then, due largely to these factors, as well as economic
troubles experienced in the late 1970s, ended its resistance to product placement.
Since the late 1970s, the trend has been toward an increase in both the use of prod-
uct placements and the level of their obtrusiveness—literally turning film screens into
live billboards—reflecting the growth of America’s consumer culture (Segrave, 2004).
It has been argued that since 1945, consumerism has shifted in emphasis from the
accumulation of material goods toward the consumption of ephemeral experiences—
what may be classified as experiential consumerism (Blaszczyk, 2009). Products used
in movies, then, are linked to the widely diverse, usually extraordinary experiences of
the filmic characters, suggesting that the purchase of these products will allow us to
transcend our own, more banal workaday worlds.

References
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV. Wheel-
ing, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2009.
Segrave, Kerry. Product Placement in Hollywood Films: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2004.
—Mark D. Popowski

PRODUCT TIE-INS. A fundamental economic element of the film industry, prod-

uct tie-ins are representative of the process whereby a business pays a fee in order to
create a marketing campaign around a film. In this way, the profiles of both the film
and the company’s product(s) are raised. For example, a company such as General
Mills that sells cereal places the images of movie characters on its cereal box and a
toy related to the movie inside the box, thus capitalizing on the movie’s popularity.
Product tie-ins, then, if successful, are beneficial for all parties involved.
Generally, a tie-in campaign follows the process of placing a product in a film. For
the James Bond picture Die Another Day (2002), for instance, Ford Motor Company

1033
Product Tie-Ins

supplied the vehicles used in the movie—in other words, they placed their product—
and then tied the film with their vehicles to a broader advertising campaign. It is not
always possible to place a product in a movie, however, and, oddly enough, for success-
ful film franchises, it is not even necessary to place products. In 2005, for example, the
producers of Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith negotiated tie-in deals with
both Burger King and M&Ms, despite the fact that neither of the company’s products
appeared in or was ever mentioned in the film. In such cases, then, companies try to
attach their products to a film’s “brand.”
While most modern tie-in deals are connected to films, early tie-in contracts tended
to be negotiated between companies and individual actors. In 1932, for example, Owl
Cigars signed a $250,000 tie-in contract with United Artists, allowing the company to
create an advertising campaign around actor Paul Muni, who played the title character
in Scarface, Tony Camonte, who smoked the company’s brand of cigars. From here,
film studios began to establish relationships with companies that produced so-called
“sin products,” mainly alcohol and tobacco. Company heads quickly realized that hav-
ing stars use their products in movies, and then showing these stars using those prod-
ucts in ads, helped to legitimize commodities that were generally looked down upon.
Eventually, however, stars worried that tie-ins damaged their credibility as actors, and
they began turning down lucrative advertising deals. It was at this point that studios,
seeking to reduce production budgets, began to strike tie-in deals with companies
eager to place their products, or at least to connect them to high-profile films. Such
deals appealed to advertisers, as attaching their products to films not only offered the
possibility of increased exposure for whatever commodity they produced, but also
maintained at least tangential connections to the actors who appeared in the films.
Today, tie-in deals are extraordinarily lucrative for both film companies and adver-
tisers. Because such deals can be so profitable, both sides seek to lock down tie-in deals
months, and sometimes even years, in advance of a film’s proposed release date. Strik-
ing such deals can put advertisers in a difficult position, though, as production delays
can push back release dates and make it difficult to know when to launch ad cam-
paigns. Another very real risk for advertisers is the possibility that a movie may fail
at the box office; if this happens, the company is unlikely to benefit from the tie-in
campaign. In order to protect their investments, then, companies typically try to secure
tie-in deals that include not just original films but also sequels, in relation to which
box-office returns can be more accurately predicted. They also seek to strike deals with
studios that are set to release highly anticipated pictures—the first film released in the
Harry Potter series, for instance.
Another issue advertisers have to overcome in order to make the process successful is
the increased reluctance of film stars to take part in tie-ins. Tobey Maguire, for example,
who has played the lead in the Spiderman films, did not want his likeness used in tie-in
promotions after the first movie in the series was release in 2002. As a result, all tie-in
advertizing images depicting Spiderman had either to show the character from behind
or with his mask on. Even the use of animated characters for tie-in purposes can be con-
tentious. As part of its tie-in with Godzilla (1998), for instance, Taco Bell wanted to put
the image of the beast on its cups; the film’s producers, however, were hesitant to allow

1034
 Product Tie-Ins

the image to circulate before the film was released, arguing that the impact on viewers
would be lost if they knew what the updated version of Godzilla looked like.
As with advertisers who try to be as careful as possible in attaching their products to
particular movies, producers are also selective about the products with which they asso-
ciate their films. Cereals, fast-food chains, carmakers, national retailers, and cell phone
companies are all popular partners for film producers, as they are profitably positioned
in the marketplace. A good example of an advantageous deal that was struck between a
studio and a popular company is that negotiated by Disney and McDonald’s, who
signed a 10-year contract giving McDonald’s exclusive tie-in rights to all of Disney’s
films. Not surprisingly, companies that market products oriented toward adults tend
to partner with companies that release PG-13 or R-rated films. Samsung, for example,
signed a contract with Warner Bros. to tie their cell phones to The Matrix (1999).
Although in the end there is really no sure-fire formula for predicting which tie-in
deals will succeed, both advertisers and film producers seem satisfied with the system.
Indeed, as producers struggle to lower budgets and advertisers search for new ways to
reach consumers in increasingly fragmented markets, it seems that product tie-ins will
continue to play a significant role in the business of making movies.
See also: Product Placements

References
Lehu, Jean-Marc. Branded Entertainment: Product Placement and Brand Strategy in the Enter-
tainment Business. Philadelphia: Kogan-Page, 2007.
Marich, Robert. Marketing to Moviegoers: A Handbook of Strategies Used By Major Studios and
Independents. Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2005.
Pompper, Donnalyn, and Yih-Farn Choo. “Advertising in the Age of TiVo: Targeting Teens and
Young Adults with Film and Television Product Placements.” Atlantic Journal of Communi-
cation 16, 2008: 49–69.
—Sean Graham

1035
This page intentionally left blank
 v
R
RELIGION AND CENSORSHIP IN FILM. Cinema emerged at a time when
America wrestled with the social strains triggered by industrialization and mass culture.
This struggle often pitted native-born citizens against immigrants, Protestants against
Catholics, small towns against cities, and modernist Christians against Fundamental-
ists. From the outset, movies became embroiled in these conflicts. Traditionalists feared
the potential of film to subvert the moral norms of their communities. Critics found
scenes depicting violent crime and inappropriate romantic relationships especially
troubling (Mitchell and Plate, 2007). As movie theatres multiplied across the nation,
producers—many of them urban Jews—and distributors became the target of recur-
ring attempts to censor offensive films. When New York City mayor George B.
McClellan Jr. closed all theatres in the city in 1909 in response to widespread com-
plaints about the indecency of the movies, a Protestant reform organization called
the People’s Institute established the National Board of Censorship, the first of a series
of organizations designed to work with the film industry to establish acceptable stan-
dards of screen morality. Although the National Board of Censorship (renamed the
National Board of Review in 1915) had no legal authority, most film producers were
eager to cooperate with its efforts, welcoming a voluntary partnership with civic and
religious leaders as an alternative to government censorship (Couvares, 1992).
Most Board reviewers came from urban Protestant churches, and were generally
more theologically and socially liberal than church members in America’s smaller towns
and cities. The decentralized nature of American Protestantism meant that no set of
leaders could speak authoritatively for all Christians, even within the same denomina-
tion. Despite the work of the Board, condemnation of movies continued throughout
the 1910s, leading to widespread demands for legal regulation of the film industry
and the creation of censorship boards by legislatures in six states (Couvares, 1992).
In 1921, following a series of Hollywood sex scandals, the Motion Picture Produc-
ers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) was established in part to handle public
relations on behalf of the industry. Under the guidance of Will Hays, a Presbyterian
elder from Indiana and Republican Party stalwart whose evangelical rhetoric was some-
times likened to revivalist Billy Sunday, the MPPDA aggressively cultivated religious

1037
Religion and Censorship in Film

organizations such as the Federal Council of Churches, the YMCA and YWCA, the
International Federation of Catholic Alumnae, and the National Catholic Welfare
Conference, as well as civic groups such as the Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, the Daughters
of the American Revolution, and the National Education Association (Couvares,
1992). Hays pushed studios to produce noncommercial educational films for the
Federal Council of Churches, and gained from reluctant producers approval for the
“Eleven Don’ts and Twenty-six Be Carefuls,” a list of rules that would hopefully avoid
censorship. The “don’ts” included references to childbirth, venereal disease and sexual
perversion, profanity, “ridicule of the clergy,” and “willful offense to any nation, race
or creed.”
These efforts at self-regulation gained support from many liberal religious leaders,
but criticism of movies continued in conservative Protestant and Catholic circles. By
the end of the 1920s, even liberal Protestant organs like the Christian Century sus-
pected industry efforts to “manipulate” religious groups and leaned toward federal cen-
sorship laws. During the 1930s, industry efforts to avoid censorship led to more formal
and systematic attempts to partner with religious organizations, particularly Roman
Catholic. Hays had come to believe that Roman Catholics were less divided than
Protestants on issues of morality, and that the hierarchical structure of Catholicism
made it a better partner in seeking to establish uniform standards. Moreover, unlike
Protestant groups, the Catholic Church adamantly opposed legislative censorship to
combat immorality, instead preferring boycotts and industry efforts at self-regulation
(Couvares, 1992).
In 1930, the informal “don’ts” was revised into a more sophisticated Production
Code. The Code was largely the work of Father Daniel Lord, a Catholic priest and pro-
fessor of drama at St. Louis University, who had served as a consultant for various
Hollywood productions, including Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927). To
enforce the Code, in 1934 the industry created the Production Code Administration,
headed by Catholic layman Joseph Breen, who had been handpicked by Cardinal
George Mundelein of Chicago (Black, 1998; Tatum, 2004). The same year, the Roman
Catholic Legion of Decency appeared, to pledge Catholics across the nation to patron-
ize approved films and to boycott movies that the Legion deemed inappropriate. In
the 1936 papal encyclical Vigilanti Cura (“with a vigilant eye”), Pope Pius XI urged
Catholics around the world to view cinema cautiously, and singled out the new
American Legion of Decency for special praise (Pius XI in Mitchell and Plate, 2007).
The Production Code and the work of the Legion made it difficult for American
filmmakers to produce movies that explored serious moral issues or controversial social
policies, but it did successfully avert the drive toward legal censorship. It also encour-
aged a stream of Catholic films. During the Code’s heyday in the 1930s and 1940s,
many conservative Protestants acknowledged the leadership of the Catholic Church
in enforcing acceptable standards of decency (Couvares, 1992). At the same time audi-
ences flocked to such immensely popular Oscar-winning films as Boys Town (1938),
with Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan, and Going My Way (1944), with Bing Crosby
as Father O’Malley, which portrayed Catholic clergy as big-hearted champions of such
traditional American values as family, sportsmanship, and entrepreneurial capitalism

1038
 Religion and Censorship in Film

(Keyser, 1984). The partnership between Hollywood and the Catholic Church
undoubtedly helped to weaken native Protestant prejudice toward Roman Catholicism.
After World War II, the Production Code and the Legion declined in influence
(Black, 1998). In 1945, Eric A. Johnston took over Will Hays’s position at the
MPPDA. Johnston was more interested in fighting the Cold War and expanding
American film distribution overseas than wrangling over morality. Hollywood, facing
heavy competition from television, sought to expand foreign distribution of American
movies, in markets where audiences were accustomed to more complex films than the
Production Code allowed. At the same time, the United States opened the gates to a
flood of foreign films, including Rossellini’s Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946),
and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948). Although these films violated the stan-
dards of the Production Code, the Legion of Decency mounted only lukewarm
opposition. In the case of Open City, a film about the liberation of Rome from the
Nazis that enjoyed Vatican support, the Legion remained silent. Throughout the
1950s, reformist elements within the Catholic Church pushed for greater openness
to modern culture. In a 1957 encyclical, Pope Pius XII spoke much more favorably
of cinema than Pius XI had 20 years earlier. The reformist ecumenical council Vatican II
(1963–65), with its sweeping accommodation of modernity, signaled the end of an
era. In 1965, the Legion of Decency changed its name to the less militant National
Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, and three years later, in 1968, Hollywood
replaced the Production Code with the rating system.
Since the end of the Production Code, American Christians have continued to di-
vide in their response to Hollywood (Medved, 1992; Hulsether, 1999). Conservative
Catholics and Protestants frequently mount boycotts of objectionable films, such as
the 2006 campaign against The Da Vinci Code (which suggested a secret marriage
between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene). But these boycotts have had little impact
on the industry. Religious liberals maintain a more positive stance toward Hollywood,
and often praise the very films that conservatives oppose. Catholic priest and sociolo-
gist Andrew Greeley, for example, has called cinema the most sacramental of art forms,
and has argued that Hollywood spreads core Christian teachings more effectively than
the institutional Church (Greeley, 1988).
See also: Religion and Nationalism in Film

References
Black, Gregory D. The Catholic Crusade against the Movies, 1940–1975. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
Couvares, Francis G. “Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Trying to Censor the Movies
Before the Production Code.” American Quarterly 44, 1992: 584–616.
Greeley, Andrew. God in Popular Culture. Chicago: Thomas More Press, 1988.
Hulsether, Mark. “Sorting Out the Relationship among Christian Values, U.S. Popular Reli-
gion, and Hollywood Films.” Religious Studies Review 25, 1999: 3–11.
Keyser, Les, and Barbara Keyser. Hollywood and the Catholic Church: The Image of Roman
Catholicism in American Movies. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1984.

1039
Religion and Nationalism in Film

Medved, Michael. Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values.
New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Mitchell, Jolyon, and S. Brent Plate. The Religion and Film Reader. New York and London:
Routledge, 2007.
Tatum, W. Barnes. Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years, rev. and expanded ed.
Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2004.

—James Rohrer

RELIGION AND NATIONALISM IN FILM. Since the emergence of motion pic-

tures, filmmakers have frequently turned to scripture and religious traditions for inspi-
ration. Biblical references appear commonly in films of every genre, including those
that are not explicitly about religion. For example, in The Matrix (1999) Keanu Reeves
plays a futuristic messiah in a holy city named Zion, the biblical synonym for Jerusalem.
In Disney’s animated movie The Lion King (1994), the hero is a Moses-like prince who
flees his home, wanders in the desert and establishes a new life in a foreign land, and
then returns to liberate his former pride from oppression after experiencing a theophany.
In Deep Impact (1998), the president of the United States initiates Operation Noah’s Ark
when the world is threatened by a deadly comet. All of these movies, and countless
others, center on savior figures who sacrifice themselves for others, echoing the familiar
story of Jesus’s sacrifice in the biblical passion narratives. Such Christ figures appear
routinely in war movies, science fiction and fantasy, horror, and the quintessentially
American western (Baugh, 1997; May and Bird, 1982).
The struggle between good and evil is central to many film genres. In the case of
horror films, especially those that focus on demonic possession, evil is often cast explic-
itly in Christian terms (May and Bird, 1982). In other genres, evil may appear in the
form of fascist states, militaristic aliens, or uncivilized savages. American films have
often explicitly or implicitly linked the forces of good to the United States and its
European allies, and to a generically Christian civilization. Conversely, colonized peo-
ples and enemies of the United States have frequently been portrayed as evil.
This fusion of American nationalism and Christianity was especially obvious in
Cold War–era Bible epics such as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments
(1956), which explicitly drew parallels between the ancient exodus story and the
modern struggle against totalitarianism (Nadel, 1993). American nationalism and
Christianity were also fused in many science fiction films of the era (Shaw, 2002), such
as Red Planet Mars (1952) and The War of the Worlds (1953). In Harry Horner’s Red
Planet Mars, a California scientist (Peter Graves) establishes radio contact with Mars.
The United States is initially thrown into panic when it learns that the red planet has
an advanced civilization and nuclear power, but soon discovers that Mars is also a
Christian society, much like America, with a “Supreme Authority” whose teachings
resemble the Sermon on the Mount. This revelation sparks a religious revival in the
United States but triggers revolution in the Soviet Union, where a group of peasants
inspired by Voice of America radio broadcasts overthrows the communists.
In War of the Worlds, loosely based on H. G. Wells’s famous novel, the Martians are
far more sinister, mounting an invasion of earth that commences with the Western

1040
 Religion and Nationalism in Film

British director Richard Attenborough (left) and his camera crew prepare to shoot a scene with actor
Ben Kingsley as Mahatma Gandhi and a group of Indian extras on the set of Attenborough’s film,
Gandhi, 1982. (Columbia TriStar/Getty Images)

United States. The evil intent of the aliens is established early in the movie when Pastor
Matthew Collins, holding a cross and reciting the 23rd Psalm, approaches a Martian
spacecraft in an attempt to communicate the human desire for peace. The Martians
vaporize the minister with a heat ray. The U.S. military then tries valiantly to defeat
the invaders, only to discover that even atomic weapons are helpless in the face of the
red planet’s technology. Survivors of the invasion gather in a Los Angeles church to
pray and await the end. Their piety is juxtaposed with scenes of the Martians blasting
a church. This sacrilege immediately precedes the concluding scenes in which the
invaders begin to die off from exposure to human viruses. Although the aliens are van-
quished by microbes, as in Wells’s novel, the religious allusions (not in the novel) point
the audience to a more transcendent source of salvation. In the end, the red menace is
seemingly defeated by the faith and prayers of the Americans.
The conflation of religion and American nationalism also commonly appears in the
western, a genre that celebrates the transformation of the lawless wilderness into a
generically Christian republic of hardworking farmers and shopkeepers. Since the ear-
liest days of colonial America, English Protestants regarded the new world as a prom-
ised land, occupied by pagan savages and wild beasts that had to be subdued
violently, like the biblical Canaanites, in order for America to fulfill its calling. This
myth of conquest persisted throughout American history and powerfully shaped

1041
Religion and Nationalism in Film

popular images of the West as a place peculiarly rich with potential for wealth and
human happiness, yet also disordered and in need of redemption.
In the classic western, civilized men and women must overcome the evil forces of
chaos before they can enjoy the fruit of the earth. The evil confronts them in the form
of savage Indians, lawless bandits, monopolistic cattlemen, and raw nature. Although
eventually the land will be fenced and filled with towns, schools, and churches, the ini-
tial confrontation with evil requires the mediation of a man of violence, who, like an
avenging angel, meets evil on its own ground and defeats it with overwhelming force.
The classic western savior appears most famously in High Noon (1952) and Shane
(1953), but the essentially biblical roots of the myth are made most explicit in Clint
Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985). Eastwood’s plot pits a small hamlet of independent min-
ers against a powerful tycoon and his henchmen. In the opening scenes, we see through
the eyes of a little girl named Megan the brutal slaying of several neighbors. The mur-
derers also shoot the little girl’s pet dog, which she buries beneath a crude wooden cross
made of sticks. Sinking to her knees, she asks God for a miracle. The camera then pans
to a distant mountain, and a lone rider who descends as though from the clouds. Wear-
ing a clerical collar, the mysterious stranger is known only as “preacher.” Mobilizing the
frightened miners to defend themselves against the murderous gunmen, he leads them
with deadly efficiency into combat. At the end of the movie, with justice exacted and
evil vanquished, the “preacher” rides back up the mountain and seemingly into the
clouds, suggesting the ascension of Christ (Greeley, 1988; Scott, 1994; Baugh, 1997).
During the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood produced a stream of successful films
lauding the British Empire, many of them focused on India’s Northwest Frontier. Like
the Western, these empire films portrayed European colonizers as agents of civilization
and morality, confronting native people who were mired in superstition and prone to
acts of irrational violence (Jaher and Kling, 2004). Movies such as The Lives of a Bengal
Lancer (1935), Wee Willie Winkie (1937), The Drum (1938), The Four Feathers (1939),
and Gunga Din (1939) presented American audiences with caricatured misrepresenta-
tions of Asian religious traditions that left no doubt of their incompatibility with
Christian morality nor of the essentially benign influence of colonialism.
Gunga Din, directed by George Stevens—who later directed the classic western Shane
as well as the Jesus film The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)—follows the exploits of three
British soldiers and their loyal bhisti Din. Although a poor heathen by birth, Din has a
deep longing to become a British soldier, and he emerges as the savior figure who sacri-
fices his own life to rescue the soldiers from the vicious army of “Thugees,” led by a sin-
ister guru who resembles contemporary Western caricatures of Gandhi. The Thug
master and his followers are introduced as devotees of “Kali, the goddess of blood,”
the “most fiendish band of killers that ever existed.” While they are gathered in their
temple, the guru at one point enjoins his followers to “kill for the love of killing.” The
contrast with the British is made plain by Cutter, a captured soldier, who when com-
manded to “grovel” before the guru replies, “I’m a soldier of Her Majesty the Queen.
I don’t grovel before any heathen.” At the close of the movie, after Kali’s worshippers
have been vanquished, the soldiers gather to remember the fallen Gunga Din, who looks
on joyfully from heaven, his loincloth and chaddar now exchanged for a British uniform.

1042
 Religion and Nationalism in Film

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas may have had Gunga Din in mind when they
produced the second of their blockbuster Indiana Jones films. Having defeated the
Nazis and affirmed the God of Abraham in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost
Ark (1981), in the subsequent Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) the heroic
Jones confronts a depraved Thugee Cult, whose “Temple of Doom” is dedicated to
Kali. Underscoring the blood thirst of the Hindu goddess, the film depicts the enslave-
ment of children, a heart ripped out of a man’s chest, and the near immolation of a sac-
rificial victim by the evil Indian fanatics.
Hollywood has similarly misrepresented colonized Muslim peoples, and more
recently the people of independent Islamic states. For example, with only a handful
of exceptions, the more than 900 Hollywood films that represent Arabs present an
almost uniform impression of untrustworthy, scheming, greedy, and violent fanatics.
From Imar the Servitor (1914) to The Mummy Returns (2001), Arabs appear as duplici-
tous agents of chaos. Closely paralleling the British Empire genre, more than 80 Holly-
wood movies portray the French Foreign Legion in North Africa as a heroic band of
civilizers battling unruly natives. Although not explicitly attacking Islam, which would
have violated the Production Code, these films leave little doubt that God is on the
side of the French (Hart, 2001; Shaheen, 2003). In Outpost in Morocco (1949), for
example, an army of Arab nationalists has surrounded a detail of French troops, besieg-
ing them within their fort. When the Arabs cut off the fort’s supply of water, the
French soon find themselves facing death. In their hour of desperation two French offi-
cers are drawn to a crucifix on the wall of the commander’s private quarters, where
together they repeat the Lord’s Prayer and submit themselves to God’s will. That night,
an unexpected torrential rain miraculously saves the soldiers, who in the following
scenes go on to annihilate the Arab nationalists.
Hollywood portrayals of African culture, as well as African-derived religious tradi-
tions in America, have almost uniformly pandered to popular stereotypes of the “dark
continent” as primitive, superstitious, and cannibalistic (Landau and Kaspin, 2002).
Voodoo is caricatured as violent and erotic “black magic,” an association that appeared
in White Zombie (1932) and has been made in dozens of subsequent movies (Murphy,
1989). Racial tensions are barely concealed within these films, in which white protag-
onists find themselves threatened by blacks and the presumably evil power of their rit-
uals. With the exception of the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973), voodoo films
are generally classified in the horror genre, alongside films of demonic possession. In
some modern examples, such as Angel Heart (1987), The Believers (1987), and Wes
Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), the filmmakers have drawn on ethno-
graphic studies of Afro-Caribbean religion to lend an aura of authenticity to scenes
of voodoo possession, yet the religion is uniformly misrepresented as one of mind con-
trol, unbridled sexuality, and murder. In Angel Heart, for example, white detective
Harold Angel stumbles on a secret ceremony conducted by a young New Orleans
mambo named Epiphany Proudfoot. Angel watches from the bushes, terrified but
mesmerized, as black dancers whirl to the voodoo drums around the entranced Epiph-
any, who raises a chicken above her head, slits its throat with a razor, and imitates cop-
ulation and orgasm while the blood flows down over her body.

1043
Religion and Nationalism in Film

Although the colonialist association of nonbiblical religions with superstition and

violence has not disappeared from American cinema, numerous post-Production Code
films have challenged long-dominant stereotypes and offered a more positive view of
non-Western religious traditions. In part this reflects the global process of decoloniza-
tion since the end of the World War II, in part the widespread disillusionment with
American militarism in the wake of Vietnam, and in part the influence of the counter-
culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps, too, it reflects the massive flow of Asian
immigrants into the United States during the last quarter of the twentieth century.
One harbinger of change was the immensely popular television series Kung Fu
(1972–74), which inverted the traditional western myth. The show focused on a
Shaolin Buddhist priest, Kwai Chang Caine, the half-Chinese son of an American busi-
nessman in China, who wandered the Old West confronting American racism and
violence, armed only with his Buddhist wisdom and skills in the martial arts. Kung Fu
helped spark an immense demand for martial arts films in the United States, although
few of them were grounded in the television show’s nonviolent spiritual message.
Numerous popular movies of the 1980s and 1990s depicted Eastern religions favor-
ably. Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), a film with a strongly anticolonial mes-
sage, presented the Hindu leader as a Christlike liberator. Similarly, Passage to India
(1985) portrayed British colonial authorities as racist. Mrs. Moore, the heroine, is an
elderly English freethinker who rejects the imperialist dogmas of her family and
befriends Aziz, a gentle Muslim physician, and Professor Godbole, a Brahmin mystic,
both of whom recognize in her a kindred soul. In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991),
Morgan Freeman plays a devout Moor named Azeem who is better educated and more
moral than the Christians of medieval England. Little Buddha (1994), directed by
Bernardo Bertolucci, gave American audiences a sympathetic if simplistic introduction
to the story of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, as told by a Tibetan Lama who has
traveled to Seattle in search of his reincarnated former teacher. In 1997, Hollywood
released two popular movies about the childhood of the Dalai Lama, Jean-Jacques
Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun.
Since the 1970s, Hollywood has also presented a far different image of the clash
between Euro-Americans and Native Americans. Although often lapsing into simplis-
tic sentimentality, movies such as A Man Called Horse (1970), Little Big Man (1970),
The Emerald Forest (1985), The Mission (1986), Powwow Highway (1989), Dances with
Wolves (1990), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991), Thunderheart (1992), The Last
of His Tribe (1992), and Disney’s animated Pocahontas (1995) critique Anglo-
American colonialism and portray aspects of indigenous spirituality with sympathy.
See also: Religion and Censorship in Film

References
Baugh, Lloyd. Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film. Kansas City: Sheed & Ward,
1997.
Greeley, Andrew. God in Popular Culture. Chicago: Thomas More Press, 1988.
Hart, David M. Muslim Tribesmen and the Colonial Encounter in Fiction and Film. Amsterdam:
Het Spinhuis, 2001.

1044
 Representations of Disability in Film

Jaher, Frederic Cople, and Blair B. Kling. “Hollywood’s India: The Meaning of RKO’s Gunga
Din.” Film & History 38, 2004: 33–44.
Landau, Paul S., and Deborah D. Kaspin, eds. Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and
Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
May, John R., and Michael Bird, eds. Religion in Film. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1982.
Murphy, Joseph M. “Black Religion and Black Magic: Prejudice and Projection in Images of
African-Derived Religions.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Acad-
emy of Religion, Anaheim, 1989.
Nadel, Alan. “God’s Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War Epic,”
PMLA 108, 1993: 415–30.
Scott, Bernard Brandon. Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories. Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1994.
Shaw, Tony. “Martyrs, Miracles, and Martians: Religion and Cold War Cinematic Propaganda
in the 1950s.” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, 2002: 3–22.
—James Rohrer

REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY IN FILM. Characters with disabilities

and disability-related themes have appeared far more often in American movies than
is usually noted. The American Film Institute Catalog of American Films lists thousands
of characters in thousands of movies: blind and amputee and wheelchair-riding war
veterans; crime story villains and horror film monsters who are maimed or deformed
or “insane” or in some other way disabled; self-pitying blind people and bitter paraple-
gics as well as inspiring strivers who triumph over their assumed limitations; blind
women threatened by unseen assailants; and many others. Why has “disability” so
often drawn the interest of both American filmmakers and movie audiences?
There seem to be two reasons. Throughout history, disability has been a common
experience. Current demographic data estimate that one in six Americans has a disabil-
ity with a major impact on life activities. As a result, disability has been virtually a con-
stant societal issue throughout the modern era. Second, disabled people’s presence and
the social problem of disability have bumped up against American values and con-
cerns, especially regarding notions of individualism and autonomy, self-control and
self-making, and gender. Three sets of examples will illustrate how movies have taken
up disability as a social problem.
Films about disabled veterans implicitly addressed anxieties about their social rein-
tegration. World War II–era films—Pride of the Marines (1945), The Best Years of Our
Lives (1946), Till the End of Time (1946), The Men (1950), and Bright Victory
(1951), for example—made this a major theme. All of these films reflect attitudes that
both honored and feared disabled veterans as heroes as well as misfits (Gerber, 2000).
Social commentators and rehabilitation professionals warned that physical and psycho-
logical injuries might bring disorder to homeland society. Best Years dramatized that
ambivalence in a powerful way. Homer Parrish, a double-amputee Navy veteran, is
courageous and coping, yet dependent and menacing. The movie also reflects contem-
porary rehabilitation ideology. In particular, professional advice and media reportage

1045
Representations of Disability in Film

Scene from the 1951 film Bright Victory, directed by Mark Robson. (Photofest)

made women responsible for caring for and supporting disabled men’s psychological
and social reintegration. That message is central to the narrative structure of Best Years,
especially in regard to the way Homer’s relationship with his fiancée is defined. Best
Years also depoliticizes the novel on which the film was based, replacing the narrative
focus of prejudice against disability with a filmic drama that centers on individual
psychological adjustment. All of the movies mentioned here portray disability as
mainly a matter of intra- and interpersonal coping. Significantly, themes of maladjust-
ment, social alienation, troubled reintegration, remasculinization, and restoration to
society once again appeared in cinematic offerings when films about the Vietnam
War began to be made in the 1970s. Films such as Coming Home (1977), Cutter’s
Way (1981), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Scent of a Woman (1992), and Forrest
Gump (1994), for example, all used disability as a metaphor for the moral and social
maiming of America as a result of our participation in a profoundly destructive, and
in the case of Vietnam, wholly unpopular war.
Other movies depicted disability as a personal, familial, and societal burden that
should be relieved by the voluntary or involuntary elimination of individuals with sig-
nificant disabilities. Where Are My Children? (1916), a pro-eugenics message film,
describes children with disabilities as “Unwanted Souls,” while The Black Stork
(1915) depicts physical and mental “defectives” as promiscuous, menacing, and crimi-
nal to make its case for eugenic sterilization of disabled adults and euthanizing disabled
infants. Eugenic themes have been central to many science fiction movies. Gattaca
(1997), for instance, depicts a future society in which congenitally genetically inferior

1046
 Representations of Disability in Film

people and people with acquired disabilities are discriminated against. A paraplegic
wheelchair rider was born genetically superior but sustained a spinal cord injury in a
car accident. Having lost his status and identity, he devalues himself just as society
devalues him. After selling his genetic makeup to a man born an invalid, he does the
honorable thing, committing suicide.
Some movies directly or indirectly advocated mercy killing, suicide, or assisted sui-
cide of people with disabilities. From early on, certain films portrayed paraplegics as
rightfully ending their presumably mangled lives: Doctor Neighbor, A Law for the Defec-
tive (1915), What Would You Do? (1920), The Crime of Dr. Forbes (1936), The Sacred
Flame (1929), and The Right to Live (1935) are examples. In On Borrowed Time
(1939), death’s emissary persuades an old man who rides a wheelchair (Lionel Barrymore)
that death will be a merciful release for his grandson who, after an accident, will “never
walk again.” When he touches them, both the boy and the old man die instantly, then
stand and walk toward the light in the distant sky, excited and happy. Other movies
present suicide as an escape from blindness and epilepsy: for example, The Light That
Failed (1916, 1923, 1939), ’night, Mother (1986). Several movies reflect the later “right
to die” debate by propagating the view that quadriplegics’ lives are unendurably bur-
densome to themselves and society: Act of Love (1980), Whose Life Is It, Anyway?
(1982), and Million Dollar Baby (2005), for instance.
Asserting that disabled people are socioeconomic burdens, some movies pitted them
against other disadvantaged social groups. The Black Stork shows actual mentally and
physically disabled inmates at the Chicago State Hospital lounging on the parklike
grounds while poor, nondisabled children starve in the slums. Whose Life Is It, Anyway?
has an African American hospital orderly complain, “we are spending thousands of
dollars a week to keep [Ken Harrison] alive,” when for a few pennies we could save
the lives of African children by vaccinating them against measles. One of the most
powerful filmic expressions of the argument for euthanizing a disabled person as both
an act of mercy for a hopeless victim and something that will remove a societal burden
is Of Mice and Men (1939, 1981, and 1992). A “feebleminded” muscular giant, the
unintentionally violent Lenny, not only burdens his pal and protector George; he
destroys the realization of an economic dream that would have provided monetary
security for a number of farm workers trapped in the Great Depression.
Of Mice and Men reflected the early twentieth-century campaign against “the men-
ace of the feebleminded” propagated by medical professionals who described them as
violently criminal and sexually promiscuous or predatory (depending on their gender)
and who demanded their institutionalization, sterilization, or elimination. Many mov-
ies produced during the first half of the twentieth century feature feebleminded male
villains, many of whom are sexual predators: Out of the Fog (1919), Where’s Mary?
(1919), The Broken Gate (1920, 1927), Forbidden Valley (1920), Calvert’s Valley
(1922), Black Lightning (1924), The Lodge in the Wilderness (1926), Scarlet Empress
(1934), The Corpse Vanishes (1940), A Man Betrayed (1941), for example. It is arguable
that the Creature in the many Frankenstein movies represents eugenic stereotypes of
the dangerous feeble-minded male. In the late twentieth century, mentally disabled
men were often depicted as monsters and villains in horror, science fiction, and

1047
Representations of Disability in Film

exploitation movies such as A Bucket of Blood (1959, 1995), Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
(1965), The Gruesome Twosome (1968), The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant
(1971), Monstrosity (1988), The Lawnmower Man (1992); and postwar Westerns such
as Wagonmaster (1950), The Gunfight at Dodge City (1959), The Deadly Trackers
(1973), and True Grit (1969) featured menacing feeble-minded outlaws. Somewhat
ironically, at least two major dramas used mentally disabled characters to make their
very serious points: The Young Savages (1961) critically examines the consequences of
slum conditions on Puerto Rican street gang members, one of whom is a violent “men-
tal defective”; and in Deliverance (1972), four urbanites canoe down a southern river
intending to get back to nature but discover instead that nature can be vicious, an idea
that is ominously symbolized by a retarded, albino banjoist and a quadriplegic boy
with cerebral palsy.
While many mentally disabled characters display their internal disorder by acting
out violently, some manifest their inability to control themselves or their situation
because they are victims of exploitation. Female characters may be victims of sexual
exploitation, sexually promiscuous, or both, as seen in films like Fanchon the Cricket
(1915), The Arizona Cat Claw (1919), Foolish Wives (1922), Blackboard Jungle
(1955), Gigot (1962), The Hustler of Muscle Beach (1980), The Hand That Rocks the
Cradle (1992), Lost in Yonkers (1993), About Sarah (1999), and Happy Face Murders
(1999).
A counter-image, with a long history, depicted mentally disabled people as holy
innocents or holy fools, individuals whose simplicity and guilelessness unconsciously
reflect what really matters in life. Often they serve as the means to redeem nondisabled
characters from self-centeredness, as depicted in films such as Rain Man (1988), One
Special Victory (1991), Two Over Easy (1991), and Forrest Gump (1994). The Green
Mile (1999) even presents a mentally disabled character who at first seems to fit the
stereotype of the huge, violent, sexually predatory male, but who is revealed to be a
childlike innocent whose presence humanizes his death row guards. At the same time,
he has miraculous healing powers. While those traits are positive in comparison to the
traditional extremely negative stereotypes, they also act to deny him of his ordinary,
“normal,” humanity.
The dependent disabled person as a vehicle for a selfish, nondisabled person’s moral
redemption is a mainstay of many other movies. Most notable are the 56 live-action
and 15 animated theatrical and television versions of A Christmas Carol produced
between 1901 and 2009 by U.S. and British Commonwealth film companies. Rain
Man (1988) is an adaptation of the same plot: helping his idiot savant brother works
to humanize a greedy, self-centered man.
Films such as Charly (1968), The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970), and Color Me Perfect
(1996), present a medical solution that appears to allow for the social integration of
people with mental disabilities; but in all of these stories, the cures prove to be tempo-
rary and the situations end up being sentimentally tragic. During the latter half of the
twentieth century, a vigorous advocacy movement fought prejudice and discrimina-
tion, demanded appropriate education, and asserted the capabilities and rights of peo-
ple with mental disabilities to community participation. One of the first films to reflect

1048
 Representations of Disability in Film

this new perspective was A Child Is Waiting (1962), a didactic social drama about a
progressive school. A great many such movies followed, most of them made for televi-
sion. Films like Andy (1965), A Special Kind of Love (1978), Kids Like These (1987),
Bonds of Love (1992), Jonathan: The Boy Nobody Wanted (1992), The Yarn Princess
(1992), Behind the Mask (1999), The Loretta Claiborne Story (1999), and The Other
Sister (1999) not only focused on children, but also depicted innocent, childlike adults
who represented the opposable others of the sexually predatory, menacing, feeble-
minded males. A few films, such as Like Normal People (1979) and No Other Love
(1978), actually portrayed mentally disabled people as capable of romance, sexual
self-expression, and marriage. Two of the most powerfully affecting of these types of
films were the TV movies Bill (1981) and Bill: On His Own (1983). Based on the life
of Bill Sackter (Mickey Rooney), who spent 44 years imprisoned in an institution and
then learned to live in the community, these films reflected a contemporary deinstitu-
tionalization movement that actively worked to reverse the early twentieth-century
“menace” campaign.
If many movies portrayed disability as a social problem, many more indirectly
reflected cultural anxieties about disability and people with disabilities as threats to
basic American values and identities. Disability as the cause and/or consequence of
internal moral and psychological disorder appeared in every movie genre, and a socially
threatening lack of control was a key trait of “bad guys” with every type of disability.
There were menacing albinos (The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 1972; The Eiger
Sanction, 1975); malevolent amputees (The Unknown, 1927; Peter Pan, 1953; Charade,
1962; Lonely Are the Brave, 1962); and threatening asthmatics (Experiment in Terror,
1962; Blue Velvet, 1988). Some villains walked with canes or crutches (Queen Kelly,
1931; The Lady from Shanghai, 1947; Touch of Evil, 1957; Cool Hand Luke, 1967) or
had club feet (The Birth of a Nation, 1915; The Mad Genius, 1931). Others rode wheel-
chairs (The Penalty, 1920, 1941; West of Zanzibar, 1928; It’s a Wonderful Life, 1947;
House of Wax, 1955; The Comancheros, 1961; Dr. Strangelove, 1963; Caged Heat,
1974). Some were visually impaired (Drums along the Mohawk, 1939; Dick Tracy vs.
Cueball, 1946; They Live by Night, 1948; Ffolkes, 1979), others deaf or hard of hearing
(No Way Out, 1950; The Big Knife, 1955; Some Like It Hot, 1959; Mirage, 1965). There
were dwarf villains (The Unholy Three, 1925, 1930; Lone Wolf McQuade, 1983) and
villains with epilepsy (The Big Sleep, 1946, 1977). Some spoke through artificial voice
boxes (The Abominable Dr. Phibes, 1971; Cold Steel, 1987; Donnie Brasco, 1996), or
breathed through respirators (Star Wars, 1977, 1980, 1983). Stutterers might be killers
(Rope, 1948), killers might be mute (Bride of the Monster, 1955). Siamese twins could
be murderous (Basket Case, 1981, and its sequels; Sisters, 1973), “hunchbacks” were
usually malevolent (Richard III; The Devils, 1971), and people with facial disfigurements
were virtually always extremely violent (Phantom of the Opera, 1925, and its many
sequels; The Abominable Dr. Phibes, 1971; Halloween, 1977, and its sequels; Friday the
13th, 1980, and its sequels; A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1991, and its sequels). Mentally
ill villains can scarcely be counted (The Beast with Five Fingers, 1946; The Dark Knight,
2008). Indeed, silent screen star Lon Chaney built his career on villains with disabilities,
and many of James Bond’s adversaries had disabilities (Dr. No, 1962; Casino Royale,

1049
Representations of Disability in Film

1967; You Only Live Twice, 1967; Live and Let Die, 1973; The Man with the Golden
Gun, 1974; For Your Eyes Only, 1981; Licence to Kill, 1989). All of these characterizations
reflect the “spread effect” of prejudice: the stigmatized trait pervasively spoils the dis-
abled person’s social identity (Goffman, 1963; Wright, 1960). Physical deformity,
expressed externally, manifests internal moral, psychological, and social deviance. This
dangerous deviance separates the disabled character from the community; and, in the
end, makes his or her death the only acceptable solution.
Disabled characters who were not villains were often victims, whether blind (The
Blind Boy, 1908; A Patch of Blue, 1965); deaf (Johnny Belinda, 1948; In the Company
of Men, 1997); “hunchbacked” (The Fox Woman, 1915; The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
1939 and sequels); paraplegic (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962); or walking
with a cane (The Walking Stick, 1970). Characters with disabilities were often in physi-
cal danger, from which they could not protect themselves. Autistic children were in
jeopardy (Innocent, 1994), as were women who rode wheelchairs (Night Must Fall,
1937, 1964; Eye of the Cat, 1969). Blind women were particularly at risk (Orphans of
the Storm, 1921; Wait Until Dark, 1967).
Characters with certain disabilities were typically comical figures. They stuttered
(Girl Shy, 1924; A Fish Called Wanda, 1988) or lisped (The Cable Guy, 1996); were vis-
ually impaired (Mr. Magoo; See No Evil, Hear No Evil, 1989); short-statured (The Terror
of Tiny Town, 1940); amputees (The Cripple’s Marriage, 1909; Nothing but Trouble,
1991; Kingpin, 1996); deaf or hard of hearing (The Deaf Mutes’ Ball, 1907; New York
Stories: “Oedipus Wrecks,” 1989; See No Evil, Hear No Evil, 1989); or mentally disabled
(Up the River, 1930; Road to Morocco, 1942; Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid! 1986; There’s Some-
thing about Mary, 1998).
Whether villainous or victimized, in danger or comical, the drama or comedy
revolved around their presumed lack of control of themselves or their environment.
For some characters, this put them in danger; for others, it robbed them of their dig-
nity. Though these characters, or the situations in which they found themselves, were
typically exaggerated, they reflected deep-seated cultural anxieties. Loss of control,
which in American culture generally means loss of autonomy and self-sovereignty,
has arguably been one of Americans’ greatest fears. Displacing that fear onto fictional
disabled characters removes it to a somewhat manageable distance.
American movies have offered two solutions to disability as lack or loss of control.
In the silent and early sound era, the remedy was often to find a cure. Some were
effected by medical intervention, but culturally more significant were the cures dis-
abled individuals achieved by sheer willpower. One of the most melodramatic exam-
ples is Lucky Star (1929), in which a disabled World War I veteran, whose wheelchair
symbolizes his neutering, rises from the chair, runs using crutches, then drops the
crutches to continue running, ultimately rescuing his lover.
Post–World War II movies tended to replace physical cure with prevailing psycho-
logical cures. Reflecting a rehabilitation ideology, many films used a formulaic plot:
bitter, physically disabled or blind characters succumb to self-pity; but then, con-
fronted by a rebuking friend or a crisis, realize that they can cope, and even be loved,
with their disabilities. These stories became particularly common in made-for-TV

1050
 Representations of Disability in Film

movies. The Men, mentioned earlier, was one of the first examples. Other notable
examples are The Stratton Story, 1949; With a Song in My Heart, 1952; Interrupted
Melody, 1955; Ice Castles, 1978; The Other Side of the Mountain, Parts I and II, 1975,
1978; and Passion Fish, 1992. These triumph-over-adversity tales propagate a classic
American myth: success or failure depends on individual character and determination.
This framing also makes disability an individual rather than a social problem, one that
stems from prejudice and ignorance.
Some films did feature heroes with disabilities. They often have to counter biases:
for example, the young amputee in Freckles (1928, 1935, 1960) and the blind and
quadriplegic detectives in Eyes in the Night (1942; sequel The Hidden Eye, 1945) and
The Bone Collector (1999). A few films briefly touch on prejudice. Bright Victory
and Pride of the Marines liken bias against blind people, respectively, to racism and
anti-Semitism. Other movies, such as Freaks (1932), The Elephant Man (1980), and
Mask (1985), confront prejudice more extensively, but they often involve characters
with serious and rare conditions, the kind of disabled people viewers would seldom
encounter. A few later films reflect an emerging disability rights consciousness. The
TV movie The Ordeal of Bill Carney (1981) dramatized a quadriplegic father’s lawsuit
for custody of his sons and depicted his disabled lawyer militantly advocating not only
for that right but for his own right of public access. Two other films, Gaby: A True Story
(1987) and My Left Foot (1989), based on the lives of real people with cerebral
palsy, show each battling prejudice in an attempt to define themselves and direct their
own lives. In contrast, Children of a Lesser God (1986)—an extraordinary title that
powerfully expresses the possibility of society explaining away its treatment of the
disabled—politically sanitized a stage play about issues around deaf versus hearing cul-
ture by turning it into a romance.
The enormous variety of filmic characterizations of one of society’s most margin-
alized groups, it seems, reflects the complexity and contradictions involved in attaching
cultural meanings to disability in America. All indicate the unsettled state of social
thinking and the fragile place of people with disabilities in modern American society.

References
Gerber, David A. “Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Social Reintegration of Disabled Veterans
of World War II in The Best Years of Our Lives.” American Quarterly 46(2), December 1994:
545–74. Reprinted in Gerber, David A., ed. Disabled Veterans in History. Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 2000.
Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1963.
Longmore, Paul K. “The Glorious Rage of Christy Brown.” In Longmore, Paul K. Why I
Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
Longmore, Paul K. “Mask: A Revealing Portrayal of Disabled.” Los Angeles Times Sunday Calen-
dar, May 5, 1985. Reprinted in Longmore, Paul K. Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays
on Disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.

1051
Romantic Comedy, The

Longmore, Paul K. “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and

Motion Pictures.” Social Policy 16, Summer 1985: 31–37; reprinted in Longmore, Paul K.
Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2003.
Norden, Martin F. “Bitterness, Rage, and Redemption: Hollywood Constructs the Disabled
Vietnam Veteran.” In Gerber, David A., ed. Disabled Veterans in History. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2000.
Norden, Martin F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Wright, Beatrice A. Physical Disability: A Psychological Approach. New York: Harper & Row,
1960.
—Paul K. Longmore

ROMANTIC COMEDY, THE. When Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night was
released in 1934, audiences were not exactly sure what it was about the film that made
them feel so good, they only knew that they loved it. Most film historians point to the
picture as the first of what came to be called “romantic comedies.” As it turned out, the
year would prove to be a pivotal one for the romantic comedy, as in addition to It Hap-
pened One Night, three other pictures representative of this new film genre were also
released: Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century, starring John Barrymore and Carole
Lombard, the latter in her comic debut; W. S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man, the first of
the Thin Man series starring William Powell and Myrna Loy; and the Fred Astaire-
Ginger Rogers vehicle Flying Down to Rio. It was Capra’s film that made the biggest
impression, however.
Intriguingly, while movies in every other film genre have evolved—westerns, war
films, even musicals—romantic comedies have remained the same since they began
to be made in the 1930s. Three-act offerings all, they have made us laugh and touched
our hearts for decades. We all know how these narratives play out: Act One, boy meets
girl (almost without exception) and they invariably dislike each other—we, however,
know that they belong together; Act Two, boy and girl fall in love, but something, class
differences, meddling parents, something, keeps them apart—we, however, root for
them to be united; Act Three, everything is resolved, boy and girl are together (again,
almost without exception)—and we are left smiling, often through tears. Why have
these films remained so popular, even though audiences know exactly how they will
turn out? It may be that romantic comedies are so popular precisely because we do
know how they will turn out—the notion that, against all odds, people who are des-
tined to be together will somehow find each other, prevail over adversity, and live hap-
pily ever after, is one that provides us with hope and comfort in an all too often
uncaring world.
One thing that audiences found so appealing about It Happened One Night was the
give-and-take between stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. As film critic James
Harvey puts it: “There was some new kind of energy in their style: slangy, combative,
humorous, unsentimental—and powerfully romantic” (Harvey, 1987). Significantly,
this wonderfully new filmic energy that passed between Gable and Colbert was one

1052
 Romantic Comedy, The

Tony Curtis (with saxophone), Jack Lemmon (with double bass), and Marilyn Monroe in a still
from director Billy Wilder’s comedy Some Like It Hot. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

of the central elements of what film historians came to call the screwball comedy.
Comprising a sort of sister genre of the romantic comedy, screwball comedies have
the same basic narrative structure as the romantic comedy, yet the screwball variety
of these pictures is marked by a number of important differences. Notable among these
is the tendency for screwballs to play as farce, going so far as to make fun of romance
itself. They also tend to be populated by a host of agreeably wacky characters, to unfold
at a much faster pace than romantic comedies, and to reverse traditional gender roles,
presenting audiences with strong, independent women who usually dominate—and
often humiliate—their antiheroic male counterparts.
The screwball variation of the romantic comedy traces its roots back to the comedic
cinema of the early twentieth century. Interestingly, while the figure of the heroic
American male was being fleshed out in dozens of B-westerns during the first three
decades of the twentieth century, during the 1910s and 1920s comedic performers
such as Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin were defining the figure
of the antiheroic male. Unlike the heroic westerner who confronted his circumstances
and overcame them in a commanding, often violent fashion, the antihero was a victim
of circumstances who, although he may have achieved a certain sort of success by the
end of his adventure, would almost always have been humiliated along the way. Ironi-
cally, because Lloyd, Keaton, and Chaplin emerged as stars during the silent era, they

1053
Romantic Comedy, The

remained the focus of their pictures; this would begin to change, however, with the
advent of sound, as now the humiliation of the antiheroic male increasingly occurred
in the midst of relational moments during which hapless men were thoroughly domi-
nated by assertive and very vocal women (Gehring, 2002).
Turning back to 1934 and It Happened One Night, then, the “slangy, combative,
humorous” energy that passed between Gable and Colbert did seem to mark the film as
a screwball comedy. Yet, although the picture is, indeed, often characterized as such, it
actually appears to be much better suited to the category of the romantic comedy. This is
so, it seems, because although there is a good deal of what can be characterized as orthodox
screwball banter between Ellie and Peter, Capra never satirizes romance. On the contrary,
he makes true love the foundational element of the narrative structure of It Happened One
Night—Ellie and Peter must get together in the end because, quite simply, they are right
for each other. Thus, It Happened One Night can more properly be characterized as a
romantic comedy with screwball elements, rather than as a straight screwball comedy.
Audiences would have to wait until 1937 for the release of what may be character-
ized as the definitive screwball comedy, Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth. Having cut
his directorial teeth during the 1920s making dozens of shorts, McCarey was respon-
sible for pairing Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, creating one of the most enduring
comic duos in film history. He had also worked with the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields,
and Mae West before he took on The Awful Truth, so he knew something about the
filmic use of witty repartee. The Awful Truth stars Cary Grant and Irene Dunne as Jerry
and Lucy Warriner, wealthy, jet-setting members of the upper crust who split up due to
being jealous of each other, and then jealously attempt to sabotage each other’s rela-
tionship with a new partner so that they might get back together. Grant and Dunne
are often called the best screwball team ever assembled—they would pair again as
screwball leads in My Favorite Wife (1940)—and watching the two on-screen it is hard
to argue with this assessment. Dunne is wonderfully dismissive as Lucy and Grant’s
Jerry Warriner is the epitome of the long-suffering paramour. Grant’s characterization
of Jerry is particularly significant, as he would go on to refine this unique screen per-
sona and to delight film audiences with it over and over again. Grant, of course, would
become one of Hollywood’s most popular, and profitable, stars, playing roles in movies
that spanned diverse cinematic genres—melodramas, Hitchcock mysteries, war films—
but his work as a screwball comedy leading man is certainly some of his most memo-
rable. When one considers how attractive Grant was—stunningly handsome and oozing
charm—it is somewhat amazing that he could make us believe he would ever have
to play second fiddle in a relationship, and yet he does. Gable could play self-effacing
characters at whom we could laugh—his Peter Warne in It Happened One Night is the
perfect example—but he always remained in control, a point, by the way, in favor of
the argument that It Happened One Night is a romantic comedy and not a screwball.
Grant’s screwball characters, however, although they were always accomplished at what-
ever they did, never seemed in control of their love life—provocatively, that control was
always ceded over to a woman.
Nowhere is this ceding of romantic control to the female given more powerful
expression than in the Howard Hawks 1938 Bringing Up Baby. Bringing Up Baby

1054
 Romantic Comedy, The

was actually the second of two screwballs released in 1938 that starred Cary Grant and
Katharine Hepburn; the other was George Cukor’s Holiday. Although, as it turned out,
the madcap antics of Grant and Hepburn in Holiday appealed to 1930s audiences in a
way that those in Bringing Up Baby did not—while Holiday proved to be a box-office
hit, Bringing Up Baby was a box-office disaster—it may be argued that it was in the lat-
ter film that Grant and Hepburn mapped out a screwball relationship that not only
extended the one defined by Grant and Dunne in The Awful Truth, but one that also
provided viewers with something wonderfully unique in regard to the dominant cin-
ematic female.
Bringing Up Baby finds renowned paleontologist Dr. David Huxley (Grant) desper-
ately trying to bring his five-year-long struggle to reconstruct a dinosaur skeleton to a
close. Set to be married to Miss Swallow (Virginia Walker), he is reminded by his
betrothed that he has an appointment with an attorney at a golf course to discuss the
possibility of Dr. Huxley receiving a $1 million grant to complete his project. At the
golf course, David has a jarring encounter with Susan Vance (Hepburn), who will turn
out to be the figure that completely changes his life. Susan is an heiress whose extraor-
dinary wealth and sense of privilege—she actually keeps a pet leopard, which turns out
to be the “baby” in the film’s title—allow her to exist in some ethereal realm in which
she remains hopelessly unaware of the world around her, although she often has a
powerful impact on it. At the golf course, she insists on playing the wrong ball on
the putting green—it is David’s—and driving off from the parking lot in the wrong
car—which is also David’s. She waves away his protestations, finally tossing out one
of the film’s most significant lines: “Your ball, your car; is there anything in the world
that doesn’t belong to you?”
Susan’s statement is, of course, absurd—which is what makes it so funny—as she
has played the wrong ball and has driven off in the wrong car, both of which do, in fact,
belong to David. It is also absurdist, though, as in the moment that it is uttered, it
effectively disrupts the filmic order of things—troping the dominant position of the
male and refracting the notion of the reasonable. Admittedly, Grant’s Jerry Warriner
in The Awful Truth had certainly been subordinated to Irene Dunne’s Lucy, but there
is something different going on in Bringing Up Baby. As Harvey suggests, “Grant’s
partnership with Hepburn here is different from those with the leading women in
his other great comedies—with Dunne in The Awful Truth or Rosalind Russell in
His Girl Friday (1940)—where he is in competition with a heroine whose wit and skills
match or even outdistance his own. In Bringing Up Baby the hero presumes from the
beginning a superiority to the ditzy heroine—of sanity and reasonableness—which
turns out not to exist, or not to matter if it does. With Hepburn’s Susan he is not in
competition but simply out of his depth” (Harvey, 1987).
Harvey gets this just right, as Grant’s Jerry Warriner in The Awful Truth is not
bested by Dunne’s Lucy—nor is his Walter Burns in His Girl Friday bested by Rosalind
Russell’s Hildy Johnson—because Jerry cannot compete with Lucy, but rather because
Lucy is just a little bit better at the game than is Jerry. In Bringing Up Baby, however,
David Huxley is never even in the game—to paraphrase a line from the latter-day
romantic comedy Jerry Maguire, Susan had David at hello. In the end, then, he admits

1055
Romantic Comedy, The

that he has “never had a better time” than when, totally out of character for this
button-down professor, he was cavorting with Susan; so good a time, it appears, that
even when Susan destroys his precious brontosaurus skeleton, he merely sighs and says,
“Oh dear, all right,” and then embraces her passionately.
Ironically, Hepburn had been labeled “box-office poison” in the years leading up to
the release of Bringing Up Baby, an idea that is hard to fathom given her extraordinarily
successful big-screen career. Early on, though, audiences did indeed turn away from
some of Hepburn’s films—again, although it is now considered a cinematic classic, it
is important to remember that Bringing Up Baby failed at the box office when it was
first released. Part of what audiences found unappealing about Hepburn, it seems,
was related to her frustration with a Hollywood system dominated by men, most of
whom resented the attitude of this very assertive young woman. Perhaps unwittingly—
and perhaps not—Hepburn’s feelings toward the men who controlled the Hollywood film
industry from behind the camera often came across on-screen, leading some viewers to
describe her as distant, dismissive, and controlling. Her characterization of Susan Vance
in Bringing Up Baby is a good example of this; although at the very end of the picture—
just before she destroys David’s prized dinosaur skeleton—she seems rather endear-
ingly, even girlishly pleased to discover that David actually likes her, her behavior
throughout the film has been expressive of a very different relational sensibility: if
David wants to be with Susan, he will have to play by her rules. “Oh dear, all right,”
one imagines David repeating over and over again during their time together.
Although audiences did flock to see Holiday, then, the other screwball offering of
1938 that starred Hepburn and Grant, the pictures in which Hepburn starred that
actually made her a comedic success were romantic comedies, not screwball offerings.
The first of these, The Philadelphia Story (1940), also featured Grant, along with
another actor who would become a much-loved romantic comedy lead, Jimmy
Stewart. Stewart—another incredibly versatile actor who played various characters
spanning diverse genres who is probably best remembered for his roles in populist
films such as Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s A Wonderful Life
(1946)—had already warmed the hearts of audiences in The Shop Around the Corner,
a 1940 romantic comedy directed by the brilliant Ernst Lubitsch. Lubitsch, who would
go on to make a great number of very successful romantic comedies, would himself be
instrumental in shaping the direction that the non-screwball comedies of the 1940s
would take, helming not only The Shop Around the Corner but also 1939’s Ninotchka,
which starred Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas.
The Philadelphia Story was adapted from a 1939 Broadway play of the same name
written by Philip Barry expressly for Hepburn; Hepburn even worked with Barry for
two months to get the script exactly right. A huge success on Broadway, the play
explored the life of a bright, young, beautiful upper-class woman whose off-putting,
elitist self-absorption is called into question by the people in her life who swirl around
her, especially the men. Broadway audiences quickly realized that Hepburn’s Philadelphia
Story characterization of protagonist Tracy Lord was, on many levels, autobiographical in
its expression, something that actually worked in Hepburn’s favor, as it turned out.
When the screen adaptation was released in 1940, it proved to be every bit as successful

1056
 Romantic Comedy, The

as the stage production, effectively reviving—or perhaps more correctly, saving—Hep-

burn’s career.
The film opens with Tracy’s husband, C. K. Dexter Haven (Grant), angrily stomp-
ing his way out of their estate, bags in hand. She follows, carrying two material signs of
Dexter’s upper-class male privilege: his pipe holder and his golf bag. Casting the pipe
holder to the ground where it smashes into pieces at her feet, she removes a club from
the golf bag, hurling the latter after Dexter. In a final act of defiance, she breaks the golf
club she holds over her knee—a symbolic moment of phallic rupture, perhaps—and
throws these at Dexter, as well. Turning and marching back toward the door, Tracy is
accosted by Dexter. Catching up to her, he raises his hand to strike her but thinks bet-
ter of it; instead, he palms her face and roughly pushes her to the floor.
Two years later, now divorced from Dexter, Tracy is on the verge of marrying
George Kittredge (John Howard). The unscrupulous editor of Spy magazine, Sidney
Kidd (Henry Daniell), wants a tabloid style exposé on the wedding and decides to send
his ace reporter, Macauley “Mike” Carter (Stewart)—who hates the idea—and his
crack photographer, Elizabeth “Liz” Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), to bring home the story.
In order to get his staff members into the Lord mansion, Kidd blackmails Dexter,
threatening to reveal salacious information about Tracy’s father, Mr. Seth Lord ( John
Halliday), if Dexter does not agree to go forward with the plan. Mike and Liz will be
introduced as Dexter’s good friends and, once they are inside, will subtly gather infor-
mation about Tracy and her family. Tracy ultimately uncovers the plot and forces
Dexter to admit his complicity. When he explains the details of Kidd’s blackmail
scheme, Tracy agrees to meet the Spy magazine intruders.
When Mike, Liz, and Tracy first encounter each other, it seems as if the narrative
will play out in typical screwball fashion: Tracy sweeps into the room, loudly speaking
French and imperiously introducing herself as Tracy Lord. Taken aback, Carter can
barely get his words out: “I’m—I’m Mike to my friends.” To which Tracy wickedly
responds, “Of whom you have many, I’m sure.” Tracy, always the best and the brightest
in any room in which she appears, turns the tables on Mike and Liz, peppering them
with questions about themselves. Although shaken by her onslaught, Mike is also
enamored by this force of nature, and it is he who describes Tracy to perfection:
“There’s magnificence in you, Tracy . . . a magnificence that comes out of your eyes
and your voice and the way you stand there and the way you walk. You’re lit from
within, Tracy. You’ve got fires banked down in you, hearth fires and holocausts!”
It is not surprising to hear Mike describe Tracy as having fires banked down in her
that are holocaust-like, threatening to destroy everything in their path. Hearth fires are
altogether different, though, calling to mind notions of home and family, which seem
to have little to do with screwball heroines. It is difficult to imagine, for example, the
female characters in screwball comedies gathered together with the members of their
families around the hearth, soothing and comforting them. Certainly this would never
have been the case with Lucy Warriner in The Awful Truth—although she and Jerry
end up getting back together, there is no sense that she wishes to settle down and have
children. And Susan Vance from Bringing Up Baby? Even after letting David into her
life, it is clear that the only baby that the couple will rear is Susan’s pet leopard. Why,

1057
Romantic Comedy, The

then, the reference to hearth fires in The Philadelphia Story? Interestingly, Hepburn’s
Tracy Lord character could be every bit as acerbic as her Susan Vance character was
in Bringing Up Baby. And yet, with Tracy, unlike with Susan, there is a sense that there
are indeed hearth fires banked down in her, something warm and comforting, if only it
can be tapped. How, though, to get at this comforting core of Tracy Lord? What is
required, it appears, is a narrative deconstruction of this high-handed character, a sort
of filmic damping down of the holocaust flames that burn so passionately within her.
The process of cooling Tracy’s holocaust fires is, for the most part, carried out by the
two most important men in her life, her former husband and her father. Ironically,
Tracy had good reason to divorce Dexter and to distance herself from her father.
Dexter was, in fact, irresponsible, and he did drink far too much; and Seth Lord was
a philanderer, constantly involving himself in embarrassing affairs with chorus girls.
Yet, although there is an unsettling sense that we are to understand that the fault
behind the behavior of both Dexter and Seth lies with Tracy—her father suggests that
his wayward ways were due to her lack of “foolish, unquestioning, uncritical affection”
for him, a result of Tracy being devoid of “an understanding heart”—there is nonethe-
less something important to be learned from what these men have to say to Tracy, espe-
cially Dexter. Tracy is obviously terribly attractive—there is magnificence in her, after
all. Yet hers is a dangerous attraction, as she is arrogant, rude, and intolerant; and her
so-called magnificence only makes things worse. Intelligence, charm, and wit are all
wonderful things, suggests Dexter, but if they are used to destroy people—to burn
them up, as it were—then they are useless.
In the end, Tracy learns her lessons, and she, her father, and Dexter are reunited.
Audiences cheered this turn of events—the too smart, too confident woman ultimately
reined in by the men in her life while being allowed to retain a restrained form of the
magnificence that lies deep within her. Hepburn, it seems clear—especially given that
she was instrumental in shaping both the stage and screen projects—understood the
genius of this Philadelphia Story process. Like Tracy Lord’s, Hepburn’s magnificence
need not be done away with, only controlled, the rough edges polished. Studio heads
accomplished just this over the course of the next decade, casting her in a series of
romantic comedies in which she played smart, accomplished women who are ulti-
mately brought under control by equally accomplished men.
Capitalizing on the success of The Philadelphia Story, then, Hepburn was cast as Tess
Harding in George Stevens’s 1942 Woman of the Year. A streetwise, go-get-’em
reporter, she falls in love with rival journalist Sam Craig, played by Spencer Tracy.
The pairing of Hepburn and Tracy was inspired. Tracy had already begun to establish
himself as one of the most powerful and well-loved figures in the American film indus-
try, and audiences found it easy to believe that he was the right man to rein in the mag-
nificent Kate. It helped, of course, that Hepburn would fall deeply, devotedly in love
with Tracy, even though he was married, had children, and refused to divorce because
he was a devout Catholic and, in Tracy’s mind, a committed family man. The two
would carry on a long-term affair, with Hepburn willingly waiting in the wings while
Tracy dispensed with his familial duties. So devoted was Hepburn to Tracy that she
not only accepted her role as the other woman for 27 years, but also endured Tracy’s

1058
 Romantic Comedy, The

demeaning, alcohol-induced rants. Effectively putting her career on hold to nurse

Tracy through his final months, Hepburn was at Tracy’s bedside when he died after
being rushed to the hospital with congestive heart failure while the two were working
on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?—even then, Tracy would acknowledge only that
Hepburn had been a wonderful friend.
The relationship between Hepburn and Tracy did not negatively affect either of
their careers; indeed, Hepburn became a sympathetic character in the eyes of many
film fans because of what she had to endure with Tracy. The two would go on to star
together in three more romantic comedies during the next decade, all of which basi-
cally repeated the storyline of Woman of the Year—strong women tamed by stronger
men: Harold Bucquet’s Without Love (1945), and George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib (1949)
and Pat and Mike (1952). Audiences loved watching Hepburn and Tracy square off
against each other, especially because no matter how elitist Hepburn’s characters were,
viewers knew that Tracy’s characters would bring hers to heal.
Significantly, the filmic relationships defined by Hepburn and Tracy in these films
not only harkened back to the one established by Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert
in It Happened One Night, but they also became models for the romantic-based com-
edies that would follow. Although often marked by screwball moments, the
romantic-based comedies characterized as romantic comedies that followed the
Hepburn-Tracy films were more melodramatically sentimental, more serious about
love, and overwhelmingly respected normative gender roles, with heroic men—as
opposed to their antiheroic screwball counterparts—reining in difficult yet enor-
mously attractive women so that the two could live happily ever after. Admittedly,
screwballs did not disappear completely, continuing to be made throughout the
1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—Hawks’s His Girl Friday, for example, with Grant and Rosalind
Russell, and Garson Kanin’s My Favorite Wife, with Grant and Dunne, in 1940; Preston
Sturges’s The Lady Eve, with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, and George Cukor’s
Two-Faced Woman, with Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas, in 1941; Gregory LaCava’s
Lady in a Jam, with Irene Dunne; Leo McCarey’s Once Upon a Honeymoon, with Grant
and Ginger Rogers; and Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story, with
Claudette Colbert, in 1942; Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace in 1944; Hawks’s I
Was a Male War Bride in 1949 and Monkey Business in 1952, all of which starred Grant;
Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot in 1959, which featured Marilyn Monroe, Jack
Lemmon, and Tony Curtis; and Hawks’s 1964 Man’s Favorite Sport?, with Rock
Hudson and Paula Prentiss. Contemporary directors even tried their hand at the screw-
balls—Peter Bogdanovich, for example, with What’s Up, Doc? in 1972, starring Barbra
Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, and Madeline Kahn; Blake Edwards with Blind Date in 1987,
starring Kim Basinger and Bruce Willis; and Charles Crichton with A Fish Called Wanda
in 1988, featuring John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kevin Kline. Yet audiences, it
seems, wanted something different; they wanted something more like It Happened One
Night—films that, although they might descend at times into screwball mania, nonethe-
less made viewers hopeful about the possibility of falling in love.
From the 1950s on, the film industry was only too happy to oblige audience desire
for romantic comedies, releasing dozens of these films from this point forward. Even

1059
Romantic Comedy, The

actors like Humphrey Bogart, who had made a name for himself as a rough-edged,
hard-boiled detective during the 1940s, got into the picture when he was cast with
Audrey Hepburn in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954). Katharine Hepburn and Spencer
Tracy paired again in Walter Lang’s Desk Set in 1957, and Wilder once again turned
to Audrey Hepburn as his female lead in his 1957 Love in the Afternoon, casting her
opposite Gary Cooper. Audrey Hepburn would also star with Cary Grant in Stanley
Donen’s Charade (1963), one of the many romantic comedies that Grant would make.
Significantly, Grant was every bit as popular as a romantic comedy lead as he had been
as a screwball lead, starring with Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955),
with Deborah Kerr in Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957), with Ingrid Berg-
man in Donen’s Indiscreet (1958), with Sophia Loren in Melville Shavelson’s Houseboat
(1958), with Doris Day in Delbert Mann’s That Touch of Mink (1962), and, as was
mentioned, with Audrey Hepburn in Charade.
Although there will probably never be another Cary Grant, other Hollywood heart-
throbs would follow in his footsteps, appearing in numerous latter-day romantic com-
edies. Rock Hudson, whose early career overlapped the final years of Grant’s, was the
first of the matinee-idol males to follow Grant. Hudson starred alongside Doris Day
in a series of popular, and profitable, romantic comedies: Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk
(1959), Delbert Mann’s Lover Come Back (1961), and Norman Jewison’s Send Me No
Flowers (1964). He also starred with Gina Lollobrigida in both Robert Mulligan’s
Come September (1961) and Melvin Frank’s Strange Bedfellows (1965). Early in his
career, in 1967, Robert Redford starred with Jane Fonda in the Neil Simon project
Barefoot in the Park, and then two decades later with Debra Winger in Ivan Reitman’s
Legal Eagles (1986), and then a decade after that with Michelle Pfeiffer in Jon Avnet’s
Up Close and Personal (1996); while Warren Beatty paired with Leslie Caron in Arthur
Hiller’s Promise Her Anything (1965) and with Julie Christie—his current love interest—
in Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (1975), which he co-wrote with Robert Towne, and Heaven
Can Wait (1978), which he co-directed with Buck Henry, and then with his wife,
Annette Bening, in Glenn Gordon Caron’s Love Affair (1994), which was based on
Leo McCarey’s 1939 Love Affair. Although all of these leading men proved immensely
popular with audiences, none of them reached the romantic comedy heights achieved
by Grant. Interestingly, the one contemporary star who may have the looks and charm
of Grant is George Clooney, although the multitalented actor has only made one
romantically oriented comedy, Michael Hoffman’s One Fine Day (1996), with Michelle
Pfeiffer.
Intriguingly, ultrahandsome leading men are not the only ones who have starred in
latter-day romantic comedies. Billy Crystal, for instance, starred opposite Meg Ryan in
Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989), which featured a Nora Ephron screenplay
that explored the angst-filled situations that characterized romance during the late
twentieth century. Crystal would go on to pair with Debra Winger in Forget Paris
(1995), which he directed and co-wrote, and then in Joe Roth’s ensemble America’s
Sweethearts (2001), which he also co-wrote, with Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-
Jones. America’s Sweethearts also featured John Cusack, who has carved out his own
romantic comedy niche starring in films such as Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything

1060
 Romantic Comedy, The

(1989), with Ione Skye; George Armitage’s offbeat Grosse Point Blank (1997), with
Minnie Driver; Stephen Frears’s High Fidelity (2000); and Peter Chelsom’s Serendipity,
with Kate Beckinsale. The always reliable Tom Hanks, who some have labeled a con-
temporary Jimmy Stewart, has charmed audiences in a series of box-office hits opposite
Meg Ryan, including John Patrick Shanley’s wacky Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) and
the Nora Ephron projects Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and the Shop Around the Corner
remake You’ve Got Mail (1998), both of which Ephron directed and co-wrote.
Perhaps the quirkiest of the contemporary romantic comedy leading men has been
Woody Allen, who married his early leading lady, Louise Lasser; carried on a long-term
affair with another leading lady, Diane Keaton; married yet another of his leading
ladies, Mia Farrow; and who is now married to his much younger (36 years) step-
daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, who had been adopted by Farrow. A dream filmmaker for
Hollywood studio heads—he consistently brings his pictures in on time and on
budget, and his loyal fan base assures that they always make money—Allen began
directing, writing, and starring in a series of ingeniously zany comedies early in his
career, all of which featured Lasser. These included What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), Take
the Money and Run (1966), Bananas (1971), and Everything You Always Wanted to
Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972). In 1972, he starred opposite Diane
Keaton in the first of a series of romantic comedies that the two actors would make
together, Herbert Ross’s Play It Again, Sam, which Allen wrote. Allen plays the roman-
tically inept Allan Felix, who, after going through a messy divorce, tries to get back
into the dating scene. A movie buff, he fantasizes that a trench coat-clad, fedora-
wearing Humphrey Bogart (played to perfection by Jerry Lacy), who only Allan can
see and hear, is giving him pointers on how to handle women. Watched over in his
time of crisis by his friends Dick (Tony Roberts) and Linda (Diane Keaton), who
introduce him to a string of beautiful women, Allan begins to realize that he has fallen
in love with Linda. After sleeping with her, which buoys his confidence tremendously,
Allan comes to understand that Linda is better off with Dick, and in a re-creation of
the famous closing scene from Casablanca he insists that they must stay together.
Although he does not end up with the girl—a rare occurrence in romantic comedies—like
Rick in Casablanca, who insists that Ilsa must accompany Victor as he goes about his life’s
work, Allan makes a sacrifice for a higher cause.
Having become romantically involved when they starred in Play It Again, Sam on
Broadway, Allen and Keaton would go on to make two more offbeat comedies, Sleeper
(1973) and Love and Death (1975), before they played opposite each other in Allen’s
landmark romantic comedy Annie Hall (1977). In the film, Allen plays Alvy Singer
to Keaton’s absolutely delightful Annie Hall, the two constituting a pair of high-
strung New Yorkers who live out their almost Kafkaesque experiences looking for,
and tortured by, love. After writing and directing his first serious film, the Ingmar
Bergman-inspired Interiors (1978) which co-starred Keaton, Allen once again paired
with Keaton in a romantic comedy, 1979’s Manhattan. Here, Allen plays Isaac Davis,
another high-strung New Yorker, who falls for Mary (Keaton), the mistress of his best
friend Yale (Michael Murphy). Interestingly—especially given his future relationship
with Soon-Yi Previn—the 42-year-old Isaac has an affair with Tracy (Mariel

1061
Romantic Comedy, The

Hemingway), a bright, articulate teenager who, rather ironically, ends up teaching

Isaac what love is really about.
Keaton has turned out to be one of the best of the contemporary female romantic
comedy leads, taking up the mantle of actresses such as Claudette Colbert, Irene
Dunne, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, and the Hepburns, Katharine
and Audrey. Keaton’s career continued to flourish after she and Allen split, and even
though she is now in her mid-sixties, she continues to make romantic comedies. In
2003, for instance, she starred in Nancy Meyers’s Something’s Gotta Give, and in
2007 in Michael Lehmann’s Because I Said So. Her co-star in the first picture was Jack
Nicholson, who was cast as an aging playboy with a penchant for young women who,
in this case, falls for an older woman—one who is charming, witty, funny, and sexy.
Nicholson would also star in one of the very best of the contemporary romantic com-
edies, James Brooks’s As Good As It Gets. In Brooks’s film, Nicholson plays Melvin
Udall, an irascible, obnoxious, self-absorbed, obsessive-compulsive, terribly successful
author of romance novels who falls in love with Carol Connelly (played by the
approachably attractive Helen Hunt), a single mother/waitress who struggles to find
love while living with her own mother and taking care of her son, who suffers from
life-threatening asthma attacks. Carol initially wants nothing to do with Jack; but he
works hard to change—being around Carol makes him “want to be a better man”—
and although it seems as if their relationship will be a continual challenge to sustain,
in the end Carol is won over. Although her character is shifted from the corner diner
to the corporate boardroom, Hunt played a similar role in Nancy Meyers’s What
Women Want (2000). Cast opposite Mel Gibson, whose character Nick Marshall,
another aging playboy, can suddenly hear woman’s thoughts after an accident with a
hairdryer, Hunt plays Darcy McGuire, a powerful, sexy, insecure advertising executive.
Unexpectedly attracted to Nick, Darcy ends up teaching him—as Carol did with
Melvin in As Good As It Gets—how to be a better man, and the two end up together.
As was mentioned earlier, after her starring role in When Harry Met Sally, Meg Ryan
would go on to establish herself as the romantic comedy female lead of the 1990s and
early 2000s. Although her dramatic films have almost all been critical and box-office
disasters, Ryan has struck gold—seemingly with anyone with whom she has been
cast—in her romantic comedies. Although Julia Roberts won her Best Actress Acad-
emy Award for her dramatic turn in Erin Brockovich (2000), she has been similarly suc-
cessful as a romantic comedy female lead. After bursting on the scene in Pretty Woman
(1990), playing a prostitute who teaches yet another man about love—in this case a
corporate raider played by Richard Gere—Roberts went on to star in Charles Shyer’s
I Love Trouble (1994), with Nick Nolte; P. J. Hogan’s ensemble My Best Friend’s Wed-
ding (1997), with Dermot Mulroney, Cameron Diaz, and Rupert Everett; Roger
Michell’s Notting Hill (1999), with Hugh Grant; Garry Marshall’s Runaway Bride
(1999), once again with Gere; Gore Verbinski’s The Mexican, with Brad Pitt; the pre-
viously mentioned America’s Sweethearts; and another ensemble, this one directed by
Marshall, Valentine’s Day (2010). Although it would not be surprising to see Ryan or
Roberts in more romantic comedies, the most popular, and bankable, contemporary
female star of the genre is surely Jennifer Aniston. Parlaying her immense popularity

1062
 Romantic Comedy, The

on the sit-com Friends into an enormously successful big-screen career, Aniston has
made a slew of romantic comedies during the 1990s and 2000s. These include Edward
Burns’s She’s the One (1996), Glenn Gordon Caron’s Picture Perfect (1997), Nicholas
Hytner’s The Object of My Affection (1998), Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999), John
Hamburg’s Along Came Polly (2004), Rob Reiner’s Rumor Has It . . . (2005), Peyton
Reed’s The Break-Up (2006), Stephen Belber’s Management (2008), David Frankel’s
Marley & Me (2008), Brandon Camp’s Love Happens, Andy Tennant’s The Bounty
Hunter (2010), Josh Gordon and Will Speck’s The Switch (2010), and Dennis Dugan’s
Just Go with It (2011).
It may be fitting to close with mention of a man who shares a name with the great
Cary Grant, the British actor Hugh Grant. Agreeably good-looking and boyishly
charming, Hugh Grant’s characters and the relationships in which they find themselves
embody what is best about the romantic comedy: no matter how far away love seems,
it is really just around the corner. Perhaps of all the romantic leads he has played, none
is more representative of this idea than William Thacker in Notting Hill. A simple
bookseller in the Notting Hill district of London, William is surprised to see the
international film star Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) walk into his shop. Though it seems
impossible to him, the beautiful, famous, wealthy Anna falls for him, and of course, he
for her. Driven apart in Act Two, they are, against all odds, finally reunited by film’s
end. Indeed, in the final shot, we see the two lovebirds on a bench, Anna reclining back
with her head on William’s lap as he reads a book, her stomach gloriously swollen with
their child—the ultimate romantic comedy couple . . . or, in this case, family.

References
DiBattista, Maria. Fast-Talking Dames. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
Gehring, Wes D. Romantic vs. Screwball Comedy. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.
Harvey, James. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1987.
Kendall, Elizabeth. The Runaway Bride: The Romantic Comedy of the 1930s. Lanham, MD:
Cooper Square Press, 2002.

—Philip C. DiMare

1063
This page intentionally left blank
 v
S
SCIENCE AND POLITICS IN FILM. There are diverse depictions of science in
American film, but the overall picture is one of apprehension. This apprehension
reflects the uneasy dependence of society on modern science and technology. If knowl-
edge is power, as Francis Bacon argued, the enormous power of science has been a
cause of both wonder and fear. C. P. Snow (1963) famously noted the fundamental
tension between science and the humanities and the distrust of literary intellectuals
for scientists. It is therefore not surprising that so many filmic representations of sci-
ence have been ambiguous or even hostile, embracing a Promethean theme of hubris
or a Faustian theme of blasphemy. Both themes are present in the archetypal film
image of mad science, Dr. Frankenstein. Armed with superior knowledge, the mad sci-
entist appears to be a superman, though a flawed one. He (rarely she) can challenge,
change, or destroy the world. However, the scientist is also depicted as less human in
other ways: moral, social, and physical. The science generated by such individuals, usu-
ally greatly simplified, is itself politically suspect. When science intersects with public
policy, the primary issue is separating “good” science from “bad” science; judging
which individual scientist is right and controlling the bad science.
While scientists have been depicted as heroes in American films, the archetypal
image is the mad science of Dr. Frankenstein, starting with Frankenstein (1931). Rein-
forced by repetition in other media (cartoons, comics, commercials, television pro-
grams, and model kits), even those not familiar with the original films can recognize
the component elements of the stereotype. Their cultural influence is so great that
the conventions can be easily parodied, as in The Nutty Professor (1963, 1996), Young
Frankenstein (1974), and Back to the Future (1985), and the most extreme example,
the genre- and gender-bending Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). The line between
horror and comedy can often be thin (Picart, 2003).
The image of mad science, evident in terms like “Frankenfood,” has also influenced
political discourse on biotechnology and nuclear technology (Skal, 1998, 25). The
Frankenstein film, both literal adaptations and looser variants, form the most persis-
tent image of science in American film. Mary Shelley’s original novel is the tale of an
irresponsible “modern Prometheus.” However, film adaptations also draw inspiration

1065
Science and Politics in Film

Actor Pat Boone takes a shower surrounded by a crystal-like set in scene from the 1959 motion
picture Journey to the Center of the Earth. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

from medieval legends of Faust, a tragic genius profanely seeking dangerous knowledge
(Haynes, 1994). In the original Universal cycle of Frankenstein films (starting with
Frankenstein, 1931 and ending with House of Dracula, 1945), the mad doctor and his
successors are driven, or possessed, by a preternatural need to experiment (the central
watchword of mad science). Many are tormented by their actions but like addicts must
continue nonetheless. Their experiments may mock divine power, as the Monster’s crea-
tion in Frankenstein through the literal channeling of power from the heavens to Earth.
Frankenstein, in a controversial line cut from later releases, declares “In the name of
God now I know what it feels like to be God,” marking him as a blasphemous usurper
of divine authority. As with the discoveries of Galileo or Darwin, science may challenge
not only the political status quo but also the religious and moral superstructure of society.
Central to the conceptualization of mad science is the scientist, typically stereotyped
as white and male, and marked by the iconographic white lab coat, test tubes, thick
glasses, and wild “Einstein” hair (Skal, 1998, 17; Haynes, 1994, 1). Like the alchemist
Faust, the modern scientific genius wields enormous, perhaps unnatural power, and
may transcend normal human limits (Schelde, 1993, 31–33). Despite this power, sci-
ence, especially of the mad variety, is typically the solitary enterprise of obsessive indi-
viduals on isolated islands and mountain peaks, in jungles, ruined castles, or lonely
estates. Such scientists are solitary figures on a personal journey of self-discovery or
self-destruction. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1921, 1931, 1941), Island of Lost Souls
(1932), The Invisible Man (1933), Dr. Cyclops (1940), The Fly (1958, 1986), Back to
the Future, and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) exemplify this theme. Even scientific

1066
 Science and Politics in Film

teams, such those in The Andromeda Strain (1970) and Sphere (1998), are small and
appropriately isolated.
Such physical isolation mirrors the social and often sexual isolation of scientists.
Even scientist-heroes are often social misfits with poor social skills or poorer fashion
sense, as in The Lost World (1925, 1960) or The Fly (1986). The Nutty Professor films,
employing two separate sets of negative social stereotypes, show scientists whose only
escape from loneliness is through mad science. Scientists often have few or weak family
ties, and the scientific endeavor itself is dangerous to domestic normality (Schelde,
1993, 32). Scientists pursuing mad science become alienated from family and friends,
ultimately endangering both. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), explores this theme
more gently, but as in other films, those closest to a scientist are usually the first men-
aced by the results of mad science. In Frankenstein, the doctor’s experiments keep
him from his fiancée, and later the result of those experiments nearly destroys her. In
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—satirically in Young Frankenstein—the experiment liter-
ally carries the fiancée away. In Jurassic Park (1993), the paleontologist is happy to
remain digging in the field with his (childless) botanist girlfriend, while the mathema-
tician, clad in a black leather jacket and sunglasses like a rock-star, acknowledges his
multiple failed marriages. In Bringing Up Baby (1938), an asexual female scientist tells
her paleontologist-fiancé that the fossilized dinosaur they are reconstructing will be
their “child,” as their careers will not allow the time for a real family. In other films, sci-
entific crises parallel personal relationships in crisis. In Outbreak (1995), the reunion of
separated biologists symbolizes the return to health of a disease-threatened society.
Similar formulas occur, not always with a happy reunion, in Altered States (1980),
The Fly (1986), Sphere, and Twister (1996).
Negative science generally lacks any moral restraint and disregards any notion of
social responsibility. While some mad scientists entertain hopes of ultimately bettering
society—as in Captain Nemo’s forlorn quest to end war (Mysterious Island, 1961) or
Dr. Totenkopf ’s misguided attempt to preserve wildlife (Sky Captain and the World of
Tomorrow, 2004)—mad scientists in reality pursue research with little real regard for
its consequences. They may flagrantly break taboos, like Dr. Pretorius in Bride of
Frankenstein, a camp figure who drinks whiskey from beakers and enjoys midnight
snacks while grave robbing. More darkly, they may regard other people as merely test
subjects. In Dr. Cyclops, the title scientist experiments on his hapless victims with a per-
verse boyish glee, while Dr. Mirakle in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) viciously tor-
tures women on a strange quest to prove evolution. Professional glory (Charly, 1968)
or simple revenge (The Raven, 1935) may be the scientist’s motivation. Dr. Moreau
(Island of Lost Souls and Island of Doctor Moreau) is both torturer and blasphemer. Mix-
ing human and animal essences he produces an artificial creation with himself as God
but ironically also Satan. (In the 1932 film, his creatures rightly fear visits to the
“House of Pain.” In 1996, he inflicts pain with a gadget not unlike a TV remote con-
trol.) Borrowing from the real horrors of Nazi science, a fictionalized Josef Mengele
in The Boys from Brazil (1978) continues his research (cloning Hitler) with no loss of
ideological drive. Such disregard for social or moral norms dooms any hope that pos-
itive results will come from mad science, even if the original motive was noble.

1067
Science and Politics in Film

To sharpen the critique, the fallen scientist may be confronted by a representative of

institutionally respectable science, sometimes an old colleague or teacher (Frankenstein,
The Invisible Man, The Invisible Ray [1935], Dr. Cyclops, The Phantom Creeps [1939]).
Proper scientists also accept the limits set by conventional morality and religion. In
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Dr. Lindenbrook acknowledges divine
authority, despite his quest for knowledge at any almost price. In Fantastic Voyage
(1966), more crudely, the scientist who expresses wonder at God’s creation proves
loyal, while the atheist is revealed to be a traitor.
Films after the 1960s rarely present a mad scientist in the classic mold except as a
comic figure; but elements of the mad scientist archetype persist. Dr. Forbin in
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969) is the closest to the classic image, even acknowledg-
ing his kinship to Frankenstein at one point. In Demon Seed (1977), Dr. Harris simi-
larly creates a computer “monster” that then follows the standard path of destruction,
in this case a sexual assault on Harris’s estranged wife. Dr. Stone in The Andromeda
Strain is secretive about the purpose of the research project he establishes (it turns
out to be germ warfare) and is much more emotionally detached than his more con-
ventional colleagues. Dr. Chandra in 2010 (1984) is more emotionally involved with
computers than with his human colleagues. Apollo 13 (1995) pokes gentle fun at the
(heroic) flight controllers with their thick glasses and slide rules. However, the mad sci-
entist motif continues to evolve. Starting in the 1970s, the individual mad scientist is
often replaced by the corporation as the incubator of mad science (Schelde, 1993,
40–41), especially illicit substances or dangerous technology. The villainous corpora-
tion is indifferent to the human costs of its actions, focused on profits, highly secretive,
and as always amoral. Just a few examples of this theme in recent decades are Soylent
Green (1973), Alien (1979), Outland (1981), Blade Runner (1982), Aliens (1986),
Jurassic Park, and A.I. (2001). Twister features corporate scientists as villains.
Given this generally negative image of science, it is not surprising that the relation-
ship between science and politics is riddled with tension. Typically, the political
response to scientific discoveries is highly defensive and focused on protecting the
existing order. Echoing the social discomfort over evolution, genetic engineering,
reproductive technology, and artificial intelligence, science is depicted as a source of
danger. Once unleashed, it requires intervention by political and military authorities
to contain it. Scientists themselves are too morally suspect or politically naive to be
trusted. The legion of mad scientists who from the 1930s forward have sought world
domination or to upend the laws of nature and society suggests the social unease about
the potential of the geniuses to undermine “normal” society. When scientists play God
or pursue dangerous questions, or seek knowledge “Man” was not meant to have, they
must be contained and the results destroyed.
Another significant element of the filmic image of science is its simplification. Prob-
lems with scientific causes or solutions unfold very quickly in both screen time and
chronology. In The Day after Tomorrow (2004), the global climate changes in a matter
of hours, or at crucial junctures, only minutes. In Deep Impact (1998), the detection of
a killer meteor is made almost instantaneously, with a few strokes of a keyboard. In
innumerable science fiction films, mutations that produce monstrosities and even

1068
 Science and Politics in Film

new species emerge within hours or days (Them! [1954], Tarantula [1955], The Begin-
ning of the End [1957], The Amazing Colossal Man [1957], Omega Man [1971], Altered
States, and I Am Legend [2007] to name just a few).
When science is part of a public problem, the solutions are to be found among
clashing “theories” (more properly hypotheses) in which scientist characters may be
right or wrong but rarely armed with empirical evidence. In Journey to the Bottom of
the Sea (1961), Admiral Nelson, convinced of his theory’s accuracy, ignores other scien-
tists and the doubts of his own crew in a race to the North Pole where, put into prac-
tice, his theory saves the world. Scientific debates are driven by gut instinct, logical
inferences, or emotional arguments. Effective public policy in such cases is the ability
to select the “right” scientists and theories while rejecting the “wrong” ones.
The science depicted in films is also strangely unspecialized. Especially in science
fiction and horror films to the mid-1900s, science is fairly generic and scientific exper-
tise is not limited to any particular field. A Dr. Frankenstein is an expert in almost any
conceivable scientific or medical field. When science is part of a film’s plot, scientific
principles and methodology are always greatly simplified, often reduced to a singular
concept (radiation in post-Hiroshima films) or simplified buzzwords (radium, muta-
tion). Scientific information is presented as required by the plot, but often in the form
of exposition to an “average person” character who stands in for the audience. The
treatment of scientific complexity may become an ironic joke at the expense of the sci-
entist: the average person can laugh off the scientist’s complex words as they hold the
right to make the final moral judgment on the merits of that science. This is perhaps
best depicted in The Thing (1951) where Dr. Carrington, cold and remote as his Arctic
laboratory, is willing to risk everyone’s lives to contact an obviously hostile alien. The
extraterrestrial threat is neutralized (by electricity in a reversal of the Frankenstein cre-
ation) by nonscientists (an Air Force crew), who are technically competent but clearly
do not comprehend much of the science they encounter. A similar dynamic is seen in
The Right Stuff (1983), where “All-American” astronauts prevail over the lab-coated
(and sometimes foreign) doctors and engineers (“rocket scientists”). The medical per-
sonnel especially appear more like torturers than healers as they “test” (experiment
on) the astronauts.
This ambivalence about science taps into social anxieties about the terrifying poten-
tial of science to create or destroy (Telotte, 1999, 136). This is particularly evident in
the postwar fear of nuclear technology, especially weapons (Lipschutz, 2001). Nuclear
science may generate hope for its peaceful uses (This Island Earth, 1955) but is pri-
marily a source of danger if that power is misused, which filmmakers ensure happens.
Even when not caused by design, atomic mutations are lurking around every corner
(Them!, Tarantula, The Beginning of the End). Nuclear madness is best exemplified by
Dr. Strangelove (1963). The wheelchair bound, German-accented Strangelove is a vis-
ual composite of Henry Kissinger, Herman Kahn, and Werner von Braun among
others (Seed, 1999, 150). Strangelove has trouble controlling his artificial arm and
keeps reverting to his Nazi past as Armageddon approaches.
Another modern anxiety is economic obsolescence or even the loss of free will due
to automation. In films depicting artificial intelligence, such creations operate as a dark

1069
Science and Politics in Film

mirror of human sins and weaknesses. Computers (along with robots and androids) are
traditionally menacing figures, drawing on the iconography of Frankenstein. As com-
puters became more common in the 1960s and 1970s, anxiety over their potential to
displace human workers or humanity itself gave them an additional air of malice. It
is not surprising that computers were often cinematic villains (2001: A Space Odyssey
[1968], Colossus: The Forbin Project, Demon Seed, Logan’s Run [1976]). These creations
are perhaps too human for our own good as they have human aspirations: power,
knowledge, and even progeny. Interestingly, as computers became ubiquitous and
familiar, they have ceased to be as threatening, although often at the price of their per-
sonalities. They have been reduced to mere tools and reflect only the moral intent of
their operators. In Independence Day (1996), a computer-generated virus wielded by
an eccentric scientist saves the world. While Hal 9000 (introduced in 2001) remains
a character in 2010, he is a more sympathetic figure in the later film. Not a monster
run amok, the sequel reveals Hal to be the victim of excessive government secrecy that
has made him schizophrenic.
Those that control science may also be suspect, especially when scientists and their
allies in government keep secrets. Secrecy is usually justified in the name of security or
to prevent public hysteria. In When Worlds Collide (1951), scientists devise the means
to transport a handful of humanity to safety, but the terrified mob (an echo of the village
mobs from Frankenstein) storms the rocket, risking the entire mission. In Deep Impact,
with a comet days from striking the Earth, panicked crowds demand entry to the
“Ark” survival bunker while the anonymous majority herd onto the highway for other
sources of safety. The need to protect (or control) this panic-prone public is also evident
in many films where scientific information or discoveries are kept secret (2001, The
Andromeda Strain, The China Syndrome [1979], Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981], 2010,
Stargate [1994], Contact [1997], Deep Impact). The desire of military and political
authorities to keep scientific information secret is almost a reflex. In films that postdate
the Vietnam War and Watergate, government secrecy about science itself is the villain,
as reflected in UFO conspiracy films (The Arrival, 1996, The X-Files, 1998).
While the depiction of science in film is diverse, the image of Frankenstein has been
the most important. When pursued by scientists who are morally irresponsible and
socially isolated, it is not surprising that science produces monsters and ultimately fails
to uphold social norms. The scientist himself (rarely herself ), may be an object of fun
or fear but is usually a morally ambiguous figure. Government’s interaction with sci-
ence is also troubled and tends to necessitate the control of negative, socially disruptive
science. Despite the innumerable positive accomplishments of science in the real
world, on film it remains a highly problematic endeavor, tainted by hints of blas-
phemy, hubris, and recklessness.
See also: Politics and Film; Science Fiction Film, The

References
Haynes, Roslynn D. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Litera-
ture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

1070
 Science Fiction Film, The

Lipschutz, Ronnie D. Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy. New York: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2001.
Picart, Caroline Joan S. Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Laughter and Horror.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.
Schelde, Per. Androids, Humanoids, and Other Science Fiction Monsters: Science and Soul in Science
Fiction Films. New York: New York University Press, 1993.
Seed, David. American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film. Edinburgh, UK:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Skal, David J. Screams of Reason: Mad Scientist and Modern Culture. New York: W. W. Norton,
1998.
Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures: And a Second Look. New York: Mentor, 1963.
Telotte, J. P. A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1999.

—Karl Leib

SCIENCE FICTION FILM, THE. Science Fiction (SF) is a genre that explores
themes of science and progress, space travel and adventure, technological and social
advances, encounters with aliens and alien worlds, and the foundational elements of
the human condition. As a genre, SF is fluid; films may be set in the past, the present,
or the future, and in locales as diverse as the Earth, other planets, other galaxies, and
even other dimensions. SF explores the potential of science to revolutionize the lives
of humans, allowing them to be exposed to the wider universe, to make startling dis-
coveries and develop amazing new technologies, and to display a disturbing and
destructive sense of overweening arrogance.
Today, SF is a major industry, producing films, television and animated series, video
games, novels, comic books, toys, and more. With its ideas and ideals permeating
American culture, the influence of SF is hard to overestimate. As a genre with few limits
on subject matter, iconography, period, or place, SF is easily used to express political
views overtly, or covertly through analogy and symbolism. SF’s influence, for instance,
has been felt in America’s changing attitudes toward women, the Cold War, the Vietnam
War, the space race, and developments in science and technology. Indeed, SF has even
influenced the way we think: the phrase “science fiction” is used to distinguish current sci-
ence and technology from that which may or may not develop in the future. SF is also
associated with real scientific progress. A minor example is the flip-top cell phone, a
version of which was first seen on Star Trek; a major example is the creation of the U.S.
National Aeronautics Space Agency (NASA)—SF contributed here by popularizing the
idea of space travel, by helping to disclose the potential for new discoveries in outer space,
and by helping to spread the belief in UFOs. We see references to SF in everyday life, from
SF-inspired fashions in clothing and jewelry to homes built to look like spaceships.
With its emphasis on progress, SF has been particularly open to exploring the
changing role of women, although as with pictures from other genres, SF films have
tended to be overwhelmingly male oriented. Their heroes and antiheroes are most
often masculine, and their points of reference have traditionally been geared toward
examinations of the fears and desires of men. Yet SF has also provided women with

1071
Science Fiction Film, The

Alien spacecraft open fire in a battle scene from the 1953 film War of the Worlds, directed by Byron
Haskin. (Getty Images)

roles that are clearly exceptional when compared with those offered to women who
appear in other genre films. Significantly, in American-made SF films, we find female
characters in positions of authority—astronauts, medical doctors, and scientists—even
though real-life women have long been relegated to subordinate roles while trying to
forge their careers; and although SF characters such as Wonder Woman and the
50-Foot Woman tended to draw on male fantasies about and fears of the too-
powerful female, other roles have defined female paths to power—Sarah Conner
(Linda Hamilton) in Judgment Day; Delenn (Mira Furlan) in Babylon 5; Captain Jane-
way (Kate Mulgrew) in Star Trek Voyager; Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) in Contact; and
Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) in The Matrix.
The history of SF films spans the history of cinema. Some of the first films ever
made were proto-science fiction offerings, including the silent pictures A Trip to the
Moon (La voyage dans le lune, 1902) and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1916). In the
United States, SF’s early popularity was due in large part to the fact that it attracted
younger audiences with its cheap film serials based on comic book heroes like Flash
Gordon (1936–1940) and Buck Rogers (1939). During the 1950s, often referred to as
SF’s first golden age, a large number of SF films were produced, most of them low
budget and most, though not all, geared toward juvenile audiences. Films like The

1072
 Science Fiction Film, The

Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953), and The Invisible Boy
(1957) featured young boys as main characters, while others like Fire Maidens from
Outer Space (1956), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), and The Blob (1958) obvi-
ously appealed to teenage males.
The 1950s also saw the production of numerous classics in SF. These films, many of
which were about aliens and nuclear monsters, expressed anxiety over nuclear radia-
tion, the communist scare, and disasters in space. In both War of the Worlds (1953)
and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), for example, alien ships attack earth but are
ultimately destroyed. In another classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), a
small-town boy tells a doctor that his parents are not really his parents, and the rest
of the film follows the doctor’s discovery of look-alike aliens and his efforts to warn
the rest of the world about these intruders. A similar story is told in Invaders from Mars.
This film too begins with a boy; he sees a spaceship from his bedroom window at
night, and the next day his parents start acting strangely. In Them! (1954), nuclear radi-
ation causes ants to mutate into giants that threaten to overtake the earth. In The Day
the Earth Stood Still, an alien ambassador visits Earth to warn its inhabitants that an
interplanetary alliance exists and will not tolerate humans taking their wars into space.
In When Worlds Collide (1951), disaster from space threatens in the form of a meteor;
the film ends on a positive note, though, as a group of men, women, plants, and ani-
mals travel in a newly built space rocket and land on a shining new planet.
Although the 1960s and 1970s produced fewer SF films, this period saw the release
of big-budget films in the genre and the development of major franchises. Realistic
space photography and groundbreaking special effects were developed by Arthur
C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in a film that explored the mysteries of space, time, and
human evolution: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), based on a story Clarke published in
1948. The following year, the first Star Trek television series aired (1969–72), followed
by the first Star Trek movie in 1979. Star Trek attained worldwide popularity and gener-
ated countless official and unofficial media spin-offs, with a total of 11 feature films,
5 television series, several animated series, and uncounted novels and video games. Also
extremely popular, the first Star Wars film was released in 1977, followed by The Empire
Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). The trilogy was rereleased in a special
edition (1997), and was later followed by three prequels (1999, 2002, and 2005).
Other themes developing around this time were the reverse of space adventure and
alien invasion: inner space and visits from cute and sexy aliens. Fantastic Voyage (1966),
Altered States (1980), and Tron (1982) exemplify the SF turn toward inner space. In
Fantastic Voyage, a miniaturized ship and crew travel inside a man’s body, which looks
every bit like an alien planet. Altered States explores the human brain with the help of
advanced machines, hallucinogens, and sensory deprivation. In Tron, a computer pro-
grammer is transferred inside a computer where he battles an evil program.
Friendly aliens became popular in 1970s and 1980s films. In Close Encounters of the
Third Kind (1977), the U.S. military communicates with alien spaceships via music,
and one of the ships returns a variety of people who have mysteriously disappeared
over the years. In E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), a friendship develops between a
boy and a cuddly alien who is temporarily stranded on earth. In Starman (1984), a

1073
Science Fiction Film, The

romantic relationship develops between a widow and a transforming alien who takes
on the shape of her dead husband.
Beginning in the 1980s, dystopian films became extremely popular. With the help
of big budgets and special effects, pictures such as Blade Runner (1982), The Termina-
tor (1984), and The Matrix (1999) portrayed a number of possible dark futures. In
Blade Runner, artificial life forms (artificial intelligence) are made so realistically that
even they do not know they are not human. This film is an iconic representative of dys-
topian cinema, with its portrait of a constantly rainy, dismal, and broken-down 2020
Los Angeles. Terminator and The Matrix show the darkest of all possible futures when
humans are all but wiped out by AI takeovers. Fear of computers is also the subject of
War Games (1983), which demonstrates the folly of trusting computer programs—and
programmers, it seems—with the keys to initiating nuclear war.
The social dystopia is also important in SF, beginning as early as Metropolis (1927). In
this film, industrial capitalism divides the members of the working class, who live out
their miserable lives deep beneath the earth, from the members of the upper class, who
live out their lives in sun-drenched towers that soar above the earth. In Fahrenheit 451
(1966), a social equality movement results in a thought-controlled society. In Soylent
Green (1973), overcrowding and pollution result in a scarcity of food, and a government
that secretly euthanizes humans to produce protein wafers that are the most sought-after
form of food. In 1984, the first film based on George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 was
produced, making Big Brother—the idea that government could become an oppressive,
omnipresent overseer that controls every aspect of human life and thought—a house-
hold phrase. Other examples of government as an oppressive presence in peoples’ lives
are The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), in which fertile women are turned into breeders after
a nuclear war renders most of humanity infertile, and Gattaca (1997), in which genetic
selection leads to a rigid social structure based on a futuristic form of eugenics.
As the twenty-first century opened, SF cinema remained as popular as it had ever been,
even though many of the current SF films were remakes. Indeed, between 1990 and
2009, numerous remakes, sequels, and prequels were produced, including War of the
Worlds, Star Trek, Terminator, Star Wars, Metropolis, The Matrix, and The Time Machine.
Not surprisingly, in SF cinema, science is always present, whether foregrounded
explicitly—as in films such as This Island Earth (1955), in which all of the main char-
acters are scientists—or looming in the background—as in Star Wars, in which the
things of science are used as dramatic props that drive the narrative forward. Signifi-
cantly, in many SF films, science itself is the focus. This is the case, for instance, in
Contact (1997), in which scientists discover a message from aliens that consists of blue-
prints for building a spaceship. After scientists from the United States and Japan work
together to build it, Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), who originally discovered the
alien message, travels on the ship to another planet. During the course of the trip,
she experiences all the wonders of the galaxy, talks to an alien, and finally receives
answers to some of her most troubling questions. Ellie is portrayed as having always
been interested in the stars; science is who she is. Yet her trip is literally characterized
as a religious experience: she is shown ecstatically hurtling through space as she gazes
through the translucent walls of her otherworldly vessel; later, when she returns with

1074
 Science Fiction Film, The

no evidence that she ever left—from the perspective of the others who witness the
event, the material ship moves not an inch—her experience becomes a sort of Kierke-
gaardian leap into the absurd abyss of personal faith.
Science is also linked with religion in When Worlds Collide. Here, the filmic focus is
on the survival of the human race. Biblical references spoken by a narrator intensify and
give greater meaning to the filmic experience, as viewers come to understand that the
imminent destruction of the earth will be initiated by an act of God, that the rocket ship
is actually functioning as an Ark of salvation, and that a new planet represents the Prom-
ised Land. The message of this film seems to be that science is a gift from the divine:
God gives humanity knowledge, and when it used correctly, the human race survives.
SF cinema has also explored deeply existential questions concerning the meaning of
the human experience. Interestingly, it is often the case in SF films that humanity can
only be defined by contrasting it to what it is not: in relationship, then, to alien entities,
whether organic or machine. Thus, in the Star Trek films, humans interact with the alien
Mr. Spock, who tightly controls his emotions, and with the android Data, who, because
he is a machine, has no emotions. Data desperately wants to be human, but this can
never be. No matter how much he studies and mimics us, he will never be able really
to laugh, to cry, to be happy or sad. Along with Spock and Data, then, we find ourselves
stretched across a continuum: from human, to alien, to even more alien—to machine.
Filmic portrayals of the contrast between humans, who are all too often consumed by
their own emotions, and either aliens who display no affect or androids who are affect-
less have been central to SF for a very long time. In the 1950s classics Invasion of the
Body Snatchers and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), for example, alien
invaders lack emotions and morals—it was, in fact, their lack of affect that eventually
gave them away. At least those invaders tried to appear human, whereas in other films,
such as those in the Terminator series, the machines were too rigid, too evil, too power-
ful to be easily mistaken for human beings. Even more alien are the tentacled monsters
of films like Independence Day, in which aliens without mouths communicate telepathi-
cally, exposing themselves as beings of pure evil and Otherness. Yet, despite the fact that
they almost always lack the very traits that make us most human, science fiction’s Others
usually help us to understand ourselves. Perhaps because they are not human, because
they are sometimes able to see things much more clearly than we can, they force us up
against important questions: Where have we come in our great quest to solve the mys-
teries of science, technology, and even of the cosmos? And where do we go from here?
Given our unbridled ambitions, what might we unleash on the universe?
See also: Matrix Series, The; Star Trek Series, The; Star Wars Series, The

References
Cornea, Christine. Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2007.
Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1997.
Telotte, J. P. Science Fiction Film. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
—Susan de Gaia

1075
Screen Actors Guild

SCREEN ACTORS GUILD. In 1925, the Masquers Club was founded by a group
of actors who wished to fight against what they saw as the abuses of the studio system.
In 1933, members of the club united with other actors to form an organization aimed
at protecting artists’ rights, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). SAG was formed to protect
screen performers from studio exploitation at a time when the National Industrial
Recovery Act (NIRA) had been passed by President Roosevelt’s administration, guar-
anteeing a minimum wage and a maximum number of hours employees could be
asked to work. The NIRA also allowed for the right to form organizations and to bar-
gain collectively through chosen individuals. It was into this atmosphere of unionized
power that SAG was born.
To highlight that the members of the organization were artists, the word “guild” was
adopted, rather than union, as this set members apart from laborers and labor unions.
Not surprisingly, heads of studios, such as Irving Thalberg, fought against this new
organization. In March 1933, three actors, Ralph Morgan, Alden Gay, and Kenneth
Thomson, met to discuss their disgust with the studio system and their wariness that
membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was by invitation
only. Three months later, Morgan, Gay, and Thomson joined with others who shared
their concerns and formed SAG.
The guild’s first officers and board of directors were formed from members includ-
ing Boris Karloff, C. Aubrey Smith, and Leon Ames. Alan Mowbray financed the
organization at this early stage, and Morgan was elected SAG’s first president. Sub-
sequent presidents included some of Hollywood’s most identifiable names, including
Robert Montgomery (twice), James Cagney, Howard Keel, Dana Andrews, and
Charlton Heston. Ronald Reagan was also president twice. During the organization’s
early stages, the membership of SAG increased dramatically when future president
Eddie Cantor insisted that the union should help all actors, not just those already
established. In 1937, producers agreed to negotiate with SAG. This was after the
National Labor Relations Act was passed; the act limited the extent to which employers
could react to labor unions and strikes.
The studio system still existed, however, and tried to exert its power despite the for-
mation of SAG. While the union had won better working conditions for actors, the
studios could still dictate which roles they played. Olivia de Havilland, for example,
rebelled against the studios and was suspended for six months. When Warners refused
to release de Havilland from her seven-year contract, insisting that her suspension be
added on to the seven years, de Havilland sued and won. This landmark victory became
known as the De Havilland Decision. The studios’ influence waned further when James
Stewart negotiated for a percentage of the profits from Winchester ’73 and won.
There have been other clashes between SAG and powerful administrative figures in
the film industry. In 1947, for instance, a group of actors suspected of communism was
ordered to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was
investigating the possible influence of communists within Hollywood labor unions.
Ten of those summoned refused to appear before the committee and were sentenced
to prison. This led to several SAG members, such as Humphrey Bogart, flying to
Washington to show support for the 10. That same year, SAG voted to force its

1076
 Screenplay and the Screenwriter, The

members to pledge to be noncommunist. SAG has also called on its members to strike
several times, which they have done.
SAG is linked to the Associated Actors and Artistes of America (AAAA), which is the
primary performers’ union in the United States. Through years of detailed negotiation,
SAG has established strict regulations for all aspects governing members working on
union projects, which include most film and television programs. At this point, union
productions are only allowed to hire union performers.

References
Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sex-
uality at the Movies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Katz, Ephraim. The Macmillan International Film Encyclopaedia, 3rd ed. London: Macmillan,
1998.
Saint Nicholas, Michael. An Actor’s Guide: Your First Year in Hollywood, 3rd ed. New York: All-
worth, 2006.

—Victoria Williams

SCREENPLAY AND THE SCREENWRITER, THE. Early, silent movies did not
rely on screenplays or scripts. Rather, film treatments laid out narrative scenarios that
described for the director the dramatic (or comedic) action of each scene. Title writers cre-
ated intertitles—short written descriptions inserted between scenes. It was not until the
sound era that the modern screenplay emerged. Many early films, both in the silent and
sound eras, relied on previously published material for narratives. This was primarily
because the screenplay as a genre and the screenwriter as an artist had not yet emerged. In
addition, the literary source of many early films served to elevate the artistic value of the film.
The screenwriter is the author of the screenplay. Today the quality of the script is
considered vital to the success of a film, and screenwriters are often recognized—and
paid handsomely—for their work. This was not always the case, however. During Hol-
lywood’s golden age—roughly from the advent of the sound era at the end of the 1920s
into the early 1960s—writers were under contract to the studios, and often as many as
10 writers contributed to a single script. The studio executives tapped into the writers’
individual talents, with some creating dialogue, others generating plotlines, and still
others working on character development. The script for Casablanca (1942), for exam-
ple, which many film critics and historians consider to be the finest screenplay ever
written for an American film, was penned by no fewer than four writers, all of whom
worked independently on the project.
This piecemeal approach traces its roots to the silent movie era. Before the term
“screenwriter” existed, there were gag writers, continuity writers, treatment writers, sce-
narists, adapters, and title writers. The treatment writer would sketch out the basic plot
of the film; the scenarist would script the descriptions of the individual scenes (or sev-
eral scenarists would be used to write different scenes for one picture); and, if the film
was a comedy, the gag writer would be used to describe the sight gag performed by the
actor. Once all of this was accomplished, the continuity writer would weave all of these

1077
Screenplay and the Screenwriter, The

script elements together into final

form and the title writer would
write the title cards that appeared
on the screen throughout the
movie. These titles may have
included words “spoken” by the
characters or plot descriptions.
Not surprisingly, the first Acad-
emy Awards had three writing
categories: Title Writing, Adapta-
tion, and Original Story.
With the advent of cinematic
sound, playwrights began to be
recruited to craft dialogue, and it
is at this point that the modern
notion of screenwriting was born.
During the studio era, ideas for
scripts almost always originated
with the studio production heads,
and were assigned to the contract
writers for development. Writers
often had access to large research
departments and libraries, and
worked regular hours on the stu-
dio lot. With the demise of the
studio system, however, screen-
Director Charlie Kaufman attends the premiere of writers began to work indepen-
Synecdoche, New York on October 28, 2008, in London. dently, at least initially, on
(Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) scripts. They would now devise
original scripts, or sometimes
adapt a novel, story, or play into a screenplay at the request of producers who owned
the production rights to previously published material.
Screenplays usually begin as concepts, which are then developed into treatments, or
what can be considered abstracts for the filmic story. If a screenwriter can sell the idea,
then he or she will generally write the screenplay. The economics of the present system
dictate this process. While experienced writers are often allowed to pitch their ideas to
producers at the treatment stage, aspiring screenwriters are usually required to draft
and attempt to sell a completed screenplay.
Today there are basically two main categories of screenplays: the original screenplay,
which is written directly for the screen; and the adapted screenplay, which is based on
some published material. Screenwriters tend to specialize in one type of screenplay or
the other, as each medium requires unique scripting abilities.
The composition of a screenplay may begin with the creation of characters, with the
story being driven by the actions of those characters; in some cases, however, the

1078
 Screenplay and the Screenwriter, The

screenwriter begins with a particular subject matter—a cultural issue or historical event,
for instance—and then develops filmic characters that are defined in relationship to that
subject matter. In fashioning the screenplay for Chinatown (1974), for example, Robert
Towne wanted to create a hard-boiled detective story in the tradition of Raymond
Chandler. In order to construct the foundational narrative elements for Chinatown,
Towne turned to a real-life incident in which water from Central California was diverted
to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. While Towne used this incident as a cinematic
point of departure, he went on to develop a powerful cast of characters, who were brought
to life on-screen by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and other talented actors.
A screenwriter’s relationship to his or her work varies. In some cases, once a writer
has completed a screenplay and it is accepted for production, the writer has nothing
more to do with the project. In other cases, however, the writer maintains a presence
throughout the entire production. Towne, who has long been friends with Jack Nicholson
and Roman Polanski, came up with the idea for Chinatown (1974) while working on the
set of The Last Detail (1973), and pitched it to Nicholson, who was starring in the latter
film. Once Chinatown was picked up, Towne and Polanski worked together daily for six
weeks developing a final draft of the screenplay—Towne was even included in the casting
process. Interestingly, even though Polanski worked hand-in-hand with Towne to perfect
the script, it is universally regarded as a Robert Towne screenplay.
Significantly, screenwriters such as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had estab-
lished themselves as playwrights before they began working in films. The best of
these writers, Miller and Williams included, were—and still are—highly valued in
Hollywood, not only because they produced quality scripts, but also because they
brought a certain legitimacy to the filmic projects on which they worked. Other screen-
writers were novelists first. William Faulkner, for instance, spent many of his best years
in Hollywood writing screenplays to supplement the monies he earned for his literary
work. Similarly, Raymond Chandler, originally a journalist but famous for his hard-
boiled detective fiction, found work writing and adapting screenplays. Working in
the studio system proved challenging for some of these writers, who, because of their
idiosyncratic behaviors, had difficulty adapting to the tight scheduling demands of
the studio. While working on The Blue Dahlia (1946), as the story goes, Raymond
Chandler was distressed to learn that the picture was going into production before he
had penned a single word of the script. Although he was able to get most of the script
written as shooting began, two weeks into the project he had yet to find an ending
for the film and was suffering from writer’s block. He told the film’s producer John
Houseman—who was also one of Chandler’s very good friends—that although he was
a recovering alcoholic and had been sober for some time, he could only finish the script
if he relapsed completely. Houseman purportedly arranged for Paramount Studios to
pay to have six secretaries placed at Chandler’s house around the clock. A doctor was also
hired to give Chandler vitamin shots, as he rarely ate when drinking. Limousines waited
outside, ready to run pages at a moment’s notice. In the end he produced one of his best
original scripts, and the story of his self-sacrifice became Hollywood legend.
Although he was not a literary figure like Faulkner and Chandler, one of Hollywood’s
most successful screenwriters was Paddy Chayefsky, who many considered unique

1079
Screenplay and the Screenwriter, The

because he saw film as a writer’s medium. Like almost all screenwriters, early in his career
even Chayefsky saw his work cut and revised without his approval, until it sometimes
bore little resemblance to the original product. Chayefsky, however, was able to work
with a small production company in the 1950s, ultimately gaining absolute control over
his work and establishing himself as one of the most important screenwriters in the busi-
ness. By the time he wrote Network (1976)—for which he earned one of his three Acad-
emy Awards—Chayefsky had gained such notoriety that his name appeared in the
hallowed space over the credits.
While Chayefsky was one of the industry figures who gave screenwriting a serious
stamp, it may be argued that Joe Eszterhas was the person who gave screenwriting its
celebrity status. By the 1990s, Eszterhas was Hollywood’s most notorious screenwriter,
famous not so much for the quality of his scripts—although some were very good—
but for their racy nature, his jet-set lifestyle, and for the astronomical salaries he com-
manded for his work—at his peak, he was earning as much as $4 million per script.
While films such as Jagged Edge (1985) and Basic Instinct (1992) are regarded as fun,
edgy thrillers that titillated audiences with their scenes of sex and violence, two of his
later films from this period, Showgirls (1995) and An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Holly-
wood Burn (1998), were considered among the worst films ever made, and even
received “awards” for Worst Screenplay. Given Eszterhas’s salary, some pointed directly
at him as the cause for these failures. Soon after An Alan Smithee Film was released, he
abandoned Hollywood for suburban Ohio, found religion, and denounced his pre-
vious lifestyle of booze, bullying, and womanizing. Indeed, after scripting so many
films exploiting sex and violence, he is, somewhat ironically, penning the story of the
Virgin of Guadalupe.
Although there have been many very good screenwriters, some of the most notable
beyond those already discussed include Charles Brackett (The Lost Weekend, Sunset
Blvd.), Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Searching for Bobby Fischer), David Mamet
(The Verdict, Wag the Dog), William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
The Princess Bride), Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind), and Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, Julie &
Julia). Woody Allen and Billy Wilder—both highly regarded directors—top the list
of writers who have been nominated for Oscars, with 14 and 12, respectively; while
Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Paddy Chayefsky have the most Oscar wins, with
three each.

References
Davis, Ronald L. Words into Images: Screenwriters on the Studio System. Jackson: University
of Mississippi Press, 2007.
Field, Syd. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. New York: Dell, 2005.
Goldman, William. Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwrit-
ing. New York: Grand Central, 1989.
McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York:
HarperCollins, 1997.

1080
 Silent Era, The

Norman, Marc. What Happens Next? A History of American Screenwriting. New York: Crown,
2008.
Stempel, Tom. Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film. New York: Con-
tinuum, 1988.

—Dean R. Cooledge

SILENT ERA, THE. The silent film era extends from the late nineteenth century,
with the earliest work by the Lumière brothers in France and Thomas Edison in
America, into the early 1930s, when silent film gave way to “talkies.” However, most
scholars situate the silent era in America during the 1910s and 1920s, when it matured
as a tightly organized industry privileging the multireel feature film after the waning of
the nickelodeon, the move to Hollywood from earlier production headquarters in New
York and New Jersey, and the decline in competition from European filmmakers
caused by World War I. D. W. Griffith’s 12-reel feature The Birth of a Nation (1915)
was a major commercial and cinematic success, pointing the way for the film industry
as it headed into the 1920s.
While the term “silent” in silent cinema refers to the lack of synchronized sound,
early cinema was far from silent in other respects. From the nickelodeon era into the
1920s, films were accompanied by live music, ranging from single pianos or reed
organs to large orchestras, depending on the nature and location of the venue—which
ranged from small storefront theaters to thousand-seat picture palaces. Some studio
releases came with specifically composed musical scores, and almost all with cue sheets
that suggested musical themes for specific scenes. Often, solo musicians more or less
expert at reading the visual cues of the film improvised a score on the spot, and exhib-
itors also drew on large published collections of sheet music appropriate for stock scene
types. Outside of musical accompaniment, theaters in the silent period could employ
“descriptive talkers” or “lecturers” who narrated the film, sometimes from printed mat-
ter of varying degrees of specificity. Other lecturers improvised dialogue not included,
for instance, on intertitles. In urban immigrant communities, this feature was repre-
sented as a means of self-improvement, and it continued to be employed whenever vis-
ual narrative clarity was compromised. As the feature film became the central industry
product, the use of lecturers declined and the use of title cards for dialog became more
realistic, gradually supplanting exposition cards. In 1925, Warner Bros. created the
Vitaphone process—a sound-on-disc system whose development signaled the begin-
ning of the end for silent film—ultimately releasing the first “talking picture,” The Jazz
Singer, in 1927. Silent films, however, would continue to be made into the 1930s, with
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) often described as the last silent film.
As a medium derived from still photography, vaudeville, and theater, silent film
adapted many of their presentational methods; as the period progressed, however, the
industry worked diligently to become more respectable, seeking to dissociate its prod-
uct from that peddled by vaudeville houses and nickelodeons. While older venues and
distribution methods persisted, grand picture palaces of the silent era dramatized the
goals of the uplift movement—to create a safe, clean, family-friendly environment

1081
Silent Era, The

for an orderly, middle-class audience in an economical fashion with vast seating

capacities, elegant lobbies, and impressive orchestras. Despite the rise of the picture
palace, though, smaller theaters remained more prevalent, with most having a seating
capacity of fewer than 500—the Roxy Theater in New York, which boasted 6,214
seats, was opulent indeed, but it represented an extreme case. At the dawn of the
1920s, there were approximately 15,000 theaters in the United States, charging
between 10 and 25 cents admission; of that number, more were in rural settings than
in urban. Theaters exhibited various forms of entertainment in balanced programs,
which grew in length over the period. A typical mid-1920s bill might include combi-
nations of a musical overture, a news weekly, a lantern slide show, a live revue, a brief
comedy or novelty film, and a feature film. Exhibitors sought to begin and end the pro-
grams at specified times, which sometimes meant speeding up projection, dropping
items from the bill, or even cutting reels from the feature. As the number of larger the-
aters increased, there was less need for rapid audience turnover, and the multireel fea-
ture film evolved into the central entertainment attraction.
The evolution of the film industry’s structure during the silent era was complex, and
it was marked by new refinements in cinematic production, distribution, and exhibi-
tion that brought about the feature film. The development of the industry during this
period was powerfully influenced by the emergence of the Motion Picture Patents
Company, or MPPC (1908–1918), a licensing and trade association set up among
established production companies to discourage competition. Throughout the period,
the film industry worked toward standardization; contracts, patents, and licenses
bound the industry into a tightly knit network. Studios affiliated with the MPPC con-
trolled the distribution of their films—generally short one- to three-reel offerings—
through the General Film Company. Controlling distribution enabled established East
Coast companies to achieve a monopoly. These early efforts to control the film indus-
try also included the development of the film exchange, a commercial arrangement
between patent companies and exhibitors in which exhibitors rented their films—
which changed almost daily—at set prices. In the early silent period, this exchange sys-
tem was not calibrated for multireel features; exhibitors, exchanges, and production
houses were reluctant to push multireel films, both because of audience expectations
and because of the costs associated with screening them. Within the existing system,
multireel films were released one reel at a time, ensuring quick audience turnover but
retarding the development of complex narratives. Multireel features would typically
be shown as special attractions or outside of the established distribution and exhibition
system, and states’ rights distribution practices evolved to allow local exchanges to con-
tract with major distributors for territorial exhibition rights. Longer films were exhib-
ited in this fashion, because they could travel throughout a particular region as a
special attraction until the audience pool was exhausted. Thus, early multireel films
tended to emerge from independent production houses or European film studios,
which didn’t experience the same limitations as mainstream American outfits. While
distributors had separate arms specializing in features, as more large first-run theaters
were constructed and demand increased, longer films became the order of the day.
The devastation caused by the World War I had all but decimated the mainstream

1082
 Silent Era, The

European industry, and American companies, often building on already existing

import agreements, began to compete vigorously for prestige pictures.
Independent American houses and European companies realized that to compete
they must be able to distribute their products as well, and they set up their own corpo-
rations; ultimately, a small number of these corporations would gain tight control over
the industry. Carl Laemmle’s move from the East Coast to the West in 1915, where he
set up Universal City, allowed his company to escape the patent and licensing wars in
some measure, and production houses began cropping up in what was to become
Hollywood. Laemmle launched several important silent stars, though for some time
he resisted the feature film movement. Despite the success of some early Universal fea-
tures like Traffic in Souls (1913), it was only in the 1920s that Laemmle sought to ele-
vate the company’s profile. The assembly-line methods of Universal City meant harsh
working conditions, and many talented actors were easily lured away. Nonetheless, the
star system was emerging, and the prestige film, the star’s vehicle, was on the rise. In
1914, Adolph Zukor released New York-based Famous Players films through a newly
created corporation, Paramount, which soon merged with the Lasky Company to
become Famous Players-Lasky. Paramount Pictures quickly dominated the industry,
as the influence of the MPPC declined due to Zukor’s cunning business practices,
the collapse of Triangle Film, a high concentration of star power, and the institution
of block-booking practices. Exhibitors threatened by Paramount banded together to
form the powerful First National, which used states’ rights practices to distribute exclu-
sively to the nearly 6,000 theaters they owned, and soon moved into production as
well, acquiring a significant amount of talent. The battle between Paramount and First
National for industry control and the distribution of prestige feature films had far-
reaching effects. Amidst these power plays, and concerned with salary caps, the restric-
tion of creative freedom, and a rumored merger between Paramount and First
National, actors and directors entered the fray to form United Artists in 1919; however,
without access to theaters, and burdened by hefty actors’ contracts, it foundered—
despite Joseph Schenck’s inspired reorganization of the company in 1924. One impor-
tant cause of the dramatic changes to the industry during the silent era was the method
by which filmmaking was financed; by selling their stock on the public market, produc-
tion and distribution companies not only acquired the influx of capital needed to com-
pete but also made the industry more businesslike. In conjunction with factory
production methods, which ensured consistent quality and regular release schedules,
these methods of financing transformed cinema into one of the nation’s leading indus-
tries. Cinema, trending toward the feature film, was becoming both art and product.
With standardization in production came a decrease in radical technological and
artistic innovation but an elevation in production values, set quality, costumes, acting,
and lighting. Very early silent cinema tended to minimize the camera’s presence, com-
posing short films of single, static shots or simple linear cuts, typically showing actors
full-frame as on a stage. With the multireel feature, scene dissection became much
more common, and a grammar of film emerged. D. W. Griffith pioneered crosscutting
and editorial techniques designed to control pacing, and Mack Sennett used quick cuts
to develop a distinguishing comedic style. As the variety show waned, spectacle was

1083
Slasher Films

incorporated into the feature film, in part under the pressure of foreign imports like
Queen Elizabeth (French, 1912) and Cabiria (Italian, 1914). The extreme long shot
and the wide pan could capture the spectacular expanses of the American landscape,
and vast, detailed indoor sets could recreate images of elsewhere. With the rise of mul-
tireel feature films came a corresponding need for continuity, clarity, and character
development; filmmakers introduced a more restrained acting style that emphasized
facial expression over broad pantomime. The close-up became an important—though
sometimes derided—stylistic device in the silent era, creating a new intimacy between
audience and actor that opened the way for the star system. With the emergence of the
star system, fan magazines like Motion Picture Story magazine (1911) and Photoplay
(1911) galvanized a mass audience of consumers, and some of the most enduring
actors captured the public imagination—Lillian Gish, Norma Talmadge, Harold
Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, Douglas
Fairbanks. In the 1920s, few dramatic American innovations in cinematography
occurred, but abroad, flourishing avant-garde movements produced a variety of exper-
imental cinema in the wake of war; surrealism, expressionism, and impressionism
offered alternatives to mainstream narrative film, and Soviet filmmakers like Sergei
Eisenstein developed rich montage techniques.
The significance of the silent era in film history cannot be overstated. During the
first decades of the twentieth century, a truly commercial popular art emerged bound
closely to the image of a modern America. With the development of synchronized
sound, the era drew to a close, but the modes of production, distribution, exhibition,
and consumption inaugurated during the silent film era persisted, creating the film
industry as we know it today.

References
Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994.
Greiveson, Lee, and Peter Krämer. The Silent Cinema Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Koszarski, Richard. An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture,
1915–1928. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
McCaffrey, Donald W., and Christopher P. Jacobs. Guide to the Silent Years of American Cinema.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999
—Tonya Howe

SLASHER FILMS. Although horror films have long been popular Hollywood fare,
the social, political, and industrial changes that arose after World War II led to the
development of new types of horror pictures that reflected the postwar culture. It
may be argued that Universal Studios’ 1930s and early 1940s creature features—
including Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, and The Mummy—provided the arche-
type for mainstream horror films. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), though, with its
cross-dressing, gender-confused killer and its shower stabbing scene, is frequently cited

1084
 Slasher Films

as the progenitor of the slasher film. Hitchcock took Robert Bloch’s novel of the same
name, in which he had fictionalized the bizarre life of necrophiliac serial killer Ed
Gein, as the basis for his hit movie. Essentially, Psycho broke new ground with its use
of psychological rather than supernatural horror. Released in the same year, British
director Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, in which a glamour photographer stabs women
to death with his camera tripod’s spiked legs, is also cited by horror critics as an impor-
tant influence.
Emphasizing psychological rather than physical horror, Psycho and Peeping Tom pre-
sented viewers with predators who utilized a single weapon—a long-bladed knife in the
first and the tripod in the second—to achieve their deadly work. Slasher predators,
however, wielded an arsenal of cutlery that they used to kill their various victims in
an array of gruesome ways. Inspired by Psycho, Tobe Hooper recycled the Ed Gein
character and made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974. Massacre concerned a family
of cannibals that preyed on teenage transients. Hooper’s seminal film bridged the gap
between Psycho and what became traditional slashers. Essentially, Hooper invented
the formula, with a psychopath who butchered a number of teens one by one until
the last one (usually) kills him. Somewhat ironically, the success of slasher movies gave
rise to two Psycho sequels: Psycho II and Psycho III.
The rise of the youth market, the elimination of the Production Code, the box-
office triumphs of Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and, later, Black Christmas
(1974), paved the way in 1978 for director John Carpenter’s Halloween. This first offi-
cial slasher movie, about an insane killer, Michael Myers, who escapes from a mental
asylum and tries to kill his sister, made a fortune. Halloween inspired Sean S. Cunningham
to make Friday the 13th in 1980. The success of that film and its many sequels opened
the door for scores of derivative slashers.
Halloween’s influence on Friday the 13th is unmistakable; indeed, scenarist Victor
Miller acknowledged his debt to Carpenter’s movie. Halloween perfected the slasher
movie formula: a voyeuristic psychotic killer with gender identity problems dons a
mask; he slaughters a group of teenagers without a qualm when they have sexual inter-
course; revenge motivates the villain’s homicidal behavior; a tomboyish girl prevails
over the impotent psychotic killer; and no matter how many times the killer is stabbed
and/or shot, he manages to survive. The so-called golden age of slasher movies ran
from 1978 to 1986—although Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy revived the genre in
1996, and the four Scary Movie pictures (2000–2006) delighted viewers by making
fun of slasher flicks.

References
Chafe, William. The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II. Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1991.
Rockoff, Adam. Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986. Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2002.
Whitehead, Mark. Slasher Movies. Harpenden, UK: Pocket Essentials, 2000.

—Van Roberts

1085
Social Movements and Film

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND FILM. Lorenz von Stein, a German sociologist,

coined the term “social movement” in his 1850 History of the French Social Movement
from 1789 to the Present. According to Charles Tilly (2004), who situates the origins
of social movements in England and North America in the late eighteenth century,
there are three major elements of social movements: campaigns, repertoire, and
WUNC—participants’ public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commit-
ment. Adding to this, Sidney Tarrow (1994) claims a distinction between social move-
ments and political parties or special interest groups. Social movements, which some
theorists argue are a result of urbanization and mass education, emerge as grassroots
activities in response to particular social, political, or economic conditions that a group
of people determines needs to be changed. Additionally, a social movement requires
group action, which can be encouraged or reinforced through literature and film. Fol-
lowing this line of thought, the first social movements in America can be viewed as a
result of British taxation (the Revolutionary War), westward expansion (concern for
the American Indian and the environment), and inequality based on race, class, and
gender (abolition, labor, and women’s rights).
One of the earliest social movements to take shape in America, the women’s rights
movement is best summarized by Abigail Adams’s admonition to her husband in a let-
ter dated March 31, 1776: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. . . . If
perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment
a Rebelion.” And “foment a Rebelion” they did. Through the Seneca Falls Convention
of 1848 and suffrage marches in the early twentieth century, the movement continued

Actress Hilary Swank in a scene from the 2004 film Iron Jawed Angels, directed by Katja von Garnier.
(Photofest)

1086
 Social Movements and Film

to gain followers and strength. Iron Jawed Angels (2004) tells the story of young suf-
fragists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns who, in the 1920s, broke away from the National
American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) run by Carrie Chapman Catt to
create a more radical wing of the movement; their formation of the National Women’s
Party (NWP) and continued nonviolent protest eventually led to the ratification of the
19th amendment in 1920. Although Iron Jawed Angels provides contemporary audi-
ences with a historical view of the movement, Politics (1931) looks forward to a time
when women not only vote but vie for public office. In Politics, Hattie Burns goes up
against a group of crooked politicians and becomes the women’s choice for mayor. In
a women-against-men comedic performance, Hattie encourages the townswomen to
strike, forcing the men to do the housework and to live without the women’s services.
The competition heats up after one of the men tells his wife, “You should stay in the
kitchen where you belong.” Pulling out all the stops, the women succeed in getting
Hattie elected. Revealing the progress women have made on the political front, women
have been cast in the role of president at least a dozen times from Project Moonbase
(1953) to 24 (2008).
Politics is not the only area of society in which women sought to be treated as
equals; the workplace has also been a battleground for women’s rights, particularly
during World War II when men went off to war and women went out to work. Depict-
ing the origins of the cultural icon that would be used to proclaim women’s equality,
Rosie the Riveter (1944) is a comedy of errors in which Rosalind “Rosie” Warren and
her friend Vera Watson take positions in a wartime airplane factory in California,
encounter trouble, and finally find romance. As evidence of the icon’s importance,
one source credits the Rosie the Riveter movement with increasing the labor force in
America by 57 percent between 1940 and 1944 (Porter, 2004). Before Rosie, however,
Hollywood had already created a film featuring a woman who owns and operates a
large automobile factory. In Female (1933), another comedy in which errors abound,
a powerful female tycoon, Alison Drake, gets what she wants until one of her employ-
ees, a gifted engineer, fails to fall under her spell. The conflict between Alison’s position
as CEO and her feelings for Jim Thorne, the engineer, results in her having to decide
between work and marriage.
On a more serious note, Norma Rae (1979) and North Country (2005) explore the
continued oppression and exploitation of women in the workplace 50 years after the
Rosies entered wartime factories. Hailed for its “realistic union-organizing campaign
and the fierce corporate response at the fictional O. P. Henley textile mill,” Norma
Rae is one of the few Hollywood movies to explore the ideas of unionization or fair
employment (Nathan and Mort, 2007). Unlike Alison in Female, the female lead in
Norma Rae does not jump into bed with the male lead. Instead, Norma Rae Webster
is already married (and a mother), and Reuben Warshowsky is a union organizer
who becomes her friend, another situation rare in Hollywood movies (Nathan and
Mort, 2007). With increasing courage and determination, Norma Rae is successful
in organizing the millworkers, in the process discovering hidden inner strength. North
Country takes labor issues into the twenty-first century with its interpretation of the
first class-action sexual-harassment lawsuit filed in the United States. In this film, Josey

1087
Social Movements and Film

Aimes, a single mother who returns to her hometown looking for a way to support her-
self and her two children, quickly learns that working alongside men in a male-
dominated profession offers a woman more than a living wage. After enduring sexist
jokes and lewd behavior from her male co-workers, Josey sues her employer for failing
to provide a safe workplace. Like Norma Rae, Josie finds an inner strength that carries
her through legal, familial, and cultural battles.
Discrimination and unfair treatment in the workplace are not based solely on gen-
der, and labor problems involving race can be seen in films such as Matewan (1987)
and Bread and Roses (2000). Continuing the theme of unionization, Matewan portrays
the conflict that arises in 1920 when white mine workers, struggling to unionize, go on
strike and black and Italian miners are brought in as strikebreakers. Union organizer
Joe Kenehan intervenes, convinces the black and Italian miners that unity is the
answer, and brings the three groups together. After numerous violent confrontations
between labor and management, many centered around Kenehan, the miners success-
fully return to work. In its depiction of the labor struggle, Bread and Roses brings to
light the oppressive treatment of another group: Mexicans. This film reveals the labor
inequities experienced by the legal and illegal immigrants who clean offices in late
twentieth-century Los Angeles. Based on the Justice for Janitors campaign, Bread and
Roses covers the janitorial workers’ efforts to unionize, under the threat of deportation
for some and the loss of employment for others.
The civil rights movement (1955–1968), also the result of racial disparity in
American society, began as an attempt to abolish racial discrimination and restore
black suffrage in the South; the movement emphasized freedom, respect, dignity, and
social and economic equality. Racial segregation, disenfranchisement, exploitation,
and violence gave the movement direction. Founded in 1909 to end racial discrimina-
tion through legal means, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People’s (NAACP) most successful action was Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
which overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine established with Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896) and instituted the long struggle for integration and equal educational opportu-
nities in public schools. Acts of civil disobedience meant to promote equal rights led to
altercations between protestors and authority figures. The Long Walk Home (1990)
and Mississippi Burning (1988) represent two different but equally important land-
marks in the civil rights movement: the Selma, Alabama, bus boycott (1955) and
the murder of three civil rights activists in Neshoba County, Mississippi (1964).
The Long Walk Home follows the relationship that develops between two women—
Odessa Cotter, a black maid, and Miriam Thompson, her white employer—whose
lives are affected and eventually changed by the bus boycott, Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr.’s first attempt to desegregate the Birmingham transportation system. Mississippi
Burning, moving from the personal to the political, engages viewers in the discrepan-
cies of the American justice system when the victims of violence are unpopular with
law enforcement. Taking opposite approaches to representing events that helped to
shape the civil rights movement, both movies present fictionalized versions of history
that remind contemporary audiences of the struggle for equality forged in America’s
recent past.

1088
 Social Movements and Film

Yet another racially motivated effort, the American Indian movement (AIM),
formally organized in 1968, grew out of an effort to unite the indigenous peoples of
the Americas through spirituality and common need (Wittstock and Selinas, 2008).
Some of the movement’s first actions were to counteract police violence against Native
Americans, reclaim land for Indian use, and guarantee treaty fulfillment with
representative government bodies. Recognizing that passive resistance had not been
successful in protecting Indian rights, the movement’s leaders determined that a more
aggressive approach to the problems of native peoples needed to be implemented.
Efforts to bring about an awareness of the plight of Native Americans resulted in
numerous activities, such as the seizure of the Mayflower replica on Thanksgiving
Day (1970), the occupations of Mount Rushmore (1971) and Wounded Knee
(1973), the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1972), and the organization of
The Longest Walk (1978). Inspiring films such as Billy Jack (1971) and Dances with
Wolves (1990) document the effects of government oppression on Native Americans
and reflect the move from passive resistance to active confrontation in the Indians’
attempts to better their situation. Undoing many of the stereotypes created by the
B-westerns of the mid-twentieth century, Dances with Wolves traces the trust and
friendship that develop between a white Union Army officer, John J. Dunbar, and
the Sioux who make him an honorary member of their tribe. Taking the Indians’ side
in the war over western expansion, Dunbar warns the Indians that more white men
will come to take their land. Rather than make a stand against white encroachment,
the Sioux move to their winter camp, but this does not protect them from government
aggression. Focusing on the plight of Native Americans during the civil rights era, Billy
Jack moves viewers into the future, a hundred years later, after the white government
has forced Indians onto reservations. Billy Jack’s role in the film is to protect the
Freedom School, which has been founded on reservation land to support creative activ-
ity and teach nonviolent resolution and passive resistance. Violence erupts when a group
of racist white youths attacks a group of Indian students in the town ice-cream shop.
Although the school’s founder, Jean Roberts, attempts to diffuse the situation through
nonviolent means, Billy Jack—a half-breed, Green Beret, Vietnam vet—steps in to
avenge Jean, the students, and the school after Jean’s methods fail. Billy Jack’s violent
response leads to his eventual arrest, and the final shootout draws widespread media
attention, seemingly making Billy’s aggression more successful than Jean’s passivity.
A film about the rights of Native Americans, Billy Jack is also a film about the
wrongs of using violent methods to resolve human conflict. Thus, while not strictly
an antiwar film, it produced one of the most recognized antiwar songs of the twentieth
century, “One Tin Soldier,” and encompassed the beliefs of the antiwar movement: the
costs of the conflict are not worth the gains, the horrors of war are an abuse against
humanity, and war benefits only particular interests. Billy Jack is a decorated Vietnam
veteran, but his disillusionment with war causes him to abandon white society to live
on reservation land. Taking an antiwar stance, he tries to adopt a philosophy of peace-
ful conflict resolution, but his Green Beret training has made him cynical about the
honesty of the U.S. government and wary of the powerlessness experienced by those
who embrace such a worldview. In the end, his struggle to define his position results

1089
Social Movements and Film

in a display of the conflict many Americans felt during the 1970s. An earlier represen-
tation of the antiwar movement, The Great Dictator (1940) is the first Hollywood film
released before the United States entered World War II to denounce Hitler. In its stand
against fascism, Chaplin’s first “talkie” and most commercially successful film puts forth
the goal of the antiwar movement in his now famous “Look up, Hannah” speech:
“I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew,
gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.”
In 1975, the feminist movement was working toward the ratification of the Equal
Rights Amendment (ERA), the civil rights movement was forcing the integration of
public schools, and the American Indian movement (AIM) was continuing efforts to
pass the Indian Self-Determination Act, which would ensure tribal self-governance
(Man, 2007); the Environmental Movement, however, was just taking root in
America. With the release of Soylent Green in 1973, Americans were asked to recognize
the consequences of placing too heavy a burden on the Earth’s resources. As overpopu-
lation leads to widespread unemployment, homelessness, and poverty, and real food is
unavailable or nonexistent, people subsist in a surreal world on “soylent wafers” made
of chemically engineered ingredients. Through the storyline, viewers come to realize
that the answer to the world’s population problem (soylent green) is even more horrific
than the problem itself. Ten years later, Silkwood (1983) moves from declaring the dan-
gers of overpopulation to denouncing the effects of nuclear waste. One of the first
movies of its type, Silkwood explores the personal and environmental implications of
the harmful production and illegal disposal practices employed in a plutonium manu-
facturing plant. A Civil Action (1998) continues the story of environmental pollution
by manufacturing plants, disclosing the harmful effects of water contamination by a
leather manufacturing company in a small Massachusetts town. All three films are a
call for environmental awareness and action.
Coming out in the 1990s, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered (LGBT)
movement is bringing new interpretations of familiar themes (gender, labor, etc.) and
characters to moviegoers. A relatively new entry on the list of American social move-
ments, its origins have been traced by some to the sexual revolution of the 1960s; mov-
ies depicting nonheterosexuals have been around much longer. For example, Queen
Christina (1931), obviously pre-Code Hollywood, deals beautifully with the Swedish
monarch’s bisexuality. What some have reported as a glossing over of this aspect of
Christina’s life, a simple kiss on another woman’s mouth, others have read as affirma-
tion of the queen’s chosen lifestyle and one of the most incredible scenes in movie his-
tory. Later, dressed as a man, Christina meets and falls in love with a Spanish
nobleman. The complexity of Christina’s life is carefully and respectfully presented;
there is no gratuitous lesbian sex for the masses here. In 2000, If These Walls Could
Talk and Common Ground, covered decades of change in the American LGBT experi-
ence. Centered on the events that supposedly occur in one house over four decades,
If These Walls Could Talk begins in the 1960s, when the surviving partner in a long-
term lesbian relationship must face the legal implications of her unrecognized status;
moves to the 1970s, where a student must face her friends’ criticism because she falls
for someone “butch”; and ends at the turn of the century, when an out lesbian couple

1090
 Sound

decides to have a child and begins the search for a sperm donor. Common Ground,
which takes place in the small, fictionalized town of Homer, Connecticut, rather than
a house, also crosses decades and generations. The first story takes place in the 1950s
and involves a woman who is discharged from the military because of her sexuality;
returning to Homer, she discovers her Section 8 discharge also prevents her from
teaching. Flashing forward, viewers find themselves in the 1970s, toward the end of
the Vietnam War, and drawn into a gay French teacher’s struggle to keep his homo-
sexuality a secret while mentoring a student who is questioning his own sexuality.
The final story, which takes place at the turn of the century, details the conflict faced
by a gay man who is contemplating a commitment ceremony. Even though the unity
of the diverse entities involved in the LGBT movement is still a work in progress, film
explorations of the unique issues facing the nonheterosexual population continue to
emerge on the large and small screens, with notable recent examples being the 2008
release of Prayers for Bobby and Milk.
See also: African Americans in Film; Native Americans in Film; Religion and
Nationalism in Film; Women in Film

References
Man, Glenn. “1975: Movies and Conflicting Ideologies.” In Friedman, Lester D., ed. American
Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007:
135–56.
Nathan, Robert, and Jo Ann Mort. “Remembering Norma Rae: Why does Hollywood render
unions and the working class invisible?” The Nation, February 26, 2007; November 30,
2008. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070312/nathan-mort.
Porter, Glenn. Encyclopedia of American Economic History. New York: Scribners, 1980.
Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Collective Action, Social Movements and Politics. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Tilly, Charles. Social Movements, 1768–2004. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004.
Wittstock, Laura Waterman, and Elaine J. Salinas. “A Brief History of the American Indian
Movement.” American Indian Movement. November 17, 2008. http://www.aimovement.org/
ggc/history.html.
—Robin L. Cadwallader

SOUND. Films make use of three kinds of sound: music, dialogue and sound
effects. Sound in film is either diegetic, issuing from the world of the film, or nondie-
getic, originating from outside of the film. The most common type of nondiegetic
sound is the music on a film’s soundtrack. The characteristics of sound include rhythm,
pitch, loudness, fidelity, and quality.
Debates about the first sound film abound in film history. The first sound film pro-
jected for an audience was Alan Crosland’s Don Juan (1926), which featured recorded
orchestra music but no dialogue. The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first film to use
synchronized sound to tell a story, but it featured only a few short sound sequences.

1091
Sound

The first American all-talking film was the 1928 picture The Lights of New York, which
used full sound and image synchronization.
In its early stages of development, sound technology existed in two forms: sound-
on-film and sound-on-disc. The sound-on-film system, or Phonofilm, converted
sound into light waves that were printed along the edge of the frame. Phonofilm was
developed by Lee De Forest in 1923. The sound-on-disc system used a phonograph
to play a record of the sound as the film was being screened. Western Electric (a subsid-
iary of AT&T) marketed a sound-on-disc system called Vitaphone in 1925, but its
major disadvantage was the difficulty of synchronizing the sound and the image.
Warner Bros. bought Vitaphone and used it to make Don Juan and The Jazz Singer.
In 1928, “The Big Five,” the most prestigious and powerful of the Hollywood film
studios, pledged to adopt the sound-on-film system because its synchronization was
more reliable. Hollywood’s transition to sound films, however, was fraught with both
economic and aesthetic problems. For example, it was expensive to outfit the studios
and theaters with the new equipment. Moreover, directors had trouble blocking scenes,
as early microphones were unidirectional and tended to pick up extraneous noise on
the set. The sound of the camera was particularly problematic, so glass boxes were built
to house the cameras, but these tended to restrict the camera’s movement. In addition,
actors, some of them very successful silent film performers, had difficulty making the
transition to sound, and production costs escalated because screenwriters were now
needed to write scripts. By 1932, though, the transition to sound was virtually com-
plete. Charlie Chaplin was one of the most famous holdouts, reluctantly adding a
few lines of dialogue to his 1936 film Modern Times before making a complete transi-
tion to the new technology in The Great Dictator (1940).
Even during the silent film era, moving pictures were never completely silent;
although dialogue was communicated to audiences by way of written intertitle cards
in most silent pictures, most of them were accompanied by live music and sound
effects. Filmmakers understood early on, it seems, that music is crucial for establishing
mood and providing leitmotifs for characters and events. With this in mind, studios
began to hire composers to score their films, a practice that is still very much a part
of the filmmaking process today.
The rising popularity of folk and rock music during the 1950s and 1960s, and the
realization that many of the young people who listened to it also enjoyed watching
movies gave rise to a new connection between film and music. A symbiotic relationship
between popular music and film was powerfully expressed, for example, in The Graduate
(Mike Nichols, 1967), which used music by the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel to
enhance the narrative images. Realizing there was a great deal of money to made from
cross-marketing films with popular music, studios began to produce soundtracks that
ultimately sold millions of copies. A perfect example of this has been the success enjoyed
by The Bodyguard soundtrack. Capitalizing on the popularity of Whitney Houston,
Kasdan Pictures (teaming with Warner Bros. and TIG Productions) cast the pop diva
opposite Kevin Costner in the film; enthusiastic fans showed up to hear Houston sing
on-screen and then went out and purchased enough copies of the film’s soundtrack to
make it the biggest seller in history.

1092
 Sound

The production of sound for a film consists of four stages: design, recording, edit-
ing, and mixing. The sound designer comes up with a comprehensive plan for all ele-
ments of the film’s soundtrack and how they will work together. Walter Murch, known
for his Academy Award-winning work with director Francis Ford Coppola on The
Conversation (1979) and Apocalypse Now (1979), came up with the phrase “sound
design” to describe what he does. The introduction of the digital format for recording
has allowed designers greater flexibility and creativity. In the contemporary recording
process, technologies such as digital audiotape, compact discs, and computer hard
drives are used to capture sounds. Direct sound is captured on the set by microphones
placed on the actors, elsewhere on the set, or suspended overhead on a boom pole. The
multitrack sound recording process (introduced with Robert Altman’s Nashville in
1975; sound editor, William A. Sawyer) allows for the recording of up to 24 separate
tracks of sound. Sound can also be recorded during postproduction in a studio and
then mixed with the direct (or natural) sound. In the Automated Dialogue Replace-
ment (ADR) process, a film’s dialogue is performed by actors in a sound studio after
the movie is shot. ADR ensures that the dialogue is clear and audible despite any dis-
tracting noises heard on the set during filming.
During the editing stage, the sound editor works with the director, music composer,
and picture editor to pair the sound with the images. Sound effects are gathered and
added, either through a digital program or using the Foley system. In this process,
invented in the 1930s by Jack Foley, a sound technician for Universal, artists create
sound effects in a specially equipped studio using a variety of objects. Sound mixing
takes each individual track of sound and combines these into a fully developed sound
design that complements the images. Most American films follow a sound hierarchy
in which dialogue takes precedence, followed by music and sound effects.
Contemporary film sound has been improved by digital technologies in the produc-
tion and postproduction processes and by the advent of the Dolby system in theaters.
Dolby Stereo debuted in 1976 with four channels of surround sound, was improved to
six channels in 1992, and seven in 1999. This extra channel is positioned behind the
viewer to enhance the sense of surround sound; it is often used to create flyover effects
in action films. American theaters use several different formats of digital sound: Dolby
Digital, Digital Theater Systems (DTS) and Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS).
See also: Color; Music in Film; Musical, The; Silent Era, The

References
Altman, Rick. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992.
LoBrutto, Vincent. Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound. New York: Praeger,
1994.
Weiss, Elizabeth, and John Belton, eds. Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985.
—Jennifer L. Gauthier

1093
Sports Film, The

SPORTS FILM, THE. In twentieth-century American cinema, the category of the

sports film generally refers to movies that feature a sporting event as the primary setting,
a real or fictional athlete as a central character, or a sporting-related theme as the context
for the broader plot. Sports films vary in their use of humor, drama, biography, com-
mentary, and action as devices for portraying real, metaphorical, or fantastic stories.
While traditional American sports such as football, basketball, and boxing have
frequently been used as plot backdrops for these pictures, baseball figured promi-
nently in many of the most important sports films made during the twentieth
century. Although not recognized by the American Film Institute as a film genre, this
august body has nevertheless honored sports movies such as The Hustler (1961),
Raging Bull (1980), and Rocky (1976) as some of the most significant films of the
twentieth century.
There are several important subgenres of sports films. Where many of these movies
have focused on dramatic re-enactments of athletic achievement or heroism, some have
used sports as the context for more comprehensive and dramatic human interest sto-
ries. Examples of these latter pictures include: Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), Bull
Durham (1988), Jerry Maguire (1996), and The Rookie (2002). In these films, the rela-
tionships defined between and among their characters are the vehicles through which
themes such as love and romance, redemption, or unlikely achievement are explored.
Critically acclaimed films such as The Hustler and Raging Bull feature similarly com-
posed central characters, wherein the plot and central conflict are essentially a function
of the struggle or personal obsession of the protagonist.
The sports film comedy is a subgenre in which sports, athletes, or sports-related
themes and imagery serve as the backdrop to a comedic plot. Particularly popular in
the last 25 years, some of the most important of these films are The Bad News Bears
(1976), Slap Shot (1977), Caddyshack (1980), and Angels in the Outfield (1994).
Sports-comedy films may center on mis-achievement as a plot device, though the nar-
rative arc frequently brings the protagonist to a positive resolution.
Geopolitical antagonisms, notably Cold War themes, have been featured in the box-
ing subgenre, most significantly in the Rocky series. Rocky IV (1985) is perhaps the
most obvious example of the filmic expression of these tensions and also has the dis-
tinction of being the most financially successful of all the Rocky films. More recent
innovations in this subgenre are films such as Fight Club (1999) and the critically
acclaimed The Wrestler (2008).
Social commentary is another important subgenre of the sports film. In films such
as Hoosiers (1986), The Hurricane (1999), Remember the Titans (2000), and Love and
Basketball (2000), sports themes have served as the backdrop for an exploration of
issues such as race, class, and gender. These four films in particular have received criti-
cal acclaim in the form of Academy Awards, Golden Globe Awards, and recognition at
international film festivals. Much the same can be said of Ali (2001), which was hon-
ored with two Oscar nominations and numerous festival awards. Although these social
commentary sports films have been well received by audiences, some critics have sug-
gested that they tend to glamorize race relations, ignoring the important struggles
waged by real men and women attempting to achieve civil and political equality.

1094
 Sports Film, The

It may be that the film industry’s

desire for commercial success has
forced filmmakers to produce
movies that skirt some of the
more divisive issues that still
plague America.
Finally, the coming-of-age film
is another important subcategory
of the sports film genre. The
aforementioned Hoosiers, as well
as Rudy (1993) and Invincible
(2006), are representative of this
subgenre. The basic thematic nar-
rative—that the protagonist,
against all odds, overcomes a set
of obstacles in order to achieve
social acceptance, personal satis-
faction, or a transformation in
the eyes of his peers—though it
sometimes unfolds in diverse and
often complex ways, is basically
followed through in these films.
Although the central characters
generally achieve some sort of
fantastic and/or improbable feat
whose acceptance requires a cer-
tain suspension of disbelief on
the part of the viewer, the social
significance of these films cannot Actor Sean Astin in a scene from the 1993 film Rudy,
be understated, especially for directed by David Anspaugh. (Photofest)
young adult males. Playing off of
a more generalized myth of American exceptionalism, it may be that these coming-
of-age sports films are so popular because they act to reassure vulnerable young men
that should they work hard enough, there is always a “possibility of the extraordinary.”
Generally speaking, sports films have not featured significantly in defining
American cinema, in the sense that the genre is often seen as either fringe or as not
providing the ideal setting for the most compelling storytelling, the preference being
given to more “serious” dramatic backdrops. At the same time, Toronto recently
held North America’s first Sports Film Festival, perhaps presaging the emergence or
acceptance of the genre within a more serious milieu.
Sports movies have proven to be extremely popular, perhaps because their storylines
are almost always redemptive. Because of their popularity, and because these pictures
tend to be very profitable, they will most likely continue to be made. As long as sports
films weave racial, nationalist, gender, or human interest stories into the fabric of

1095
Studio System, The

narratives based on athletic figures or themes, the genre will continue to gain critical
respect.

References
Baker, Aaron. Contested Identities: Sports in American Film. Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 2003.
The Greatest Sports Films of All Time, DVD. Twentieth Century-Fox Home Entertainment, 2007.
Williams, Randy. Sports Cinema-100 Movies: The Best of Hollywood’s Athletic Heroes, Losers,
Myths, Misfits, of the Silver Screen. New York: Limelight, 2006.

—John M. Mullin

STUDIO SYSTEM, THE. Although the official studio system era ran from 1930
to 1949, the control that major studios have had over film production and consump-
tion extends far beyond this period. Eight major studios worked to prevent competi-
tion in a way that served to standardize not just modes of production and distribution
but also the ways in which audiences came to understand the new filmic medium.
These studios determined how movies should look, feel, and sound by rigidly defining
the stories, plots, feature lengths, and “star quality” of individual pictures. This homo-
geneity can, in large part, be attributed to the rise of the studio system.
The studio system structure allowed the film industry to weather large technological
and cultural changes that might have otherwise meant the downfall of major produc-
ers. Sound, for example, came suddenly to the motion picture industry, but the transi-
tion from silent films to “talkies” went relatively smoothly, primarily because of the
existing (although still developing) studio system. Warner Bros. and Fox led the way
toward full industry conversion to sound, something that was accomplished by 1930,
only three years after the release of The Jazz Singer, the first talking motion picture.
The dawn of the twentieth century saw a great many fledgling filmmakers experi-
menting with the new medium of moving pictures. As the first decade of the new
century came to a close, however, powerful figures in what was now an emerging
industry formed the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) in an attempt to cre-
ate a monopoly on cinematic equipment. Although the MPPC failed, its formation
marked the beginning point of the studio system, as now filmmakers sought to maxi-
mize profits and increase efficiency through enhancing and controlling production-
line methods. This factorylike approach, with highly supervised, subdivided labor
and standardized production methods and styles, led to the development of cinematic
“studios,” a term used because it had a more artistic feel than did the term “factories.”
Adolph Zukor (1873–1976) pioneered the “vertical integration” of the industry with
the 1916 merger of the distribution company Paramount with the production com-
panies Famous Players (New York) and Lasky Corporation (Los Angeles).
After the merger, studio heads at what came to be known as Famous Players-Lasky
(later Paramount) developed a three-part strategy for filmmaking that applied modern
business practices to the processes of contracting stars and executives, distribution, and

1096
 Studio System, The

exhibition. Initiating this strategy, studio heads at Famous-Players Lasky signed popu-
lar actors such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to highly restrictive contracts.
These stars served to create a kind of brand loyalty to the studio: fans became faithful
to movie stars, and because these stars were signed to contracts with a certain studio,
fans unwittingly became faithful to that studio. For their part, studio heads tended to
remain behind the scenes, where they wielded vast power and enjoyed long, largely
unregulated executive careers. With profits high and stockholders happy, studio heads
in the early days of Hollywood took home paychecks and bonuses far in excess of the
national standard for business executives.
In regard to distribution, Famous Players-Lasky divided the process into three inter-
related facets: advertising, sales and promotion, and service. During World War I, dis-
tribution expanded internationally, and the increasingly powerful studio took full
advantage of this growth phenomenon. Famous Players-Lasky executives also sought
to control the exhibition of films by concentrating on gaining control of most first-
run, and a good number of second-run, cinemas. By the early 1930s, the “Big Five”
(Loew’s, Inc., RKO, Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., and Paramount—formerly
Famous Players-Lansky) and the “Little Three” (United Artists, Columbia, and Uni-
versal Studios) dominated the film industry.
Significantly, during the years that America was involved in World War II, film
audiences began to flock to theaters. While this generated higher profits for the major
studios, it also created a demand for the production of more films. This demand
allowed independent filmmakers to edge their way into the system by creating smaller
studios. Usually headed by stars, directors, or producers, independent production stu-
dios making just one or two films at a time began to flourish. With the 1949 Supreme
Court decision in United States v. Paramount, a series of delayed and ongoing antitrust
cases against the Big Eight were resolved, forcing these companies to sell their theater
chains and discontinue block booking. As a result, profits from exhibition, the major
studios’ biggest source of revenue, crumbled. The 1950s saw the Big Eight producing
fewer, but bigger, films—usually historical epics and westerns, serving mainly to
finance movies produced by independents in exchange for distribution rights or out-
right ownership of the final picture. During the 1960s, studios relied mostly on selling
old films to TV in order to generate income. The release and phenomenal success of
the Universal picture Jaws in 1975, however, changed everything, as after this point,
the major studios began to concentrate on producing at least one high-budget “block-
buster” per year whose revenues could sustain them, even if their smaller pictures lost
money. After the 1970s, then, independent filmmaking became increasingly precari-
ous, while the major studios once again rose to power.
See also: Independent Film, The; Screenplay and the Screenwriter, The

References
Dick, Bernard F. Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Holly-
wood. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.
Gomery, Douglas. The Hollywood Studio System: A History. London: British Film Institute, 2005.

1097
Sundance Film Festival, The

Mordden, Ethan. The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
Staiger, Janet. “Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio
System.” In Kindem, Gorham, ed. The American Movie Industry. Carbondale: Southern Illi-
nois Press, 1982: 94–103.
—Molly K. B. Varley

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL, THE. Certainly one of the most important

annual events in American cinema, the Sundance Film Festival has also become a sig-
nificant celebratory point of origin for independent cinema, mentioned alongside the
festivals in Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Berlin. This event takes place every January
in the little snowy winter station of Park City, Utah. Annually, the Hollywood smart
set meets at what is now actor/director Robert Redford’s “Sundance Village,” a rustic
resort area nestled in the scenic canyon beneath soaring Mount Timpanogos. Resisting
suggestions from big-city developers to build fabulous hotels and restaurants in the
area after he purchased it in 1969, Redford was adamant that Sundance would remain
a place where visitors could commune with nature and involve themselves in artistic
pursuits.
The festival traces its roots to the concordant interests of the state of Utah’s arts
community, represented by Sterling van Wagenen, and the state’s commercial needs,
represented by Utah State Film Commissioner John Earle. Contrary to what many
believe, Robert Redford was not the founder of the event, even if as a local resident
he has been involved since the very beginning as the board’s inaugural chairperson.
Born as the Utah/US Film Festival in September 1978, its purpose was to screen retro-
spectives, short films, and movies not produced within the Hollywood system. Origi-
nally held in Salt Lake City, the festival was funded by the Utah Film Commission,
industry sponsors, and donations.
It remained a local event, facing problems with financing and encountering difficul-
ties in development until Redford took over the festival in 1981, becoming its
president. Redford moved the festival to Park City, and it was renamed the United
States Film and Video Festival; Lory Smith became the program director at that point.
In 1985, Tony Safford became the new program director, and from that point forward,
the festival was organized as a nonprofit association—the Sundance Institute. Redford
was able to use his industry connections to gather together colleagues and friends in
support of the event. In 1991, Geoffrey Gilmore was installed as program director,
and the event was renamed the Sundance Film Festival, after Redford’s character in
the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In 1996, the Sundance Channel
was launched. A corporate and artistic venture uniting Redford, Showtime Networks,
and the Sundance Film Festival, the channel offers cable television viewers
commercial-free, original programming.
Relying on hundreds of volunteers, Sundance is now spread across 10 days. Jury
panels evaluate films divided into different categories: Independent Feature Films;
American Spectrum; Frontier; Native Forum; Park City at Midnight; Premieres;

1098
 Superhero in Film, The

Shorts; From the Sundance Collection; and Special Screenings. Highly coveted prizes
are awarded, including the Grand Jury Prize; the Sundance Special Jury Prize; the Free-
dom of Expression Award; the Audience Award; the Filmmaker Trophy; the Directing
Award; the Excellence in Cinematography Award; and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting
Award.
Continuing to support mainly low-budget, independent cinema, the festival has
gained an international reputation. Often the point of origin for the screening of
low-profile African American and Latin American films, Sundance has become an
important stepping-stone for talented new directors, including Joel and Ethan Coen,
Vincent Gallo, Jim Jarmusch, Robert Rodriguez, Steven Soderbergh, and Quentin
Tarantino.

References
Anderson, John, and Morgan David. Sundancing: Hanging Out and Listening In at America’s
Most Important Film Festival. New York: Harper, 2000.
Craig, Benjamin. Sundance: A Festival Virgin’s Guide: Surviving and Thriving in Park City at
America’s Most Important Film Festival. London: Cinemagine Media, 2006.
Dayan, Daniel. “Looking for Sundance: The Social Construction of a Film Festival.” In Bon-
debjerg, Ib, ed. Moving Images, Culture, and the Mind. London: University of Luto Press,
2000: 43–52.
Smith, Lory. Party in a Box: The Story of the Sundance Film Festival. Salt Lake City: Gibbs-
Smith, 1998.

—Laëtitia Baltz

SUPERHERO IN FILM, THE. Superheroes appeared in films soon after they first
graced the pages of comic books. While often dismissed as static, shallow characters,
superheroes actually embody the highest ideals of heroism, self-sacrifice, and devotion.
Interestingly, they are also often revealed to be alienated and deeply troubled individ-
uals. The dominant theme in superhero films is power and the moral ambiguities of
its use. As the genre has evolved, other films have sought to deconstruct the myth of
the superhero and its ambiguous place in society.
Movie serials starring Captain Marvel (1941), Batman (1943, 1949), the Phantom
(1943), and Superman (1948, 1950) appeared soon after comic book superheroes first
emerged in print. However, the genre only became significant with the release of
Superman in 1978. Beyond comics and films, Superman and other superheroes have an
enormous presence across modern culture (Jones, 2004, 338–39). They are true multi-
media characters, appearing in newspaper comic strips, novels, television, video games,
toys, and, ubiquitously, in merchandising. The rich continuities of comic book universes,
built over decades by numerous writers, artists, and fans, are vast narrative repositories
(Kaveney, 2008, 25). Reynolds (1992), in one of the earliest scholarly works on the
subject, defines superheroes as the protagonists of a “New Mythology,” one which, while
drawing from other mythologies, has evolved a complex folklore all its own.

1099
Superhero in Film, The

Superheroes show obvious kinship with characters of classical mythology, pulp mys-
teries, westerns, and even Akira Kurosawa’s samurai. While the genre has porous boun-
daries, a classic superhero character does have certain distinctive traits. Most
conspicuous are their “secret identities” and fanciful costumes. Costumes typically
embody or symbolize the hero’s power or iconography (Batman’s embrace of darkness,
for example). Secret identities and costumes also personify the superhero’s dual “per-
sona,” in which the individual and the hero may display different personalities and
often conflicting needs (Kaveney, 2008). Superheroes above all are “super”; they are
set apart from others by their “extraordinary natures” (Reynolds, 1992). This power
may come from an individual’s genetic heritage, such as the alien Kal-El (Superman)
or the mutant X-Men. There are also heroes who command mystical forces, such as
Johnny Blaze (Ghost Rider, 2007), whose powers are the Devil’s treacherous gift.
Owing to the science fiction themes that pervade superhero mythology, many heroes
gain powers by scientific means or by accidents of “mad science.” Peter Parker (Spiderman,
2002) receives his spiderlike powers as the result of the bite of a radioactive spider. Tony
Stark (Iron Man, 2008) uses his engineering skill to build a body-enmeshing flying suit.
Not all superheroes are conventionally “super-powered,” however: by training his body
and mind to their fullest potential, Bruce Wayne (Batman, 1989), for instance, becomes
a superhero by sheer force of will (Brooker, 2000; Skoble, 2005).
As superheroes are defined by their uncanny abilities, it is tempting to view them
as Godlike figures, or even to equate them with Friedrich Nietzsche’s übermensch—
his “overman” or “superman.” Perhaps the superhero who has most often been sub-
ject to messianic characterizations is Superman (Hajdu, 2008). Indeed, in the
musical Godspell (1973), Jesus literally wears a Superman shirt; in a monologue
used in Superman and Superman Returns (2006), Superman’s true (heavenly?)
father, Jor-El, urges his “beloved son” to be a light unto the people of Earth; and
in Superman Returns, Superman saves the day but must endure a passion sequence
of sacrifice, death, and resurrection. The secular image of Nietzsche’s superman is
also apparent in superhero films. As Anton (2007) argues, the animated film The
Incredibles (2004) is heavily laden with Nietzschean themes. The government bans
superheroes and forces them into witness protection-style anonymity. Out of fear
and jealousy, the mundane majority has mandated a mediocre equality that benefits
no one: “If everyone is special, then no one is!” is the lament of a frustrated super-
child and the gloat of a decidedly non-super villain.
If superheroes walk the Earth like gods, projecting the fantasies of (mostly male)
adolescents, it is nonetheless clear that possessing their extraordinary powers comes
with a price. Peter Parker, for example, perhaps the most introspective of film superher-
oes, makes it clear in Spiderman that his power is both a gift and a curse. Constantly
meditating on the phrase “with great power comes great responsibility,” Parker can
delight in his new abilities, but ends up being tormented when his actions in prevent-
ing a crime indirectly lead to the murder of his uncle. In fact, while being a superhero
can be rewarding, it can also be burdensome, as the heroic life seems always to be
marked by turmoil. Mr. Incredible (The Incredibles) is even sued by a man he saves
from a suicide attempt. In the X-Men trilogy (X-Men, 2000; X-Men II, 2003; and

1100
 Superhero in Film, The

X-Men: Last Stand, 2006), Mutants (the “good guys” who exhibit various remarkable
abilities) are a hated minority. These films, in particular, play with the issue of homo-
phobia. When one young Mutant “comes out” to his family in X-Men II, his mother
bluntly asks him, “Can’t you just not be a Mutant?” In X-Men: Last Stand, a “cure”
for the “disease” of mutation is developed by a pharmaceutical lab based on Alcatraz
Island in San Francisco Bay; a storyline that provides viewers with a truly complex stew
of political metaphors.
Though many superheroes enjoy the tacit endorsement of the authorities, they
often face suspicion and even hostility from civic officials. Of course, this is not sur-
prising, as superheroes are self-appointed, unaccountable to anyone, and frequently
operate outside the law. The need for superheroes to fight crime can easily be seen as
a critique of traditional law enforcement, which often appears too corrupt or bureau-
cratic to be effective. Vigilante-style superheroes (such as Batman, the Punisher, and
Rorschach) do what the police fail to do: attack and overcome the most brutal crimi-
nals. When his family is murdered and the police seemingly do nothing, Frank Castle
annihilates the criminals himself, beginning a one-man war on crime (Punisher, 2004,
and Punisher War Zone, 2008). The same mission consumes Batman (Batman, 1989,
and Batman Begins 2005), despite his close friendship with Police Commissioner
Gordon. A similar motif occurs in Darkman (1990), Daredevil (2003), and The Spirit
(2008). Rorschach (Watchmen, 2008) goes further, regarding the police as irrelevant
and even attacking them when they obstruct him.
Superhero films are often cynically distrusting of traditional political, military, and
economic elites. Many films (Superman III, 1983; Batman Returns, 1992; The Phantom,
1996; Catwoman, 2004; The Fantastic Four, 2005, to name a few) feature scheming
capitalists, often dabbling in mad science for conquest and profit. Iron Man shows a
defense contractor actively conspiring with terrorists. A subtler comment on capitalism
appears in Blade (1998), in which a creepy council of vampires strongly resembles a
board of directors. The Toxic Avenger (1985) battles an entire city government that is
steeped in corruption as foul as the toxic waste from which they derive their wealth.
The anarchistic V (V for Vendetta, 2005) confronts a sinister fascist regime in
alternative-history Britain. Another alternative-history film, Watchmen, imagines a
fifth-term President Nixon joking that an imminent nuclear war will finally destroy
the liberal “Harvard Establishment.” In The Hulk (2003), Bruce Banner (who stress
transforms into the superpowerful Hulk) is treated like a lab animal by a shady defense
contractor and the ruthless General Ross. Curiously, for a film made so soon after 9/11,
the U.S. military is the Hulk’s main adversary, and the Hulk is clearly the intended
object of audience sympathy. In the semi-sequel The Incredible Hulk (2008), the military
(symbolized by Ross and the violence-addicted Major Blonsky) have learned nothing;
they still try to exploit the Hulk as a weapon. The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
(2007), in a direct allusion to the Guantánamo Bay prisoner abuse scandal, features a
government interrogator specializing in “harsh methods” (i.e., torture). The X-Men tril-
ogy is perhaps the most mistrusting of political authority, frequently alluding to real-
world oppression: the denial of African American civil rights; the internment of Japanese
Americans; and the Holocaust.

1101
Superhero in Film, The

Superhero worlds do require foes more colorful and dangerous than corrupt
businessmen or politicians. Like Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis Moriarty, extraordi-
nary heroes require equally remarkable enemies as proper foils. Super-villains also
counterpoint the superhero’s selfless use of power, especially villains who gain power
by similar means as the heroes that confront them. As Brenzell (2005) suggests, the
superhero’s acquisition of enormous power is akin to Plato’s story of the Ring of Gyges:
How does one choose to use a ring that makes one invisible? The answer reveals a per-
son’s true character. For super-villains (as well as corrupt elites), power is simply the
means that allows one to achieve the ends of self-aggrandizement, revenge, or the
destruction of one’s foes. Superman’s arch-foe Lex Luthor famously uses his genius
for murderous money-making schemes. In Superman and Superman Returns, his “real
estate investments” involve the destruction of whole states and the deaths of millions.
Comparatively tame in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Luthor merely wants to
profit from the arms race. However, Superman II (1980) offers the clearest analogy to
the Ring of Gyges. Three Kryptonian criminals, finding themselves with the same abil-
ities as Superman, immediately claim lordship over the Earth. Destroying all
opposition, they declare a “new order” with their leader Zod as absolute ruler. Seeing
the American eagle on a White House carpet, Zod (who can fly like Superman) is omi-
nously pleased that humans “are accustomed to worshiping things that fly.” What
makes Superman a hero, and Zod a monster, then, are not their abilities (which are
identical) but their characters. Black-bearded and clothed, Zod strikes a satanic pose,
even walking on water at one point to affirm his antimessianic nature. He never con-
siders using his power for anything but personal gain. In contrast is Superman’s Christ-
like willingness to suffer, even die, for truth, justice, and the American way. He and
other superheroes answer the dilemma of the Ring of Gyges by following a moral code
transcending both self-interest and loyalty to the state. Despite their flaws and weak-
nesses, in the final analysis, the power of the superhero is committed solely to the cause
of justice (Reynolds, 1992).
A second major theme resonating in superhero films is the social isolation and
troubled lives of heroes. The need to guard their secrets isolates superheroes and may
force them to lie or even humiliate themselves; Clark Kent must play the fool to con-
ceal that he is Superman, for example. Superheroes can also become isolated due to
their sense of duty and the dangerous world they inhabit. In Spiderman, Peter Parker
reluctantly conceals his love for Mary Jane Watson, fearing his enemies will harm her
to get at him. When he finally admits his love for her in Spiderman II, the shadow of
his “other self ” darkens what should be a bright and shiny moment of happiness; he
must immediately leave her to follow a police siren. His dual identity also threatens
their relationship. In Spiderman III, when a grateful woman saved by Spiderman pas-
sionately kisses him, Mary Jane is understandably irate and demands to know whether
he was “Spiderman” or “Peter Parker” at that moment. Perversely, all this secrecy does
little to protect Mary Jane, who is abducted, in turn, by the principal villain in each
Spiderman movie. While Spiderman may be an atypical superhero in managing nor-
mal romantic and family ties, those close to superheroes are frequently in danger, as

1102
 Superhero in Film, The

Lois Lane (Superman II), Vicky Vale (Batman), Betty Ross (The Hulk), Microchip
(Punisher War Zone), and many others discover.
The tragic core of so many superhero sagas is the genre’s darkest facet. A recurring
superhero motif is a tragic origin: Superman is an orphan alien from a dead planet;
Bruce Wayne (Batman) witnesses his parents’ murder; and Wolverine (X-Men trilogy)
is subjected to bizarre experiments. Tragedy appears to have completely shattered the
personality of some characters. Batman Returns (1992) provocatively suggests that
Bruce Wayne does not put on a costume to become Batman, but rather that Batman
is the real man who occasionally puts on the “mask” of Bruce Wayne. Lamont
Cranston (The Shadow, 1994) dreams of pulling away his skin to reveal another self
beneath, a dream shared by Watchmen’s Nite Owl. Even more psychologically troubled
is Rorschach (née Walter Kovacs), who refers to his inkblot-pattern mask as his “face”
and tells a psychiatrist that he is only Rorschach because Kovacs is “gone.” The Pun-
isher and The Spirit simply declare their old identities to be dead. This lonely abyss
can only be bridged by contact with other superheroes, a point best articulated in the
X-Men movies where mutants find a safe haven in Professor Xavier’s “School for the
Gifted.” Batman, despite his loner’s instinct, creates a surrogate family with Alfred,
Robin, and Batgirl (Batman Forever, 1995; Batman and Robin, 1997). The Fantastic
Four also form a family, albeit a dysfunctional one. Even Rorschach is drawn to Nite
Owl, his only friend.
Ironically, it may be that the figures who best understand the tortured existences of
superheroes are their enemies. In The Dark Knight (2008), the Joker (who exemplifies
pure chaos over against Batman’s quest for order), in a perverse trope of the well-
known line from Jerry Maguire, claims that he and Batman “complete each other.”
The Mutant war in the X-Men trilogy is rooted in the shattered friendship between
Professor Xavier and Magneto. Heroes and villains often have interlinking origins:
Daredevil, Batman, The Phantom, and Elektra (Elektra, 2005) all lose family members
to men who later became their arch-enemies. Though Blade hunts the vampire who
killed his pregnant mother, the attack is the very thing that provides the unborn Blade
his vampirelike powers. The same accident created the Fantastic Four and their rival
Dr. Doom. If superheroes and arch-villains somehow understand each other, then, it
seems to be an understanding based on shared experiences of tragedy, loss, and
estrangement.
As with any genre, superheroes are susceptible to parody and deconstruction. The
sublime silliness of the Batman television series (1966–1968) casts an ambivalent
shadow over superhero films, although some pictures like Batman Forever obviously
embrace their camp legacy. Superheroes are such extreme characters that the line
between drama and parody is often razor-thin. Transporting garishly attired characters
from comic books to film always runs the risk of generating laughter. Films have also
deconstructed the superhero’s image of noble innocence. Watchmen is particularly
grim, suggesting that if superheroes were real, besides being emotionally disturbed,
they would be unlikely to make the world a better place. On a lighter note, Mystery
Men (1999) uses superheroes to critique marketing culture. In this film, superhero
Captain Amazing employs a publicist and wears a NASCAR-like costume covered

1103
Superhero in Film, The

with the logos of his corporate sponsors. He even secretly engineers the release of his
arch-enemy to boost his ratings. The Specials (2000) exist in a similar world of com-
mercial exploitation. As only the “sixth or seventh greatest superhero team,” the Spe-
cials are well-meaning losers. A line of wildly inaccurate Specials action figures only
highlights their total impotence as heroes; even their merchandising is awful. Ironi-
cally, the Specials get a moment to shine in an emergency because the “government-
sponsored” Crusaders are on a press tour and unavailable. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog
(2008) subverts the genre further by fully inverting the hero-villain relationship. The
alleged hero Captain Hammer is a sex-crazed, egomaniacal jerk, while mad scientist
Dr. Horrible is a sympathetic (and ultimately tragic) figure. The slightly askew world
of comic book fans has also been glimpsed in Comic Book: The Movie (2004), a mocku-
mentary set at the San Diego Comic-Con. A super-fanboy played by Mark Hamill
dresses as fictional 1940s superhero Commander Courage in order to defend the char-
acter from crass commercial exploitation. This is also an interesting reversal, as the fan
uses the hero’s own iconography in order to rescue the hero.
The superhero concept is so highly elastic that it has been reworked in surprising
ways on television. No one on Heroes (premiered in 2006) ever dons a cape, but the
series draws freely on superhero thematic traditions, especially the sense of isolation.
As their powers manifest themselves, Heroes’ characters desperately try to maintain a
sense of normalcy, though the aptly named Hiro Nakamura experiences the delight
of a true comic book geek. Dexter Morgan, the forensic scientist-cum-serial killer of
Dexter (premiered in 2006), also resembles a superhero insofar as he avenges crime,
lives by a rigid code of conduct, and expends considerable effort keeping his secrets.
In the episode “Dark Defender,” Dexter even dreams of himself as a superhero prevent-
ing his mother’s murder (the trauma that warped his own life). Discussing horror tele-
vision series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Kaveney (2008, 204) simply
declares that “Buffy is a superhero,” as she clearly fits the same thematic profile as
Spiderman. While not adaptations of existing characters, and eschewing many genre
conventions, these series show the infinite adaptability of the superhero concept.
While giving audiences colorful characters and dynamic action, superhero films
have also explored the emotional and moral quandaries of power. Superheroes re-
present noble ideals but are often deeply troubled characters unsure of their place in
the world. As a genre, superhero films have flourished in part because of the basic
humanity of the characters. Despite their awesome powers, though, or perhaps because
of them, in the final analysis they are “all too human.”
See also: Action-Adventure Film, The

References
Anton, Audrey. “The Nietzschean Influence in The Incredibles and the Sidekick Revolt.” In
Wandtke, Terrence, ed., The Amazing Transforming Superhero: Essays on the Revision of Char-
acters in Comic Books, Film, and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007: 209–29.
Brenzel, Jeff, “Why Are Superheroes Good? Comics and the Ring of Gyges.” In Morris, Tom,
and Matt Morris, eds. Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way. Chi-
cago: Open Court, 2005: 147–60.

1104
 Superhero in Film, The

Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. London: Continuum, 2000.
Hajdu, David. The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008.
Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. New York:
Basic Books, 2004.
Kaveney, Roz. Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Film. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008.
Reynolds, Richard. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,
1992.
Skoble, Aeon J. “Superhero Revisionism in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.” In Morris,
Tom, and Matt Morris, eds. Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way.
Chicago: Open Court, 2005: 29–41.
—Karl Leib

1105
This page intentionally left blank
 v
T
TELEVISION. Television, though technologically feasible by the 1930s and intro-
duced to a broad American audience at the 1939 World’s Fair, first became a significant
part of the entertainment landscape a decade later, with the beginning of nationwide
network broadcasting. The movie industry initially dismissed television as an inferior
product. Movies offered high production values, familiar stars, crisp color pictures,
rich sound, and the immersive experience provided by big screens and darkened audi-
toriums, none of which television could match. Television, however, had two advan-
tages: the programming was free, and it came to viewers in their living rooms.
Over the course of the 1950s, Hollywood shifted from seeing television as a passing
fad to seeing it as a competitor. The movie industry sought, therefore, to highlight the
differences between what viewers could find in their local theater and what they could
find in their living room. The first features shot using Cinerama, a process that used
multiple cameras to create an ultra-wide-screen image, appeared as special attractions
at a select number of specially equipped theaters in 1952—so did Bwana Devil, the
first feature film designed to be viewed in 3-D. CinemaScope, which, although it pro-
duced a wide-screen image less expansive than Cinerama, required less elaborate tech-
nology, also began to expand the silver screen during this period. Other, competing
widescreen processes followed: Vistavision in 1954, Todd-AO in 1955, and Technir-
ama in 1956. Cinerama and 3-D eventually faded while wide-screen formats (along
with improvements in color and sound) lasted; but none of it slowed the steady defec-
tion of movie audiences to television.
Treating television as an alternative channel for distributing movies proved to be a
more effective, and more sustainable, strategy. Minor studios like Republic and
Monogram began supplying their low-budget, formulaic westerns to TV networks as
early as 1950, and RKO—its corporate hand forced by bankruptcy—became the first
of the major studios to follow suit, selling a package of pre-1948 titles to New York
television station WOR in late 1954. Run on weekday evenings under the umbrella
title The Million Dollar Movie, the RKO films proved popular with viewers. The other
studios followed RKO’s lead, and pre-1948 movies became a staple of early morning,
late night, and weekend programming nationwide. The advent of color television led

1107
Television

the three major broadcast networks to negotiate, in the early 1960s, for the rights to air
recent Technicolor films during evening “prime-time” hours. NBC, the network most
aggressively committed to color, launched Saturday Night at the Movies at the begin-
ning of the 1961–62 season, and ABC followed with Sunday Night at the Movies at
midseason, in early 1962. CBS, the most conservative of the networks, belatedly joined
the trend at the start of the 1965–66 season.
Older black-and-white films had been attractive to broadcasters primarily as inex-
pensive time-fillers. Recent color films, on the other hand, drew substantial audiences.
A 1968 broadcast of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds drew 40 percent of the viewing audi-
ence, and a two-night 1976 broadcast of Gone with the Wind drew 50 percent. Com-
mercial time during such broadcasts commanded premium rates. Ford Motor
Company, for example, paid $2 million to be the sole sponsor for a network showing
of Bridge over the River Kwai in 1966. The dual appeal of audience share and advertis-
ing revenue caused network “nights at the movies” to proliferate, until, by the early
1970s, the three networks were airing 10 prime-time movies each week. Ironically,
the networks’ demand for theatrical feature films ultimately outstripped what the stu-
dios could supply, leading the studios to demand higher rental fees and the networks
to search for a cheaper alternative. They found it in movies made directly for televi-
sion, which came into their own in the early 1970s.
Produced on budgets of less than $1 million apiece, with small casts and limited use
of location shooting and special effects, made-for-television movies were reminiscent
of the B-pictures of the 1930s and 1940s. Most were little more than efficient, formu-
laic genre stories, but a surprising number were extraordinarily successful. Brian’s Song
(1971), for instance, the story of Chicago Bears running back Gale Sayers’s friendship
with his dying teammate, Brian Piccolo, drew accolades from the NAACP and the
American Cancer Society, and unaccustomed tears from many male viewers. A Case
of Rape (1974), starring Elizabeth Montgomery, the bubbly star of the popular sitcom
Bewitched, savagely indicted the legal system for its blame-the-victim approach to the
crime. The Day After (1983) shocked Cold War audiences with its unsparing depiction
of life after a nuclear attack, and ended with a stark title card declaring that the real
thing would be far worse.
The value of theatrical features as prime-time “event programming” eroded in the
late 1970s and early 1980s with the rise of cable television and videocassette recorders
(VCRs). Pay-cable networks like HBO, Showtime, and The Movie Channel and vid-
eocassette rental stores offered movie-hungry subscribers living-room access to the lat-
est releases sooner than the broadcast networks could. They also presented the films
precisely as shown in theaters: edited neither for length nor potentially objectionable
content, and uninterrupted by commercials. The networks continued to air theatrical
movies—the initial network broadcasts of Jurassic Park (1992) and Schindler’s List
(1993) drew substantial audiences in 1995 and 1997—but “nights at the movies” no
longer dominated network schedules.
“Basic cable” networks such as USA, TNT, Sci-Fi, and Lifetime also filled much of
their schedules with movies. Two—American Movie Classics and Turner Classic
Movies—specialized in showing feature films. Like independent “superstations” such

1108
 Television

as Chicago’s WGN and Atlanta’s WTBS, they arranged multiyear deals with studios
that gave them unlimited broadcast rights to packages of older, nonblockbuster films.
Unlike the independent stations, they also had the resources to produce their own lines
of made-for-television features. Several cable networks had, by the late 1990s, devel-
oped specialties in made-for-television productions: westerns on TNT, family dramas
on The Hallmark Channel, and disaster stories on Sci-Fi.
Television is, in the early twenty-first century, no longer seen as a threat to the
viability of the movies. The television set is, instead, the point at which multiple meth-
ods of delivering movies to audiences converge: the portal through which viewers can
access movies via recordings; broadcast, cable, and satellite network showings; and
pay-per-view offerings delivered by their cable or satellite provider. Whether this will
continue to be the case once high-speed Internet access becomes as ubiquitous as
broadcast television remains to be seen.
See also: New Technologies in Filmmaking

References
Belton, John. Widescreen Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Marill, Alvin. Big Pictures on the Small Screen: Made for TV Movies and Anthology Dramas. Santa
Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2007.
Rapping, Elayne. The Movie of the Week: Private Stories, Public Events. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Vianello, Robert. “The Rise of the Telefilm and the Networks’ Hegemony over the Motion Pic-
ture Industry.” In Brown, Nick, ed. American Television: New Directions in History and
Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994.

—A. Bowdoin Van Riper

1109
This page intentionally left blank
 v
W
WAR FILM, THE. In 1975, Francis Ford Coppola began work on Apocalypse Now,
his epic Vietnam War film. The wounds of America’s conflict in Southeast Asia, suf-
fered in the face of what was considered a shameful defeat, were still raw at the time.
Because of this, American filmmakers were reluctant to use this war as a setting for
combat pictures. Indeed, so controversial had America’s involvement in Vietnam been
that this conflict seemed off-limits even as the basis for a cinematic antiwar statement.
Thus, with the exception of five very marginal films—China Gate (1957), A Yank in
Vietnam (1964), To the Shores of Hell (1966), Marine Battleground (1966), and John
Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968)—the American film industry steered clear of the
complex and divisive issues surrounding Vietnam until Coppola shifted his attention
to this subject in the 1970s.
Coppola stressed that his Vietnam picture would not be merely another standard
remake of previous American war films. Rather, he would produce a film that would
break from the cinematic combat formula that had marked the glut of World War II
films made between the 1940s and the 1970s. In so doing, said Coppola, his film
would not only disclose the horror and the madness of combat, it would act to over-
turn the notion of the invincible American hero fighting a just war in order to main-
tain the democratic stability and religious freedom of the United States, and, indeed,
of the entire world. Although production problems would delay the release of
Apocalypse Now until 1979, causing it to lose its status as the first true Vietnam movie
to Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, both of which
came out in 1978, the release of Coppola’s film seemed to mark the point at which
Hollywood would no longer be able simply to depict America’s armed forces gloriously
subduing evil enemies, as it had so often done in portraying earlier conflicts in which
the United States had been involved.
Admittedly, even though the paradigms of the World War II combat film were ren-
dered temporarily inappropriate after the major Vietnam pictures began to be released
in the late 1970s, American filmmakers did not completely forget about the second
Great War during this period. The Americanization of Emily, for example, was released
in 1964; Catch 22 in 1970; Midway in 1976; the big-budget, star-laden A Bridge Too

1111
War Film, The

Frank Capra (right) handles film for the series Why We Fight (1943–1945). (U.S. War Department/
Photofest)

Far in 1977; The Big Red One in 1980; The Philadelphia Experiment in 1985; The Last
Days of Patton in 1986; Fat Man and Little Boy in 1989; and Memphis Belle in 1990.
Beyond these few offerings, however, it seemed as if the days of the World War II com-
bat picture were over.
Interestingly, although filmmakers such as David Nutter, with his film Cease Fire
(1983); Roland Joffé, with The Killing Fields (1984); Oliver Stone, with his trilogy Pla-
toon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Heaven & Earth (1993); Stanley
Kubrick, with Full Metal Jacket (1987); and Brian De Palma, with Casualties of War
(1989), would follow Coppola’s lead during the 1980s and early 1990s in making their
own antiwar pictures about the Vietnam conflict, this decade would also witness the
emergence of a peculiar, ahistorical sort of Vietnam combat movie. As the decade
unfolded, certain U.S. filmmakers began to do their part in rebuilding the country’s
shattered military confidence by producing a string of films that sought to convince
the American public that even if the war in Vietnam could not be won on the ground,
it could nevertheless be won on the screen. Among the most significant of these dis-
tinctive Vietnam films were Uncommon Valor (1983), starring Gene Hackman as
Colonel Cal Rhodes; Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), starring Sylvester Stallone as
John J. Rambo; and Missing in Action, Part I (1984), Part II (1985), and Part III

1112
 War Film, The

(1988), starring Chuck Norris as Colonel James Braddock. Significantly, all of these
films depicted their protagonists as figures whom the U.S. government had failed by
not allowing them to win the struggle in Southeast Asia. Now, however, as enlightened
veterans, Rhodes, Rambo and Braddock would have the chance to win the war by
returning to Vietnam and freeing the U.S. prisoners of war who continued to languish
in this country long after the conflict had ended.
It does not appear to be a coincidence that films such as Uncommon Valor, Rambo:
First Blood Part II, and Missing in Action, Part I, Part II, and Part III became wildly
popular during the years that Ronald Reagan was president. Reagan, after all, had
come into office in the spring of 1981 determined to overturn what came to be called
the “Vietnam syndrome,” America’s reluctance to commit its troops to overseas con-
flicts. He was also seen by many Americans as the remedy for the timidity of his prede-
cessor, Jimmy Carter, who had been both diplomatically and militarily ineffectual in
securing the release of the hostages in Iran. Interestingly, the Iranian hostages were
freed within hours of Reagan’s 1981 inauguration, a sign to many in the United States
that the new president would not suffer the same humiliations that President Carter
had been forced to endure. Indeed, so powerful was Reagan that even an assassin’s bul-
let and the deaths of 200 U.S. Marines in Beirut could not slow him in his quest both
to rebuild America’s military and to resurrect the country’s tarnished image. Surviving
his assassination attempt, when Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy had not
survived theirs, Reagan became for many Americans a larger-than-life character. In
fact, many saw Reagan’s survival not only as a personal triumph but as a national
one, as well.
Some film historians have argued that films like Uncommon Valor, Rambo, and Miss-
ing in Action were cinematic representations of Reagan’s personal and political heroism.
Although this point certainly seems to be correct, it is important to note that even
though these films reinforced the image of a newly born U.S. political and military
power, they also presented their audiences with protagonists who were fighting not
only against an insidious foreign enemy but also against their own government. These
films, then, although they presented their protagonists as cinematic reflections of
Reagan as a new military president, were not pictures about the era of that heroic
president. This was so, it seems, because Vietnam combat pictures, even those like
Uncommon Valor, Rambo, and Missing in Action, were still films about a war that for
most Americans was better left in the past. Oddly enough, it would be the reemergence
of the World War II combat film that would allow the great courage of Reagan, and the
“Reagan Era,” to be defined in all its glory.
In an extremely important way, the birth of American cinema made it possible for
the United States to shape its twentieth-century self-image in a dramatically new fash-
ion. Public support for the late nineteenth-century Spanish-American conflict was ini-
tially stirred by the reports of muckraking journalists who sent back spectacular stories
from Cuba detailing the heroics of American and Cuban forces. The editors of
America’s newspapers did their part by publishing those muckraking stories accompa-
nied by prowar illustrations depicting such things as cheering crowds sending their
troops off to war or Uncle Sam hailing his “latest, greatest, shortest war.” News

1113
War Film, The

agencies also utilized the recently developed form of reportage that would come to be
known as photojournalism, releasing heroic and often startling images of brave
American troops and starving Cubans. Film, however, would become the medium
of choice for spreading America’s message concerning the “march of freedom” in
Cuba.
Ironically, none of the moving pictures that were shot in Cuba provided audiences
with images of the actual fighting that was taking place on the island. This was due,
in large part, to improvements in artillery and rifle technology, which allowed soldiers
to fire from longer distances while remaining under cover; quite simply, filmmakers
could rarely get close enough to the action to be able to record it. Thus, while newspa-
pers promised combat films filled with action scenes, what was more often produced
were pictures about the human side of war: exhausted troops moving from place to
place; injured soldiers languishing in hospitals; and images of the dead and dying on
the battlefields.
In order to produce the cinematic spectacle of war for which audiences clamored,
narrative filmmakers in America, far from the real conflict, created staged scenes of
combat and U.S. victories. Indeed, just a few short hours after the United States
declared war on Spain, Albert Smith and the British-born J. Stuart Blackton, having
sat in their office watching jubilant, patriotic crowds fill the streets of New York City,
pulled together a film crew and produced for the Vitagraph Company what is consid-
ered the first commercial combat picture, Tearing Down the Spanish Flag. The short
film, a single scene with a flagpole set against the sky and a pair of hands reaching up
and taking down the Spanish flag and replacing it with Old Glory, was shot on a
Manhattan rooftop.
Tearing Down the Spanish Flag was quickly released, and soon thousands of New
Yorkers sat in vaudeville houses watching Smith and Blackton’s filmic recreation of a
U.S. seizure of a Spanish government installation in Havana, which, eerily enough,
was still weeks away from being realized. Evidently, the fact that the film images were
fabricated did not matter to audiences. Indeed, Tearing Down the Spanish Flag proved
to be so popular with viewers that Blackton and Smith lost no time in producing
another combat picture, The Battle of Santiago Bay, a filmic depiction of the victory
of the U.S. Navy over the Spanish fleet in Cuba. Still far removed from the actual fight-
ing, the innovative filmmakers recreated their combat scenes in a bathtub, with battle-
ship cutouts and smoke blown across the camera lens from a cigarette handled by
Blackton’s wife.
As Europe entered the first years of the Great War, American filmmakers began to
make isolationist pictures such as Be Neutral (1914), War is Hell (1915), and The Ter-
rors of War (1917). These films were very different from the pro-interventionist pic-
tures that had appeared at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
centuries. Instead, they were powerful cinematic representations of President Woodrow
Wilson’s 1914 isolationist call for the public to be “neutral in fact as well as in name,”
“impartial in thought as well as action.” These films, it seems, reinforced the message
of the president’s first term: the European conflict was “a war with which we have
nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us.”

1114
 War Film, The

By the time America entered World War I in 1917, during Wilson’s second term,
thousands of Americans were packing theaters each week, eager to watch the latest cin-
ematic release. Much of this enthusiasm for the cinema was a result of the extraordi-
narily successful release of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1915, a film that
President Wilson screened in the White House and which he heartily supported. Inter-
estingly, the racist themes articulated in Griffith’s film would set the tone for the filmic
depiction of the World War II combat enemy as a heartless and debased threat to the
civilized world, one that must be stopped at all costs. In his own 1915 film The Battle
Cry of Peace, for example, J. Stuart Blackton echoed the warning of Griffith’s film, call-
ing for a buildup of armaments in order, now, to protect the women and children of
America from the “leering, lusting, licentious” Huns.
For his part, President Wilson turned to a longtime supporter, George Creel, to
form a government-backed propaganda organization that could assist him in convinc-
ing the American people that his decision to involve America in the war was the right
one. Creel responded by creating the Committee on Public Information. Realizing the
impact that Birth of a Nation had had on American audiences, Creel called on his
entertainment industry associates to produce pictures that could be used to demon-
strate the wholesomeness of American life and to “slander all things German.” They
responded with films such as The Prussian Cur, The Hun Within, and The Kaiser:
The Beast of Berlin (all 1918).
America’s entry into the war gave rise to a disturbing sense of exclusionary national-
ism at home, one that was characterized by anti-Germanism, the rise of the second Ku
Klux Klan, the Red Scare, and the Palmer raids. Given the chauvinism that marked the
wartime and postwar periods in America, it would seem quite natural that the interwar
years that stretched from 1919 to 1939 would be characterized by the production of
combat films depicting the United States as the heroic power that had turned the tide
in a global conflict waged to make the world “safe for democracy.” Interestingly,
though, once the real costs of this awful struggle were finally revealed, American film-
makers began to produce their first antiwar pictures.
Somewhat unexpectedly, one of the messengers for this shift in film industry sen-
sibilities was D. W. Griffith, whose 1918 Hearts of the World contributed to the attempt
to turn aside the prowar tide of World War I combat cinema. Although Griffith, like
wartime directors before him, still portrayed the German military as “evil Huns” in
his film, he also filled Hearts of the World with haunting scenes that effectively depicted
the horror of war, none more notable than the one in which a dazed Marie (Lillian
Gish) wanders through the desolation of the battlefield dragging what had once been
the unspoiled symbol of her love and commitment to another, her now torn and filthy
wedding dress.
The first of the American antiwar epics was King Vidor’s The Big Parade, which pre-
miered at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on November 11, 1925. Vidor focused his film
on the experiences of three young soldiers, who, despite stemming from very different
backgrounds, become comrades-in-arms as they attempt to survive the frightening sit-
uations that have been forced upon them. In the end, two of these tragic friends lose
their lives, while the third returns home missing a leg. Although some critics ultimately

1115
War Film, The

accused Vidor of making a picture that seemed at once too farcical and too sentimen-
tal, the film nevertheless succeeded in demonstrating to audiences that there were dif-
ferent ways of looking at war.
Perhaps the greatest of the post–World War I American combat films was Lewis
Milestone’s 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front. Based on the Erich Maria Remarque
novel, All Quiet on the Western Front describes the brutality of war through the eyes
of a group of German schoolboys. Originally conceived as a silent movie, the film
begins with glorious sound, as the protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Lew Ayres), and his
schoolboy friends are whipped into a nationalistic frenzy by their idealistic teacher.
Eager to fight for the motherland, the boys enlist and are promptly dispatched to the
front. In the midst of combat, though, they are quickly disabused of their naive atti-
tudes toward war, as the schoolboys are forced to become men when they are uncer-
emoniously introduced to the terrible truth of war.
The antiwar sentiments expressed in films such as All Quiet on the Western Front
would permeate American combat pictures during the interwar years. This would all
change dramatically, however, once combat films began to be made about America’s
participation in World War II. Ironically, one of the first steps taken by the film indus-
try in moving away from the production of antiwar combat pictures was to rerelease
All Quiet on the Western Front. Audiences viewed the film after first being shown news-
reel footage of the fiery aftermath of Pearl Harbor, footage that was accompanied by a
commentator’s voice-over ordering them to “Look at these pictures and get mad and
stay mad!” As one might expect, this strange juxtaposition of a prowar newsreel and
an antiwar narrative film left audiences confused, and they protested loudly to the
exhibitors. Once the Office of War Information became aware of these protests, the
antiwar films of the post–World War I period were quickly withdrawn from theaters.
What was needed at this point was a film about World War I that was vastly differ-
ent from All Quiet on the Western Front, one that was framed by what was rapidly
becoming the prowar sensibility of World War II America. Sergeant York was just such
a picture. Directed by Howard Hawks and starring Gary Cooper, this 1941 film pre-
sented audiences with a tortured protagonist who struggles to reconcile his Christian
moral code with his powerful sense of patriotism, before coming to the point where
he realizes that the fight for freedom can be understood as a holy cause. While Sergeant
York defined a first moment in the American cinema’s move away from pacifism, how-
ever, the films that would truly come to define the combat consciousness of World War
II were focused not on rugged individuals like York standing apart from their comrades-
in-arms, but on the hero bound to “a team, the crew, the corps” (Basinger, 1986).
Many of the narrative films that would come to define the new mythos of World
War II would take their lead from the Bureau of Motion Pictures, a government agency
that set about enlisting the support of the movie industry to “aid the war effort” and
help “maintain public morale.” Obviously, the Bureau of Motion Pictures was in many
respects a 1940s version of the film production division of George Creel’s World War I
Committee on Public Information. Probably the best known of the Hollywood direc-
tors that would eventually be connected to the Bureau of Motion Pictures was Frank
Capra, who had offered his services to the War Department immediately after the

1116
 War Film, The

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Commissioned in the Army on December 8, 1941,

Capra would be instrumental in producing a series of films entitled Why We Fight.
Seven films were planned for the Why We Fight series. To assist him with the project,
Capra called on his screenwriting colleagues in Hollywood. Putting together a team of
seven writers, he assigned to each the task of developing a documentary-style script that
covered a particular short period of the decade leading up to the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor. The first film in the series was called Prelude to War, and it sought to
depict the “ugliness of totalitarianism” by way of recreating the Japanese attack on
Manchuria and the destruction of Ethiopia by Italy. Second in the series was The Nazis
Strike, which detailed Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s, his successful push to
recover the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, the overthrow of Czechoslovakia
after the Munich Conference, and finally, the Blitzkrieg of Poland.
The films that followed in the series explored the conflict as it was being waged in
different parts of the world: Divide and Conquer detailed the “Nazi seizure of the
Low Countries” and the ultimate collapse of France; The Battle of Britain showed the
valiant attempt by the members of the British Royal Air Force to defend their home-
land; The Battle of Russia briefly outlined the history of Russia, examined the fighting
that occurred around Leningrad and Moscow, and showed the defeat of the German
Sixth Army at Stalingrad; and The Battle of China disclosed Japan’s strategy to use
the resources of China to conquer the rest of Asia. American viewers never saw the final
picture in the series, War Comes to America, simply because the great conflict ended
before it was completed. The film, however, demonstrated the nation’s shifting sen-
sibilities toward the global conflict: America had now become the guiding force
arrayed against the evil of the Axis nations and a just and benevolent community
“fighting for the freedoms and ideals of American life and culture” (Myers, 1998).
One of the most important narrative films embodying the post–Pearl Harbor, pro-
war sentiments of 1940s America was Air Force (1943). Featuring what quickly
became, after the release of the individually oriented Sergeant York, the foundational
element of combat films made during the war years—the small, ethnically diverse
combat group brought together by a democratic cause—Air Force was a circumscribed
reenactment of the first months of America’s involvement in World War II. Directed
by Howard Hawks, the film depicts the experiences of the crew of the Mary Ann, a
B-17 that is ordered to the Philippines to assist in the fight against the Japanese after
their attack on Pearl Harbor. During its harrowing flight across the Pacific, just ahead
of the pursuing Japanese, the crew listens to President Roosevelt’s declaration to
Congress, one that calls for an “absolute victory” over the “treacherous enemy.” Fleeing
as Japanese forces overrun the Philippines, the Mary Ann ultimately heads for
Australia. Alone in a vast, forbidding sky, the American plane comes across a huge Jap-
anese fleet and radios its position to the Air Force. Despite being low on fuel, the Mary
Ann circles the ships until the air cavalry finally arrives and destroys the Japanese fleet,
turning the tide in the battle for the Pacific. In the concluding act, the Mary Ann, now
out of fuel, crash-lands on the Australian shore. As the film ends, the surviving crew
members are preparing a raid on Tokyo, the opening salvo in America’s final push
toward victory over Japan.

1117
War Film, The

Other films made during the war years depicting the conflict with Japan and featur-
ing ethnically diverse combat units included Wake Island (1942), Flying Tigers (1942),
Destination Tokyo (1943), Bataan (1943), Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), Back to
Bataan (1945), and Objective Burma! (1945). Significantly, the members of the combat
crews in these films quickly began to be understood by film audiences as microcosmic
representatives of the American people. Engaged in a struggle to make the world “safe
for democracy,” as Woodrow Wilson had called on Americas to do during the Great
War, these men, although always headed by a courageous and more than capable
leader, succeeded because they were a team infused with the ideals that made the
United States a strong, independent, and free nation.
The combat crew would also be the central element of the World War II combat
films set in Europe. Perhaps because America did not commit significant numbers of
troops to the European conflict until 1944, the bulk of these films would not begin
to be made until the actual war was almost at its end. This is important to note, as
the combat films that were produced during and after 1945 had a vastly different
feel than those that had been created toward the end of and after World War I. Like
the combat pictures made during that war, those made during the early years of World
War II were overwhelmingly prowar. Contrary to what occurred after World War I
ended, however, the disclosure of the staggering costs of the second great global con-
flict did not lead to the production of antiwar films as World War II came to a close.
Rather, the films that were made as World War II reached its concluding stages and
finally ended were almost exclusively prowar pictures that sought to demonstrate the
“nobility of our fighting and winning” this mid-century conflict.
Perhaps the best of the Europe-based World War II films that were produced and
released during the final days of the conflict were The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) and A
Walk in the Sun (1945). Building on and extending the “common man” theme that
had come to define the Pacific-conflict pictures, both of these films depicted small, eth-
nically diverse squads of soldiers caught up in what was now being characterized as the
“glory of war.” After the war ended, similar films set in Europe would follow: Fighter
Squadron (1948); Battleground (1949); Twelve O’Clock High (1949); Force of Arms
(1951); Thunderbirds (1952); Stalag 17 (1953); To Hell and Back (1955); D-Day, the
Sixth of June (1956); Hell Is for Heroes (1962); The Longest Day (1962); The Great
Escape (1963); and The Battle of Bulge (1965), for example. Combat units would also
continue to be depicted, after the war ended, in films set in the Pacific: The Sands of
Iwo Jima (1949), for instance; and Flying Leathernecks (1951); Operation Pacific
(1951); Okinawa (1952); From Here to Eternity (1953); The Caine Mutiny (1954); Bat-
tle Cry (1955); Battle Stations (1956); Hellcats of the Navy (1957); The Naked and the
Dead (1958); Hell in the Pacific (1968); and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970).
Oddly enough, many of these World War II combat films would be made during
the early years of the Cold War, and more specifically during the time that the United
States was involved in the Korean War. Although a number of American filmmakers
did turn their attention to the conflict in Korea, in comparison to the number of com-
bat pictures that were made about World War II, there were relatively few made about
the Korean War. Much of this was no doubt due to the fact that the struggle in Korea,

1118
 War Film, The

although extremely costly in regard to both blood and treasure—some 33,000 Americans
died and the United States spent over $20 billion—was not a popular war. Indeed, most
Americans, pointing to the fact that President Truman had never asked Congress for a
declaration of war, claimed that the struggle was really little more than a Cold War “police
action.” Although the conflict, like World War II, “still pitted good against well-perceived
evil,” most people in the United States failed to embrace the struggle in Korea as they had
that which had ensued during World War II; and if “Americans had a difficult time under-
standing the conflict as the stalemate dragged on, Hollywood had as difficult a time
portraying a conflict shaded in gray instead of painted in the easily defined black and white
of World War II” (Suid, 2002).
Of the few combat films made about the Korean War, then, most followed the com-
bat crew pattern of World War II pictures—Fixed Bayonets (1951), One Minute to Zero
(1952), Retreat, Hell! (1952), Battle Hymn (1957), and Pork Chop Hill (1959), for
example. Others detailed communist abuses—Prisoner of War (1954), for instance,
which starred future president Ronald Reagan—or the devious sensibilities of our
Cold War enemies—The Manchurian Candidate (1967), for example, which con-
cerned a communist plot to bring down America through the use of brainwashed
U.S. military veterans.
Ironically, by the time The Manchurian Candidate was released in 1967, the United
States was hopelessly embroiled in Vietnam, with some 500,000 combat troops in
Southeast Asia. As was mentioned earlier, though, as opposed to the many films made
about World War II during the period that the United States was involved in that con-
flict, while we were involved in Vietnam very few films were made about the struggle in
Southeast Asia—only A Yank in Vietnam, To the Shores of Hell, Marine Battleground,
and The Green Berets. And while the vast majority of World War II combat pictures
made after that war depicted the conflict as a heroic struggle to keep the world safe
for democracy, the post-Vietnam-era films that were released during the 1970s, ’80s,
and early ’90s were almost exclusively antiwar pictures. During this post-Vietnam
War era, then, there certainly seemed to be no place for films that portrayed war in
the heroic way that it had been depicted in so many World War II pictures.
All of this changed in 1998, however, when Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated
Saving Private Ryan was released. Set during the days following the harrowing D-Day
invasion of Normandy, the film tells the story of a squad of American soldiers, led by
Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), who are given the mission of finding Private James
Ryan (Matt Damon), his family’s sole-surviving son after his three brothers are killed
in combat. After a 16-year hiatus from the promotional circuit, Spielberg decided that
once the film was completed—and reports of its incredible violence surfaced, especially
concerning a 24-minute sequence at the beginning of the film—he needed to go out
on tour to talk about the picture. Sounding very much like Coppola had in the
1970s when he was promoting Apocalypse Now, Spielberg made it clear that his goal
in making Saving Private Ryan had been to expose the horror of war, not to make yet
another “Ramboesque extravaganza.” He had wanted to make a film that showed
“the serious side of men in combat, the violence, the deaths, the dismemberments,
the reality that luck often determines whether men live or die.” Indeed, during the

1119
War Film, The

tour, Spielberg told America that in making Private Ryan, he was “trying to show some-
thing the war film itself hadn’t dared to show.” With this in mind, he had placed at the
beginning of his film scenes—the most violent—in which he sought to “recreate
the Omaha Beach landing [at Normandy] the way the veterans experienced it, not
the way Hollywood producers and directors have imagined it” (quoted in Suid, 2002).
Interestingly, the way that Spielberg described his picture made it sound as if it
would be an antiwar film much in the manner of the Vietnam films made by directors
like Cimino, Coppola, Stone, and Kubrick. Yet, although he claimed that his combat
epic would be unique, he not only used the tried-and-true formula of the small band
of brothers bound together in common cause, he gave the picture a traditional, World
War II-type ending, with the brave Captain Miller dying heroically at the hands of the
Germans, Private Ryan being saved from the fate of his literal and symbolic brothers,
and the cavalry—in the form of B-51 Mustangs—arriving just in the nick of time to
save the day.
Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line followed Saving Private Ryan by only a few
months in 1998. Set during the final days of the 1942 battle for Guadalcanal, the film
was ostensibly an examination of the fragile psychological line that exists between san-
ity and insanity for soldiers in war. Malick’s film, though, proved to be overly long and
almost surrealistically confused—oddly, it seemed to express neither a prowar nor an
antiwar message. For its part, the Army stated flatly that the picture had no redeeming
value whatsoever, portraying, as it did, soldiers as “mutineers, drunkards, and cowards.”
Jonathan Mostow’s U-571, released two years later, suffered from none of the narra-
tive issues that plagued The Thin Red Line. Seeking to reintroduce latter-day audiences
to the incredibly dangerous experience of World War II submarine warfare, Mostow
wove together accounts of the 1941capture by the British destroyer Bulldog of the
extremely important Enigma decoder from the German U-110, and the 1944
American capture of the German U-505. In order to make the picture he wanted, how-
ever, Mostow involved himself in a most “egregious tampering with history,” turning
the British destroyer into a U.S. submarine—the U-571 of the film’s title—so that it
would look as if Americans had captured the Enigma decoder (Suid, 2002). Although
British survivors of the real-life incident and members of Parliament protested loudly,
the film was released with Americans as the heroes. Mostow agreed to provide a dis-
claimer at the end of the film explaining who the real heroes had been.
When Mostow was asked why he would make a World War II film just as the new
millennium was dawning, he pointed out that while after Vietnam it had become
“impolitic to make a movie that celebrated old-fashioned heroism in war,” now that
the American people had worked through their tortured experiences of the conflict
in Southeast Asia, they were once again ready to view images of war, especially those
depicting World War II. Indeed, suggested Mostow, at this point people were “willing
to feel proud and patriotic about the men who fought in that conflict.” World War II,
after all, had been a “good war,” a “clear-cut case of good versus evil.” Mostow’s
description in 2000 of World War II as a war that defined a “clear-cut case of good ver-
sus evil” is instructive, as it unwittingly links his new-millennium combat picture back
to Ronald Reagan’s 1980s call for Americans to support Reagan’s attempts to lift the

1120
 War Film, The

United States back to the place of global prominence it had enjoyed before the nation
had suffered through the ignominy of Vietnam (Suid, 2002).
Michael Bay would follow Mostow’s U-571 with his own “good versus evil” World
War II combat picture, Pearl Harbor. Released in May 2001—just a few months after
George W. Bush took office, and just a few months before the tragic events of 9/11—
Bay’s account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had little to do with what really
happened on December 7, 1941; but it once again gave audiences a chance to cheer
for American military heroes. Significantly, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks followed
the success of Saving Private Ryan with a highly regarded HBO miniseries, Band of
Brothers, which was based on a book of the same name written by the well-known histo-
rian Stephen Ambrose. Ambrose had drawn the title for his book from the stirring St.
Crispin’s Day speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me,
Shall be my brother
Hanks, especially, had been intimately involved in pulling the project together,
actually co-writing the screenplay for the series. Like Saving Private Ryan and so many
other World War II films, the narrative focus of Band of Brothers was on a combat crew,
the real-life “Easy Company” of the 101st Airborne Division of the United States
Army. HBO mounted a massive advertising campaign for the series, and viewers anx-
iously awaited the opening episodes. Eerily, as it turns out, the series premiered on
Sunday, September 9, 2001, just two days before 9/11. While the opening episodes
drew some 10 million viewers, it would have seemed that audiences, horrified by the
images of jetliners crashing into the towers of the World Trade Center, would have
had little appetite for scenes of combat. Yet, even though it suspended its advertising
campaign for the miniseries, HBO continued to air the remainder of the episodes on
their original release dates—September 16 through November 4, 2001—drawing mil-
lions of viewers.
A number of combat pictures depicting the absurdity of war were made after Saving
Private Ryan was released in 1998—the offbeat Three Kings in 1999 and the memoir-
inspired Jarhead in 2005, both about the Gulf War, and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt
Locker in 2009, about the war in Iraq. Generally, however, the combat pictures released
after Spielberg’s film came out in 1998, if not prowar, were at least pro patriotic heroism.
Although not all were set during World War II—Black Hawk Down (2001), for instance,
explored the events surrounding a disastrous U.S. mission in Somalia, while We Were
Soldiers (2002) was a positive statement about American fighting men in Vietnam—
all, including Clint Eastwood’s companion pieces Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from
Iwo Jima (both 2006), and another Spielberg/Hanks HBO project, The Pacific (2010),
valorized military heroism, especially that exhibited by a courageous “band of brothers.”

References
Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986.

1121
Western, The

DeBauche, Leslie Midkiff. Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Guttmacher, Peter. Legendary War Movies. New York: Metro Books, 1996.
Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Koppes, Clayton R. and Black, Gregory D. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics and Propaganda
Shaped World War II Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Myers, James M. The Bureau of Motion Pictures and Its Influence on Film Content during World
War II: The Reasons for Its Failure. Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998.
Suid, Lawrence. Guts & Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 2002.

—Philip C. DiMare

WESTERN, THE. Of all of the movie genres to which the twentieth century gave
birth, the western is the most immediately recognizable and the most distinctively
American form of cinema we possess today. Generally set in the post–Civil War era,
and in territories west of the Mississippi, the western created its own landscape, its
own character types, and its own narrative forms as a way of investing this time and
place with mythic significance. And for those audiences who fell under its sway, the
western became the epic tale of how Anglo-European settlers “tamed” the western
frontier and its indigenous populations. And although its once immense appeal seems
greatly diminished at present, its underlying mythos continues to resurface in a num-
ber of disparate (and seemingly unrelated) genres that the western appears to have
spawned.
The history of this genre is practically coterminous with the development of narra-
tive films as such. In 1903, a former Edison Studios cameraman, Edwin S. Porter, shot
and directed a 12-minute film entitled The Great Train Robbery, demonstrating not
only some of the most basic editing techniques of motion picture photography—such
as panning, crosscutting, and double-exposure—but also the willingness of audiences
to follow a simple linear narrative constructed around an already familiar literary sub-
ject, realistically depicted. In this case, the subject is (in the words of a contemporary
movie ad) “a faithful duplication of the genuine ‘Hold Ups’ made famous by various
outlaw bands in the far West.” In each of the 13 scenes that make up the film’s narra-
tive, we follow the fortunes of a band of hapless train robbers who, after killing a train-
man and a passenger, are pursued by a posse and finally shot dead. The final shot of the
movie contains the most explosive image of the film, as the leader of the gang turns his
six-shooter on the audience and fires directly into the camera, thereby drawing the
viewer into a world of violent confrontation that, for decades afterward, became syn-
onymous in moviegoers’ minds with the genre itself. Whether the “bad guy” lives or
dies at the end of the film, or even whether the hero lives to enjoy the fruits of his vic-
tory, the western tells the story of how American society confronted evil on its frontier
and created a new egalitarian society in the process.

1122
 Western, The

Actors Clint Eastwood (left) and Lee Van Cleef star in the Sergio Leone western The Good, the Bad,
and the Ugly, 1966. (Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

For more than two decades after Porter’s landmark film, westerns continued to draw
movie audiences in increasing numbers, and by the 1920s, hundreds of such films were
being produced. Contemporary critics often referred to them as “horse operas,” and
their storylines and characters were generally formulaic. By the end of the decade, how-
ever, and not long after the advent of sound, one film achieved such preeminence that
it was able to influence virtually every western made after it: Victor Fleming’s The
Virginian (1929). Based on an enormously popular novel and stage play of the same
name by Owen Wister, The Virginian tells the story of a nameless cowboy who
romances a schoolmarm, guns down a local rustler, and saves a town—all without
compromising either his integrity or his romantic appeal. As played by the ever-
laconic Gary Cooper, the Virginian is handsome, shy, and tall in the saddle, but more
importantly, he is a man who can lynch an ex-saddle buddy who has thrown in his lot
with the villains. Whatever his feelings might be, the western hero’s sense of right and
wrong seldom falters, and as a figure of both rectitude and courage he evokes memo-
ries of the knight-errant ideal of medieval romance literature.
By the 1930s, many of the silent-era stars had made the transition to sound—
William Boyd (a.k.a. “Hopalong Cassidy”) was one of the more successful cinematic
transplants—and studios like Republic produced westerns in assembly-line fashion,

1123
Western, The

sometimes in as little as five days of shooting time. These B-westerns were mass-
produced in the thousands, and were designed to be the second feature in a double bill.
The emphasis in such films was on action, often giving as much attention to the hero’s
horse as to any human character, and naturally paying very little attention to either dia-
logue or character development. But in addition to these aesthetically deficient
vehicles, Republic also produced more ambitious westerns, starring two of the most
popular “singing cowboys” of the era: Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Though the films
they appeared in were scarcely more sophisticated than their B counterparts, Autry
and Rogers enhanced the popularity of the genre by combining the appeal of
country-western music with the melodramatics of the earlier “horse operas.” In fact,
musical routines became so important that the song duets of Roy Rogers and his wife
Dale Evans often stopped the action of the movie cold, while the hero and heroine ser-
enaded each other. It was not until the following decade, however, that the western
evolved into a dramatic narrative with complex characters and a plot structure that
involved more than a saloon fistfight, a posse’s pursuit, and a climactic shootout
between the movie’s hero and any number of villainous adversaries.
For historians of this genre, the 1940s and 1950s represent the classic age of the
western, and critical attention during this period tends to focus on the work of a rela-
tive few directors, and most especially the films of John Ford. By the time he made
Stagecoach (1939), Ford had directed dozens of silent and talking films, many of them
two- and three-reel westerns, but Stagecoach was a breakthrough film, both for Ford
personally and for the industry. What Ford demonstrated convincingly was that a
western could combine superior acting—thanks largely to his two principals, John
Wayne and Claire Trevor—with a complex storyline and striking cinematography,
without sacrificing those heightened action sequences that audiences had come to
expect. More than that, however, in casting the relatively unknown Wayne in the
iconic role of the Ringo Kid—as an outlaw whose code of ethics ironically sets him
apart from, and above, the respectable passengers with whom he shares the titled stage-
coach—Ford was crafting a mythic persona, a hero whose antecedents and personal
failings are more than redeemed by courage and simple honesty. On Ford’s imagined
frontier there is no room for class-consciousness or the cruel and deceitful snobbery
it engenders. Ford’s idealized West is, at its best, a democracy of the brave and the just,
and his fascination with (and emotional identification with) the U.S. Cavalry provides
a convenient narrative through which to embody that ideal.
What follows over the next decade is a trio of films often referred to as Ford’s
“Cavalry trilogy”—Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio
Grande (1950)—whose impact on the western is both profound and enduring. The
first of these is arguably the best, bringing together many of the thematic elements that
make Ford’s mature westerns hard to ignore: the injustices visited upon the American
Indian by an indifferent or corrupt federal government, the problematic nature of
command, and the power of legend to eclipse reality. Set against Ford’s beloved
Monument Valley, Arizona/Utah—an emblematic landscape to which he returns again
and again—Fort Apache tells the story of personal and moral conflict, with the threat of
an Indian uprising looming in the background, as the two principals, Colonel Owen

1124
 Western, The

Thursday (played with a finely calibrated hauteur by Henry Fonda) and Captain Kirby
York (portrayed, naturally, by John Wayne) fall out over a question of diplomacy and
Indian rights: York argues for negotiations with Cochise, the chief of the Chiricahua
Apache, while Thursday insists on violently suppressing even the possibility of an
armed revolt. Thursday’s racist arrogance and his lust for glory lead him, and the
men under his command, into a fatal ambush, an act that Ford clearly regards as
equally irrational and irresponsible. Yet, years later, when Captain York (now Colonel
York, in command of the fort) is asked by reporters to comment on Thursday’s gallant
charge, he discreetly sidesteps the question of Thursday’s unfitness for command, and
carefully preserves the legend of his bravery. Both of these attitudes—an ironic reverence
for the fragile legends of the Old West and an anguished realization that the “taming”
of the West was accomplished through acts of great injustice against an indigenous
population—helped to shape a complex worldview that binds together most, if not all,
of Ford’s work in this genre. More than that, however, Ford’s willingness to raise ques-
tions of personal integrity and racial injustice within the framework of an action-
oriented movie established a precedent on which later directors were quick to seize.
The early 1950s saw the release of two films that, for many historians, epitomize the
fullest dramatic expression of the western ideal of the embattled, heroic individual:
Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and George Stevens’s Shane (1953). Yet as differ-
ent as these films are from one another, each captures in its own way some of the moral
anxiety that becomes an increasingly prominent feature of the genre during this de-
cade. This new tone and dramatic perspective are most obvious in High Noon where
Will Kane (played by Gary Cooper), Hadleyville’s longtime marshal, is about to retire,
with a new bride in tow, when he discovers that a killer whom he had earlier captured
and sent to the gallows has been inexplicably released from prison and is looking for
revenge. Unable to rouse any support among the townspeople he had served for so
long, and unwilling to run—though his new wife (played by Grace Kelly), a pacifist
Quaker, demands that he renounce all thoughts of violence—Kane faces his would-
be assassins alone, killing them all. The cowardice and deceitfulness of the townsfolk
at first shocks Kane, and then disgusts him, and by film’s end all he can do is take his
lawman’s badge and throw it on the ground. Unlike Ford’s Wyatt Earp (in John Ford’s
My Darling Clementine, [1943]), Kane has neither the support of his family nor of
society, and when he decides to make his stand against evil, he has only his sense of
duty to turn to for self-vindication. As the mournful theme song of the movie suggests,
he has been “forsaken” by everyone except his conscience.
In Shane, Stevens’s buckskin-clad hero is even more of a loner: part drifter, part gun-
slinger, he tries to leave his morally problematic past behind him, only to discover that
he cannot “break the mold.” There is a fatalism here that threatens to undermine the
heroic spirit of the narrative, and the almost-tragic sensibility of this film complicates
our response to what one critic describes as the “airbrushed, mythologized” figure
who occupies the moral center of this film. As played by Alan Ladd, Shane is the per-
sonification of the ideal American male: handsome, polite, generous, and determined
to resist the aggression of others and to renounce the way of violence—or at least until
his integrity and courage, and the survival of those he loves, are called into question,

1125
Western, The

and then he becomes an absolutely lethal killing machine, cleansing his world of tyr-
anny and corruption. The fact that this conflict-drama is set against the reimagined
backdrop of a very real struggle between ranchers and homesteaders in the Wyoming
of the 1890s suggests that Stevens intended his audience to view Shane as a kind of col-
lective historical persona, a symbolic representation of the national spirit in a time of
war, when even men who would prefer to lead a quiet life are drawn into bloody con-
flict against their will. With the majestic Grand Tetons in the background, Shane drifts
into and out of “civilization.” He and his gun are necessary if the West is to be tamed,
but once that transformation of the wilderness is accomplished, he has no further role
to play in the society he has helped to create.
Commercially viewed, the period of mid-to-late 1950s witnessed a radical transfor-
mation of the movie-viewing audience, as the spread of TV technology made it
possible, for the first time, for audiences to re-view an enormous backlog of old
B-westerns in the privacy of their living rooms (albeit on a very small screen). The
Hopalong Cassidy Show, for example, screened no fewer than 66 of William Boyd’s
movies, while the major networks were quick to capitalize on this market, creating
TV westerns like Gunsmoke and The Lone Ranger that raised the genre to maximum
visibility. By 1959, there were 26 western melodramas on TV, and the demand for
these hour-long horse operas continued into the early 1960s, both in the United States
and abroad. Of course, this type of media saturation of any genre finally produces a
negative reaction among viewers who grow weary of too much tumbleweed, and by
the later 1960s and early ’70s the western’s popularity had already begun a steep
decline. Nevertheless, shows like Bonanza and Gunsmoke were sufficiently popular to
remain on the air for 14 and 20 years, respectively.
During this same period, however, feature film westerns continued to be made, and
some of the best exhibited changes in mood and social consciousness that had already
begun to manifest themselves in films of the early 1950s. These “revisionist” westerns,
as they are sometimes called, directed by such figures as Anthony Mann and Budd
Boetticher, took the genre in new and aesthetically problematic directions, and even
directors as revered as John Ford were inspired to reexamine many of the moral
assumptions and narrative conventions that had defined the western up to this point.
In Ford’s The Searchers (1956), for example, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is driven
close to madness by the thought that his niece—captured earlier by a Comanche raid-
ing party that killed her family—has been sexually defiled by the Indian Chief Scar,
who has taken her as his wife. After five years of searching for her, Edwards’s first
impulse is to kill her rather than to allow her to live with her (or Edwards’s?) shame,
and it is only with the greatest reluctance that he returns her to her kin. The intensity
of his racist emotions, his inability to forgive or forget or even to imagine a thought
other than revenge, ultimately make Edwards the loneliest and most embittered char-
acter ever to appear in a western drama, and his story constitutes an astonishing admis-
sion by Ford that the western hero possesses a capacity for psychopathic behavior.
Similarly dark portraits emerge in films like Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur
(1953), where Jimmy Stewart’s vengeful rancher-turned-bounty hunter, Howard
Kemp, pursues a dangerous outlaw—played with lethal charm by Robert Ryan—while

1126
 Western, The

falling helplessly in love with said outlaw’s “girl,” Lina (Janet Leigh). Having been
betrayed earlier by a fiancée who sold his ranch out from under him while he was in
the army, Kemp struggles against his own nature when he finally realizes his feelings
for Lina; driven by longing and distrust, and a desperate need for money, Stewart’s
character almost loses himself in moments of rage and despair. That Mann allows his
hero/antihero to at last renounce his quest and accept the love of a woman who will
be true to him may seem unacceptably sentimental to contemporary audiences, but
it provides a powerful testimony to the abiding theme of self-redemption that gives
the western genre a measure of psychological and moral depth to match its mythos
of heroic isolation.
Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969) provide
an appropriate historical frame for the westerns of the 1960s as much of the energy
and audience appeal of this genre began to evaporate. Both of Peckinpah’s films consti-
tute an elegy to the art form and to the era it celebrated, as each offers an ironic retro-
spective view of past glories and present corruption. In Ride the High Country,
Peckinpah shrewdly cast two celebrated western stars at the end of their careers—Ran-
dolph Scott and Joel McCrea—as two old friends who find themselves for the first
time on opposite sides of the law, with McCrea guarding a gold shipment that Scott
plans to steal. Following a story arc that becomes increasingly familiar during this de-
cade and the next, Ride the High Country allows each of its principals to recover a
measure of dignity, McCrea by dying to defend two young people who are beset by
bad men, and Scott by finally placing friendship and loyalty above greed. But the
movie as a whole is awash in a kind of cynicism that is both new and alien to this genre.
The Wild Bunch is no less deconstructive of traditional western values as it traces the
tragic spiral into death of a gang of over-the-hill outlaws whom the modern era
(the film is set in 1912) has left behind. Their final and uber-violent act of redemption
occurs when one of their bunch has been taken prisoner by a Mexican warlord who
would rather slit the throat of his hostage than release him to his friends. In the blood-
bath that forms the film’s climax, the four remaining members of the gang die in one of
the most spectacularly violent shootouts ever staged by a western director, and critics
are still divided as to whether the “Wild Bunch” sacrifice themselves in a fit of vengeful
nihilism or a moment of heroic redemption.
A remarkably similar mood of ironic distancing from the past manifests itself as well
in films of this period whose approach to the western is less radically revisionist. Henry
Hathaway’s True Grit (1969), for example, features an embarrassingly overweight and
frequently intoxicated John Wayne, playing a sometimes endearing, sometimes satiric
parody of his familiar persona. In that same year, George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid combines elements of comedy, romance, and pathos in a story
that clearly demonstrates the obsolescence of the Wild West outlaw and the deadly
absurdity of his formerly romantic exploits. This tendency to debunk iconic western
characters and the mystique surrounding them is even more obvious in “modern”
westerns like John Huston’s The Misfits (1960) and Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963), where
morally dysfunctional men—like Paul Newman’s Hud and Clark Gable’s washed-up
ex-cowboy, Gay Langland—struggle with ghosts they cannot lay to rest and guilt they

1127
Western, The

cannot live with. By any standard, these protagonists are abject human failures, and the
films they inhabit are regarded by many as either “anti-westerns” or examples of a genre
that has become self-cannibalizing.
But as the western became increasingly a vehicle for cultural disenchantment in the
United States, it acquired new vitality in Italy (and Europe generally) through the films
of Sergio Leone, whose parody westerns pay oblique homage to the genius of John
Ford while reintroducing to American audiences an actor who had earlier achieved
considerable popularity in the TV western Rawhide, Clint Eastwood. As the Man with
No Name, the laconic Eastwood piles up dead bodies like kindling in movies like A
Fistful of Dollars (1964) and its two sequels (For A Few Dollars More [1965] and The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly [1966]) in what would be a spoof of the traditional western
shoot-’em-up were it not for Eastwood’s remarkable deadpan performance and the
pervasive impression throughout Leone’s “spaghetti” westerns that violence and sudden
death are the commonplace realities of the American frontier. Interestingly, Eastwood
managed to replicate this slightly unhistorical worldview in later films in which he either
starred or directed—Hang ’Em High (1968) and Joe Kidd (1972) are examples—where
the line between lawman and outlaw becomes blurry, and possibly irrelevant. During
the later 1970s and ’80s it was Eastwood who, almost singlehandedly, kept the western
alive, and in innovative films like Pale Rider (1985) managed to create a film that was
half-sequel and half-homage to Stevens’s Shane.
Eastwood’s ultimate contribution to the history of this genre, though, may well be
his “farewell western,” Unforgiven (1992). His William Munny—ex-gunfighter and
sometime born-again Christian—is quite possibly the most pathetic western antihero
ever to mount a horse (which he cannot manage to do without falling off the first time
he tries it), but there is nothing comic about him. Munny’s descent into alcoholism
and violence is motivated as much by desperation as weakness, and the general brutal-
ity of the world he returns to after years as an unsuccessful pig farmer reaches its
unheroic climax in the killing of the sadistic sheriff of “Big Whiskey,” Little Bill (Gene
Hackman), and his business partner, the town pimp. Just before he is killed, Little Bill
pleads with Munny to spare his life, insisting that he does not deserve to die like this, to
which Munny replies “Deserving’s got nothing to do with it,” and indeed the entire
film reflects that disheartening (and somewhat nihilistic) observation. Eastwood’s final
tale of the West is as devoid of justice as it is of beauty and courage, and Unforgiven is
as much a requiem for the genre as an implied critique of the western “code” of honor,
which cannot possibly survive in a world without values.
The western has been declared dead several times since the 1970s, and the financial
and critical disaster of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate in 1980 was taken by many as a
sign that the entire genre was suffering from aesthetic rigor mortis. Yet, in addition to
Eastwood’s Unforgiven, audiences also responded enthusiastically to Kevin Costner’s
Dances with Wolves (1990) and Open Range (2003), and the western has shown a
remarkable talent for morphing into parallel genres, as in Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry
movies (starring Clint Eastwood, naturally) or Peter Hyams’s sci-fi take on High Noon
entitled Outland (1981). Obviously the frontier of the western imagination can be
relocated to a contemporary urban setting or to a remote planet in some galaxy far

1128
 Women in Film

away. All that is needed for such a hybrid genre to survive is a sheriff with a gun and a
town—or alien civilization—that needs taming.
See also: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Ford, John; High Noon; Magnificent
Seven, The; Searchers, The; Shane; Stagecoach; Wayne, John

References
Grant, Barry Keith. John Ford’s Stagecoach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Hughes, Howard. The Filmgoer’s Guide to the Great Westerns: Stagecoach to Tombstone. London:
I. B. Tauris, 2008.
Kitses, Jim, and Gregg Rickman, eds. The Western Reader. New York: Limelight, 1998.
Lenihan, John H. Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film. Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1985.
Simmon, Scott. The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-
Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Simpson, Paul. The Rough Guide to Westerns. London: Penguin, 2006.
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
—Robert Platzner

WOMEN IN FILM. Images of women in American film have largely been driven
by the star system. Beginning with Carl Laemmle’s exploitation of Florence Lawrence
in 1911, the star system was one of the ways the U.S. film industry organized its output
and maximized profitability. Stars were commodities—tangible attractions that could
be easily marketed through fan magazines and related publicity materials. The star sys-
tem relied on audience identification for its success. In the case of women in film,
female filmgoers identified with a particular female star, who then served as a powerful
role model that defined socially accepted standards of behavior. Since mainstream films
have tended to uphold dominant American cultural values, and a social order based on
white, patriarchal capitalism, female star personas have been overwhelmingly white,
heterosexual, and middle class.
Cinematic images of women in American films prior to World War I reveal a tension
between two dominant feminine ideals: the Cult of True Womanhood and New Wom-
anhood. Emerging from the culture of the Victorian period, the Cult of True Woman-
hood encouraged white, middle-class women to be pious, pure, domestic, and
submissive. The two most prominent female stars of the decade, Mary Pickford and
Lillian Gish, exemplified this concept of Victorian femininity, particularly in films directed
by D. W. Griffith. The sexualized vamp character, famously portrayed by Theda Bara in A
Fool There Was (1915), contrasted the virginal Victorian female archetype of the early cin-
ema. Bara was one of the first studio-made stars; her movie studio’s publicity department
manufactured an exotic background and macabre personality to promote her films.
The virgin/vamp dichotomy is connected to widespread anxiety in the first decades
of the twentieth century with regard to changing gender dynamics, particularly the

1129
Women in Film

Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn) works as a hash-house waitress with Diane Ladd (left) in a scene from
the movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which was released on May 30, 1975. (Michael Ochs
Archives/Getty Images)

appearance of the slimmer, more athletic New Woman of the Progressive era. New
Womanhood challenged the Victorian ideology of separate spheres, which had con-
fined women to the domestic realm. With rapid industrialization and urbanization,
an increasing number of young, single women engaged in wage labor and enjoyed a
variety of affordable urban amusements in such hetero-social venues as motion picture
theaters, dance halls, and amusement parks. Meanwhile, more middle-class women
attended colleges and universities and then subsequently entered female-dominated
professions. Married middle- to upper-class women also carved a space in the public
sphere through their leadership in various reform causes, most notably the suffrage
movement.
The New Woman played an active role within the evolving film industry of the
1910s, which offered white women novel opportunities in front of and behind the
camera. The daring serial queens in The Perils of Pauline (1914) starring Pearl White
or The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917) starring Helen Holmes challenged conventional
notions of proper feminine behavior. Slapstick comediennes such as Mabel Normand
and Marie Dressler also challenged traditional gender roles by purposefully violating
the bounds of refined middle-class behavior. Meanwhile, scenarists Anita Loos and
Frances Marion were two of the most successful writers in the industry, while Lois
Weber and Dorothy Arzner directed pictures. The French-born Alice Guy-Blaché
was the first female studio executive and co-founder of the Solax Company in 1910.

1130
 Women in Film

Moreover, before the film industry consolidated into the studio system, such actresses
as Nell Shipman, Clara Kimball Young, and Gene Gauntier used their star power as
leverage to establish independent production companies. In 1919, “Little Mary” Pick-
ford, along with Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith, formed
United Artists, a distribution company that would enable them to fully exploit and
market their own feature films.
The New Woman gave way to the emancipated flapper figure after World War I.
Flappers embraced a modern appearance and consumerist lifestyle that further chal-
lenged the rigid norms of respectability and behavior of the Victorian cultural consen-
sus. During the 1920s, Hollywood released a series of films featuring actresses such as
Colleen Moore, Louise Brooks, and Joan Crawford as flappers. Above all, Clara Bow in
It (1927) presented an illusionary vision of independence, freedom, and modernity for
young American women. However, although she appeared more sexually precocious,
the social expectation was that flappers would eventually marry and assume their tradi-
tional function as wives and mothers.
During the early 1930s, the prominence of glamorous women on the silver screen
contrasted the harsh realities of the Great Depression. Many of these actresses por-
trayed bold and independent female protagonists. For example, Jean Harlow and
Mae West titillated audiences, while Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Die-
trich specialized in strong female characters. The establishment of the Production
Code Administration in 1934, which was Hollywood’s system of self-censorship, lim-
ited the forthright sexuality of these female stars. Still, this did not mean the disappear-
ance of assertive women, as seen in the dominance of such stars as Bette Davis, Barbara
Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Crawford. Hollywood films
frequently featured these stars in a variety of roles ranging from independent heiresses
to competent career women, particularly journalists. Nevertheless, storylines contin-
ued to focus on the importance of heterosexual romance, and positioned marriage
and children as the ultimate goal.
White, Anglo-American female stars dominated the box office throughout much of
the Classical Hollywood period, though this did not necessarily translate into more
power for women in the film industry. Due to the studio system’s standard practice
of lengthy, fixed-term contracts, stars had little choice in their roles. Nevertheless, the
woman’s picture, a category of films largely produced and directed by men but cen-
tered on a female protagonist, maintained an elevated status in Hollywood as studio
executives assumed that the majority of audiences were female. Women’s pictures
focused on romance, courtship, and motherhood, and featured long-suffering and
self-sacrificing women forced to make difficult choices while maintaining their dignity.
Such films may have been intended to teach American female audiences lessons about
their proper function in a patriarchal society. Conversely, many of these female-
centered melodramas subverted the patriarchal norm by exploring the breakdown of
marital relations.
In the meantime, Hollywood relegated African American, Native American, Asian
American, and Latina actresses to supporting roles. Cinematic representations of
women of color in early film and throughout the Classical Hollywood period tended

1131
Women in Film

to fall into a narrow range of images. In its depictions of African Americans, early
Hollywood reproduced several stock characters from the minstrel shows. While
African American men overwhelmingly appeared as buffoonlike coons, submissive
Uncle Toms, or hypersexualized black bucks, African American women routinely
figured as mammies—nurturing, asexual, and rotund caregivers. Hattie McDaniel
exemplified the mammy stereotype in Gone with the Wind (1939), an Oscar-winning
role that forever typecast the actress as a deferential servant at a time when much of
U.S. society was segregated.
Conversely, Native American women did not appear on-screen as servants. Early
films often romanticized such characters as Indian princesses. At the same time, west-
erns also depicted Native women as “squaws”—savage and untrustworthy. This tension
is connected to the myth of the frontier; as the United States industrialized, urbanized,
and modernized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo-Americans
celebrated the conquest of the Wild West and its “savage” peoples while at the same
time lamenting its demise. Although there are exceptions, most notably Ramona
(1910, 1928, 1936), Hollywood films depicted mixed-race women, whether they were
mestiza, métis, or mulatto, as duplicitous and sexually aggressive. Frequently, she
appeared to be a tragic character punished for the transgressions of her parents. This
is evident in a range of films, from Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) to King
Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).
Films stereotyped Asian American women as either exotic beauties or dragon ladies.
The Chinese American actress Anna May Wong specialized in the latter stereotype,
which in many ways resembled Theda Bara’s vamp character. The characterization of
Asian American women as dragon ladies was part of a broader current of anti-Asian sen-
timent in dominant American culture and society. White communities, particularly on
the West Coast, referred to Chinese and Japanese immigrants as the Yellow Peril.
Beyond racial prejudice, this belief emerged from the perception that since Asian immi-
grants worked for lower wages, they posed an economic threat in a tight labor market.
The two major stock characters for Latinas, particularly those of Mexican origin,
were the cantina girl or the señorita. Cantina girls tended to be dark-skinned, tempes-
tuous, and more sexually aggressive than white, Anglo-Saxon female characters. By
contrast, señoritas were typically lighter-skinned, chaste, and willing to sacrifice them-
selves for the good of the white Anglo-American protagonist. During the Classical
Hollywood period, the Mexican American actresses Lupe Velez and Dolores Del Rio
rose to prominence as leading ladies, particularly in conjunction with the Good Neigh-
bor Policy. Beginning in 1933 and through the World War II years, FDR’s
Administration set aside the more traditional policies of imperialist interventionism
and bolstered relations with Latin America. The Brazilian singer and actress Carmen
Miranda also enjoyed a brief period of popularity in Hollywood at this time by starring
in a string of Latin-themed musicals.
With the U.S. entry into World War II, Hollywood films emphasized the need for
women to make sacrifices for the good of the nation. Home-front melodramas, such
as Since You Went Away (1944) and Tender Comrade (1943), were designed to inspire
patriotism by featuring women as courageous patriots performing essential duties to

1132
 Women in Film

mobilize for victory. Prior to World War II, middle-class wives and mothers rarely
worked outside the home, but the draft created an unprecedented demand for labor
and created novel opportunities for women in the workforce. Still, it was made clear
to women that they were entering the labor force to serve a temporary need at a time
of national crisis. Women were encouraged to be strong yet feminine, and expected to
maintain their domestic duties. Traditional ideas about family, domesticity, and a wom-
an’s place in American society thus did not disappear. The fresh-faced Betty Grable, the
star of a series of Technicolor musicals, was the top female box-office draw of the decade
and was popular with both women and men, particularly homesick GIs. Twentieth
Century-Fox distributed millions of pinups of Grable to American servicemen. Grable
epitomized the wholesome girl-next-door who was nonetheless a sex symbol.
As World War II ended, Hollywood films increasingly reaffirmed the patriarchal
consensus. For example, in Mildred Pierce (1945), the entrepreneurial, strong, and
independent-minded Mildred, portrayed by Joan Crawford, is punished for seemingly
abdicating her motherly duties. Postwar films increasingly coded women who were not
devoted wives and nurturing mothers as dangerous. The so-called femme fatale charac-
ter manipulated men in order to gain power and money. In the end, however, she typ-
ically succeeded in destroying not only herself, but the lives of those around her. Some
examples include Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), Jane Greer in Out of
the Past (1947), Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Rita Hay-
worth in The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Later dubbed films noirs by critics, pictures
such as these are distinctive due to their gritty and cynical take on American culture, as
well as their dark visual style.
By the 1950s, a new generation of voluptuous screen beauties, including Elizabeth
Taylor, Ava Gardner, Jane Russell, and Marilyn Monroe, dominated motion pictures.
Films of the period seemed to give women a choice between being a domestic goddess
or a sex goddess, and left little room for independent or career-oriented women.
Hyperconsumerism, home-based leisure, and suburbanization intensified the culture
of domesticity and reinforced traditional gender roles. The emphasis on family life
strengthened popular prejudices against white, middle-class women in paid employ-
ment. Domestic melodramas such as All That Heaven Allows (1955), starring Jane
Wyman, both challenged and upheld traditional gender roles and the culture of con-
formity. Moreover, on the eve of the feminist movement, Doris Day portrayed spunky
single career women who nonetheless sought heterosexual romance.
By the early 1960s, many women had become active in their demands for liberation
and equality. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book that
examined the ways in which suburban wives and mothers have been disempowered
and repressed. Friedan chronicled their feelings of unhappiness, isolation, and frus-
tration, thus giving voice to an already existing feminist movement. Three years later,
Friedan joined with other feminists to create the National Organization for Women
(NOW). The organization denounced the exclusion of women from professional and
political life, and decried legal and economic discrimination. Moreover, a woman’s
right to sexual pleasure was becoming more accepted and facilitated through the
awareness of birth control and the availability of the Pill.

1133
Women in Film

In mainstream American films, the sexual liberation aspects of the women’s

movement tended to take precedence over the political agenda. Following a 1952
Supreme Court decision, which secured First Amendment protection for films and
resulted in the gradual decline of motion picture censorship, Hollywood adopted
an increasingly brazen approach to sex and sexuality. While such stars as Doris
Day, Janet Leigh, and Natalie Wood dominated the early part of the decade, Jane
Fonda and Faye Dunaway emerged as the major female stars of the New Hollywood
period as their star personas aligned with the countercultural values of the 1960s.
Both actresses would go on to portray strong, independent, and unmarried female
professionals in a number of films in the 1970s, such as The China Syndrome
(1979) and Network (1976).
By the early 1970s, a group of younger and more radical feminists changed the
direction of the women’s movement as a whole. The ideology behind what became
known as second-wave feminism was rooted in the idea that women’s oppression was
due to the institution of marriage, which confined women to the domestic sphere.
Feminists argued that the dominance of certain cultural assumptions about women
excluded middle-class white women from the workplace and restricted working-class
and nonwhite women to a narrow range of employment opportunities. NOW cam-
paigned for Congressional ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Ini-
tially proposed in 1923, the ERA would have made all forms of discrimination based
on gender illegal. Some mainstream films flirted with second-wave feminism by featur-
ing liberated female characters, but ultimately avoided the more radical politics of the
movement. For example, Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and
Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978) each centered on female protagonists
and their processes of self-discovery and growing independence. Other films, such as
Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and A Woman under the Influence (1974), explored
the themes of subordination, repression, drudgery, and neglect in the lives of suburban
housewives.
Hollywood continued to offer strong roles for female stars into the late 1970s and
early 1980s. Sally Field played plucky, sympathetic blue-collar or rural heroines in
Norma Rae (1979) and Places in the Heart (1984), while Meryl Streep played an eman-
cipated divorcée in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), a single mother and union activist in
Silkwood (1983), and a Polish holocaust survivor in Sophie’s Choice (1982). Moreover,
Goldie Hawn fused comedy with feminism in Private Benjamin (1980) and Swing
Shift (1984). Another feminist comedy was Nine to Five (1980), starring Lily Tomlin,
Dolly Parton, and Jane Fonda, whose production company produced the film.
The influence of former screen star President Ronald Reagan meant that Holly-
wood’s fascination with liberated women was short-lived. Mainstream films of the
1980s projected many of the issues of the Reagan Revolution, namely family values,
patriotism, militarism, and unfettered capitalism. The rise of neoconservatism meant
a backlash against the social, political, sexual, and cultural movements of the 1960s
and 1970s that had challenged traditional roles and ideas. The women’s movement suf-
fered a tremendous blow when the ERA ultimately failed in 1982—only 35 of the 38
states required to ratify passed the measure.

1134
 Women in Film

Reagan had called for a return to family values, which meant a nuclear family with
the father as the undisputed head of the household. Films that featured women in the
workplace, such as Baby Boom (1987) and Working Girl (1988), tended to reinforce
patriarchal attitudes. The message was that it was nearly impossible to juggle both a
family and a career, or that women could only be truly fulfilled as wives and mothers.
As a part of this reactionary return to family values, the femme fatale archetype ree-
merged. Neo-noir films such as Fatal Attraction (1987) positioned single, independent
career women as a threat to the traditional nuclear family. Slasher films were also popu-
lar during the decade. Typically, such films featured the slaughter of teenage girls at the
hands of a male serial killer. However, the heroine or “final girl” emerges as the lone
survivor due to her strength and resourcefulness—for example, Jamie Lee Curtis in
the Halloween series.
Other mainstream films of the 1980s and into the 1990s focused on female strength
through female bonding. The chick flick, an updated version of the woman’s picture of
the Classical Hollywood period, emerged as a category of films intended for female
audiences. These films ranged from such sentimental tearjerkers as Steel Magnolias
(1989) to the more aggressive Thelma and Louise (1991). Contemporary mainstream
films about female bonding typically downplayed lesbian relationships. Both The Color
Purple (1985) and Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), for example, were based on novels in
which female friendship formed the basis for love and sexual interactions, which their
film adaptations either ignored or made ambiguous.
Though parity remains elusive, Hollywood offered more opportunities for women
of color. Following World War II, a number of social problem films appeared dealing
with racism and prejudice in U.S. society, such as Pinky (1949). However, with the rise
of the modern civil rights movement in the 1950s, the U.S. film industry adopted a
cautious approach. Dorothy Dandridge emerged as the first African American leading
lady in this period, yet she was cast in a limited range of roles. As the civil rights move-
ment radicalized in the 1960s and 1970s, a cycle of blaxploitation films appeared that
popularized elements of the Black Power movement. Some of these films featured
African American women as protagonists, such as Pam Grier in Coffy (1973) and Foxy
Brown (1974). While significant gains have been more recently made for African
American female actresses, most notably Halle Berry, leading roles for Asian American
and Native American actresses are virtually nonexistent. By contrast, Latina actresses
such as Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Alba, Salma Hayek, and Penelope Cruz have risen to
film stardom in recent decades.
Over the past two decades, there has also been an increase in the number of female
leads appearing in such male-dominated Hollywood genres as action-adventure, sci-
ence fiction, comic/video-game adaptations, and martial arts. These films attempt to
combine “girl power” with sex appeal to make them appealing to heterosexual male
audiences as well as to women. For example, Sigourney Weaver in the Alien films
and Linda Hamilton of the Terminator series portrayed macho female protagonists,
while more recently Angelina Jolie, Uma Thurman, and Milla Jovovich have played
tough action heroines. Another recent trend in women’s films and American society
is the reconciliation between feminism and femininity. Third-wave feminism emerged

1135
Women in Film

in the early 1990s among younger women who reclaimed feminism but in less overtly
political ways than the second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular,
the mass media and commodity culture functioned as important sites for empower-
ment and identity for “girls.” Some chick flicks that exhibit third-wave or postfeminist
sensibilities include Clueless (1995), Legally Blonde (2001), and the Scream trilogy
(1996, 1997, and 2000).
Most women-centric films have been produced and directed by men, and thus
exhibit a male-centered image of femininity. Nevertheless, there has been an increase
in the number of female filmmakers in Hollywood, including Kathryn Bigelow, Nora
Ephron, Amy Heckerling, Mimi Leder, Nancy Meyers, Penny Marshall, and Barbra
Streisand. The independent film movement has also afforded opportunities for direc-
tors such as Niki Caro, Sofia Coppola, Mira Nair, and Kimberly Peirce. Additionally,
there has been a moderate increase in the number of female film executives, as seen
in the careers of Sherry Lansing, Nina Jacobson, and Gail Berman. Although women
in the American film industry have made quite a few advancements, it is by no means
an equal playing field. Women are still underrepresented in the film industry, which
overwhelmingly relies on the blockbuster formula and its target audience of young
males. Perhaps the recent box-office successes of such women-centered films as The
Devil Wears Prada (2006), Julie & Julia (2009), and Sex and the City (2008), as well
as New Moon (2009) and Twilight (2008), indicate a paradigm shift for women in film
in American society.
See also: Male Gaze, The; Feminist Film Criticism

References
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. New York: Continuum, 2001.
Byars, Jacqueline. All That Hollywood Allows: Rereading Gender in 1950s Melodrama. Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women, 15th anniversary ed.
New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006.
Gledhill, Christine, ed. Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film.
London: British Film Institute, 1987.
Higashi, Sumiko. Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers: The American Silent Movie Heroine. St. Albans,
VT: Eden Press Women’s Publications, 1978.
Keller, Gary D. “Running the United States-Mexico Border: 1909 through the Present.” Studies
in Twentieth Century Literature 25(1), 2001: 63–90.
LaSalle, Mick. Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood. New York: Thomas
Dunne /St. Martin’s, 2000.
Mahar, Karen Ward. Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 2006.
Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the ‘Yellow Peril’: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood
Fiction. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

1136
 Women in Film

Negra, Diane. What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism. London:
Routledge, 2008.
Rich, B. Ruby. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and Action Cinema. London: Routledge,
1993.

—Dominique Brégent-Heald

1137
This page intentionally left blank
 INDEX

Note: Page numbers in bold font refer to main entries in this encyclopedia.

Abbott, Tom, 174 Captain Horatio Hornblower, 878

The Abominable Dr. Phibes, 1049 The Crimson Pirate, 878
À bout de souffle, 957–58 Deliverance, 124–26
About Sarah, 1048 Die Hard, 126–28, 880
About Schmidt, 768 Dirty Harry, 130–32, 879
Above the Law, 672 Don Q Son of Zorro, 877
Absence of Malice, 760 The Fast and the Furious, 881
Academy Awards, 873–75 The French Connection, 879
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and The Gaucho, 876–77
Sciences, 550, 875–76 Gladiator, 880
The Accidental Tourist, 700 Hooper, 879
The Accused, 655 of Howard Hawks, 679–80
Ace in the Hole, 860 The Hurt Locker, 881
Achbar, Mark, 329–31 Independence Day, 252–54
Acker, Jean, 829–30 Indiana Jones, 254–58, 880
Acord, Lance, 312 The Iron Mask, 877
Across the Pacific, 697 James Bond films, 51–54, 878
Across the Universe, 1015 Jaws, 275–77
Action-adventure films. See also The Karate Kid, 287–88
Blaxploitation movies kung fu cinema, 878
The Adventures of Robin Hood, 877 Lethal Weapon, 301–2, 880
Avatar, 881 Lord of the Rings trilogy, 309–11
Batman, 26–27 The Mark of Zorro, 876
Billy Jack, 879 The Matrix series, 338–40
The Black Pirate, 877 overview, 876–81
Blade Runner, 46–47 The Patriot, 880
Braveheart, 880 Pirates of the Caribbean, 880
Bullitt, 879 Rambo I and II, 880
Cannonball Run, 879 Robin Hood, 877
Captain Blood, 877 Rob Roy, 880

1139
Index

Scaramouche, 878 Boyz N’ the Hood, 65–66, 886

Shaft, 878 Buck and the Preacher, 885
Smokey and the Bandit, 879 Bulworth, 75–76
Star Wars series, 880 Cabin in the Sky, 883
Stroker Ace, 879 civil rights movement, 1088
Super Fly, 878 Claudine, 885
Superman series, 480–81 Cleopatra Jones, 885
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song, 878 Cotton Comes to Harlem, 884
The Terminator series, 485–89, 880 Crash (2004), 110–12
The Thief of Bagdad, 877 Crooklyn, 719
The Three Musketeers, 877 Do the Right Thing, 132–34, 886
Top Gun, 499–501 Driving Miss Daisy, 139–41
The Transporter, 881 The Emperor Jones, 882
Vanishing Point, 879 48 Hours, 886
White Lightning, 879 Foxy Brown, 885
Act of Love, 1047 Glory, 201–3
Actors Studio, 701, 1001 Gone with the Wind, 211–13, 883
Adams, Claire, 38 The Great White Hope, 885
Adams, Jonathan, 415 Green Pastures, 883
Adamson, Andrew, 441 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 228–30
Adam’s Rib, 615, 643, 684, 1059 Hallelujah!, 883
Adaptation, 739 Hearts in Dixie, 883
The Addams Family, 550 In the Heat of the Night, 250–52
Addams, Jane, 45 Home of the Brave, 884
Adler, Stella, 580–81, 621 Imitation of Life, 883
The Admiral Broadway Revue, 583 Intruder in the Dust, 884
Adorée, Renée, 38 The Jazz Singer, 277–79
Adventure, 648, 662 Jungle Fever, 886
Adventureland, 923 To Kill a Mockingbird, 497–99
Adventures of Don Juan, 650 Lady Sings the Blues, 885
The Adventures of Robin Hood, 616, 650, 877 Lethal Weapon, 301–2
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, 622 Let’s Do It Again, 885
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 731 Live on the Sunset Strip, 885
Advise & Consent, 785 Lost Boundaries, 884
An Affair to Remember, 454, 643, 670, 1060 Malcolm X, 320–22, 886
African Americans. See also Blackface; Menace II Society, 886
Blaxploitation movies Mo’ Better Blues, 886
Ali, 3–5, 887 Monster’s Ball, 887
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 885 No Way Out, 884
Bamboozled, 720 overview, 881–87
Beverly Hills Cop, 886 Pinky, 884
The Birth of a Nation, 41–46, 883 Precious, 887
The Birth of a Race, 883 Putney Swope, 884
Black Caesar, 885 Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, 885
Black Gestapo, 885 By Right of Birth, 883
Blacula, 885 Roots, 885–86
Body and Soul, 882 School Daze, 886

1140
 Index

Shadows, 432–33 Alexander Nevsky, 29, 640

Shaft, 433–34, 885 Alexander the Great, 889–90, 891, 892
She’s Gotta Have It, 886 Alexie, Sherman, 1020
Sounder, 885 Alford, Phillip, 498
The Spook Who Sat by the Door, 884 Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 731
Stormy Weather, 883 Ali, 3–5, 735, 887, 1094
Super Fly, 885 Alice, 553
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song, 884 Alice Adams, 683
Trading Places, 886 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 655, 797,
Uptown Saturday Night, 885 1130, 1134
Watermelon Man, 884 Alice in Wonderland, 91
women in film, 1132, 1135 Alice’s Restaurant, 550, 774
African culture, 1043 Alien, 3, 5–7, 145, 418, 489, 799, 800,
The African Queen, 684, 697 1068, 1135
After Hours, 798 Alien Resurrection, 7
After the Fall, 747 Aliens, 7, 1068
Against the Wall, 658 Alimony, 829
Agee, Arthur, 245–46 Ali, Muhammad, 3–5
Agee, James, 705, 947 All about Eve, 7–8, 748
The Age of Innocence, 798 Alland, William, 95
The Agony and the Ecstasy, 685 Allen, Corey, 409
A.I., 1068 Allen, Dede, 56, 549–51
Aiello, Danny, 132 Allen, Joan, 370
Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, 832 Allen, Karen, 254, 596
Air America, 666 Allen, Lewis, 955
The Air Circus, 678, 679 Allen, Tim, 503
Air Force, 678, 1117 Allen, Woody
Air Force One, 1031 Annie Hall, 18–19
Air Raid Wardens, 716 biography, 551–54
Aitken, Harry E., 42 Casablanca and, 86
Akins, Claude, 411 The Front, 187–88, 973
Aladdin, 1009, 1015 Interiors, 260–61
The Alamo, 848 Judaism and, 937, 989
An Alan Smithee Film: Keaton and, 705–6
Burn Hollywood Burn, 1080 Manhattan, 326–28
Alba, Jessica, 1022, 1135 romantic comedies, 1061
Albee, Edward, 528, 761 screenwriter, 1080
Albert, Eddie, 973 Allers, Roger, 306
Al Capone, 963 Alley, Kirstie, 681
Alcoholism, 117–18 All Fall Down, 564
Alcott, John, 102 Allgood, Sara, 247
Alda, Alan, 750 Allied Artists, 264
Alda, Rutanya, 123 All My Sons, 701, 746
Aldrich, Robert, 952, 954 All Quiet on the Western Front, 8–10, 38,
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 673 1028, 1116
Aleichem, Sholom, 174 All That Heaven Allows, 999, 1133
Alexander, 811, 891, 892 All the King’s Men, 10–12, 1029

1141
Index

All the President’s Men, 360, 1028, 1030 Ames, Leon, 344, 1076
All the Way, 695 Amy!, 752
Allyson, June, 400 An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form
Almond, Paul, 244 and Film, 625
Almost Famous, 167, 923 Analyze That, 622
Along Came Polly, 1063 Analyze This, 622
Altered States, 603, 1067, 1069, 1073 Anastasia, 568
Althusser, Louis, 941 Anatomy of a Murder, 508, 785, 1008
Altman, Robert Anchors Aweigh, 803
biography, 554–57, 564 Ancient world in film, 888–93. See also
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, 760 Biblical epic
The Long Goodbye, 955 Anderson, Judith, 690
M*A*S*H, 335–37, 1029 Anderson, Maxwell, 9
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 341–43 Andersonville, 658
Nashville, 1093 Anderson, Wes, 923, 958
Palme d’Or, 914 And Justice for All, 508
The Player, 919 Andrews, Dana, 30, 714, 865, 1076
Alton, John, 15 Andrews, George Reid, 906
The Amazing Colossal Man, 1069 Andrews, James J., 195
Amblin’, 808 Andrews, Julie, 333–34, 458–59
Ambrose, Stephen, 369 Androcles and the Lion, 906
America, 675 The Andromeda Strain, 146, 1067, 1068, 1070
America, America, 702 Andy, 1049
American Beauty, 919, 923 An Angel at My Table, 590
American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, 797 Angel Heart, 1043
The American Cinema (Sarris), 791 Angels in America, 765
American Film Institute (AFI), 681 Angels in the Outfield, 1094
American Flyers, 612 Angels with Dirty Faces, 15–17, 424, 588,
The American Friend, 856 961–62
American Gangster, 226, 802, 843 Anger, Kenneth, 625, 843
American Graffiti, 12–14, 167, 725, 923, Ang, Lee, 717–18
1009 Animal Crackers, 737
An American Guerrilla in the Philippines, 713 Animal House, 81
American Indian Movement (AIM), 1089 Animal Locomotion (Muybridge), 756
An American in Paris, 14–15 Animaniacs, 809
American International Pictures, Animated films
610–11, 978 Bambi, 24–25, 627
The Americanization of Emily, 602, 1111 Cinderella, 91–92, 627
American Madness, 593 Dumbo, 627
American Me, 938 Fantasia, 627
American Pie films, 923 Finding Nemo, 175–77
The American President, 1031 The Lion King, 305–6, 895
An American Romance, 837 Mary Poppins, 333–35, 627
An American Tail, 809, 1014 The Nightmare Before Christmas, 895
An American Tragedy, 640 overview, 894–96
American Zoetrope, 608–9, 725 Pinocchio, 627
America’s Sweethearts, 1060, 1062 Robot Chicken, 895

1142
 Index

Shrek series, 441–44, 896 Are You Listening?, 740

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Arizona Cat Claw, 1048
456–58, 627, 895 Arlen, Alice, 643
Song of the South, 627 Armitage, George, 1061
South Park, 895 Armstrong, Curtis, 413
The Three Little Pigs, 627 Armstrong, Edith, 589
Toy Story, 503–4, 896 Armstrong, Gillian, 591
Wallace and Gromit, 895 Armstrong, Robert, 679
Aniston, Jennifer, 1062–63 Arnold, Edward, 362
Anna Christie, 663 Aronson, Max, 227
Anna Karenina, 663 Arquette, Rosanna, 110
Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 630–32, 1044 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, 730
Annie, 1013, 1015 Arrowsmith, 652
Annie Get Your Gun, 1009 Arsenic and Old Lace, 670, 1059
Annie Hall, 18–19, 260–61, Arthur, Jean, 359, 361, 436, 679
326–27, 398, 552, 553, Artificial Intelligence: AI, 809
706, 1061 Artists and Models, 722
Ann-Margret, 83, 84, 607, 772 Artists’ Performance (Borden and
Another You, 885 Brockman), 579
Anti-Semitism. See Judaism and film Arzner, Dorothy, 557–58, 683, 1130
Anti-war films, 19–22, 1029, 1115–16. See As Good As It Gets, 700, 768, 1062
also War films Ashby, Hal, 121, 233–35, 559–60, 565,
Antoine and Colette, 826 1060, 1111
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 105, 983 Ashley, Sylvia, 647
Antonov, Aleksandr, 29 Ash Wednesday, 823
Antwone Fisher, 843 Asian Americans, 1132
Any Given Sunday, 770 Askew, Luke, 150
Any Which Way You Can, 634 Ask Father, 724
The Apartment, 860, 861 Ask the Dust, 825
Apocalypse Now The Asphalt Jungle, 748, 963
antiwar film, 1029, 1111 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Brando in, 582 Robert Ford, 802
Coppola and, 121, 607, 609 Assault on Precinct 13, 231, 595, 597
Hopper in, 695 Associated Actors and Artistes of America
Oscar nomination, 560 (AAAA), 1077
overview, 19–22 Astaire, Adele, 561
surrealism, 394, 422–23 Astaire, Fred, 527, 560–62, 1014, 1052
Apocalypto, 664, 666 Astin, Sean, 1095
Apollo 13, 1009, 1068 Astor, Mary, 322–23
Apple Computers, 503, 726 As You Desire Me, 663
The Apprentice, 929 At Land, 625
Apted, Michael, 244 At Long Last Love, 577
Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty,” 703, 1002–3 The Atomic Kid, 160
Archer, Anne, 167 The Atonement of Gosta Berling, 663
Arch, Jeff, 643 At Play in the Fields of the Lord, 1044
Ardolino, Emile, 129 Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, 1073
The Arena, 671 The Attack of the Clones, 468, 726

1143
Index

Attenborough, Richard, 224, 284, 354, 973, Balaban, Bob, 520, 934
1041, 1044 Balcon, Michael, 689
At War with the Army, 722 Bale, Christian, 489
Auberjonois, Rene, 336 The Ballad of Cable Hogue, 773
August Rush, 1005 Ballard, J. G., 108–10
Austen, Jane, 103, 681 Ballew, Smith, 847
Austerlitz, Frederick, Jr. See Astaire, Fred Ball, Lucille, 558, 716, 973
Auteur theory, 180–81, 791–93, 826–27, Balsam, Martin, 402, 506
896–896, 948, 957. See also French Bambi, 24–25, 91, 627
New Wave Bamboozled, 720
Authors Film Publishing Group, 856 Bananas, 1061
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 885 Bancroft, Anne, 215–17, 762, 774, 782
Autry, Gene, 847, 1008, 1010, 1124 Bancroft, George, 462, 463
Autumn Sonata, 568 Banderas, Antonio, 443
Avatar, 881 Band of Brothers, 809, 1121
The Avengers, 265 The Band Wagon, 562
Aventure malgache, 690 Barabbas, 889, 907
The Aviator, 423, 795, 798 Bara, Theda, 1084, 1129, 1132
Avildsen, John G., 287–88, 297–98 Bardem, Javier, 371
Avnet, Jon, 1060 Bardot, Brigitte, 714, 957
The Awful Truth, 670, 1054 Barefoot in the Park, 1060
Axelrod, George, 324 Barnes, Frank, 195
Aykroyd, Dan, 140 Barnes, George, 953
Ayres, Lew, 8–9 Barrett, Majel, 465
Barry Lyndon, 708
Babel, 502, 939 Barrymore, John, 900, 1052
Baby Boom, 1135 Barrymore, John, Jr., 714
Baby Boy, 807 Barrymore, Lionel, 270, 683
Baby Face Nelson, 963 Barry, Philip, 385, 684, 1056
Baby’s Breakfast, 730 Barthelmess, Richard, 998
Bacall, Lauren, 38–40, 679, 814, 975 Barthes, Roland, 901
The Bachelor Party, 602 Barton, Bruce, 905
Backer, Brian, 165 Barton Fink, 604–5, 914
Backlash, 816 Basic Instinct, 1080
Back to Bataan, 1118 Basinger, Kim, 26, 291, 1059
Back to the Future trilogy, 809, 1009, Basket Case, 1049
1065, 1066 Bassey, Shirley, 210
Backus, Jim, 409 Bass, Saul, 403
Back Where I Came From, 787 Bataan, 422, 1118
Bad, 795 Bates, Kathy, 1030
Bad Day at Black Rock, 814, 816 Bathing Beauty, 1008, 1009
Badham, Mary, 498 Batman, 26–27, 585, 768, 1101–4
Badlands, 23–24 Batman Returns, 585–86
The Bad News Bears, 1094 Battle beyond the Stars, 470
Baker, Blanche, 451 Battle beyond the Sun, 608
Baker, Kenny, 469 Battle Cry, 1118
Baker, Norma Jean. See Monroe, Marilyn The Battle Cry of Peace, 1115

1144
 Index

Battleground, 422, 1118 Belasco, David, 775

Battle Hymn, 1119 Belber, Stephen, 1063
The Battle of Britain, 594, 1117 The Believers, 1043
The Battle of China, 1117 Bellamy, Ralph, 677
The Battle of Russia, 1117 The Bellboy, 722
The Battle of Santiago Bay, 1114 Bellow, Saul, 989
The Battle of the Bulge, 1118 The Bells of St. Mary’s, 208
Battleship Potemkin, 27–29, 639–41, 947 Bellyful, 832
Battle Stations, 1118 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 70, 956, 957
Battling Butler, 703 Beltrami, Marco, 1007
Baudrillard, Jean, 338 Benchley, Peter, 275–76
Baum, L. Frank, 535 Be Neutral, 1114
Baxter, Anne, 7, 713, 906 Ben-Hur, 685, 865–66, 889–93, 903,
Bay, Michael, 1121 906, 914
Bazin, André, 791, 826, 947, 956 Bening, Annette, 564, 1031, 1060
Beach, Adam, 179, 1020 Bennett, Constance, 614
Beach Party, 922 Bennett, Joan, 712, 713
Beam Ends (Flynn), 650 Benny, Jack, 270, 716, 1013
The Beast with Five Fingers, 1049 Benson, Robby, 760, 990
Beatty, Ned, 124, 125, 739 Benson, Sally, 343
Beatty, Warren Benton, Robert, 55, 480, 563
biography, 563–66 Berenger, Tom, 33–34, 394, 699, 800
Bonnie and Clyde, 54–55, 59, 824 Beresford, Bruce, 139
Bulworth, 75–76, 1031 Bergen, Candace, 83, 84
The Fortune, 763 Bergin, Patrick, 579
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 341, 555 Bergman, Ingmar, 260, 568, 826, 898
Mickey One, 774 Bergman, Ingrid, 84–85, 567–68, 607, 616,
Promise Her Anything, 1060 648, 1060
Shampoo, 559 Berkeley, Busby, 568–70, 919
Splendor in the Grass, 460–61 Berlin, Elaine. See May, Elaine
Beau Brummel, 822 Berlinger, Joe, 49
The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, 820 Berlin, Irving, 527, 737
Beauty and the Beast, 1015 Berlin, Jeannie, 739
Beauvoir, Simone de, 941 Berman, Gail, 1136
Because I Said So, 1062 Berman, Pandro S., 562
Bechtel, Mrs. William, 293 Bernstein, Carl, 643, 1028, 1030
Beckel, Graham, 379 Bernstein, Elmer, 320
Beckett, Samuel, 705 Bernstein, Leonard, 524
Beckinsale, Kate, 1061 Bernstein, Walter, 187–88
Bed and Board, 181, 827 Berry, Halle, 75, 571–72, 719, 887, 1135
Bedelia, Bonnie, 126 Berry, Jerome, 571
Bedford, Luther, 245 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 582, 1044
Beetlejuice, 26, 585 Bessie, Alvah, 973, 975
The Beginning of the End, 1069 Best in Show, 519
Behind the Mask, 1049 The Best Man, 360
Being There, 234, 560 The Best Years of Our Lives, 30–31, 865, 918,
Belafonte, Harry, 549, 777, 884 977, 1045–46

1145
Index

Better Luck Tomorrow, 939 A Bill of Divorcement, 614, 683

Between Two Worlds, 270 Bill: On His Own, 1049
Beulah, 741 Billy Jack, 879, 1089
Beverly Hills Buntz, 560 Billy the Kid, 298–300
Beverly Hills Cop, 886 Biloxi Blues, 763
Bewitched, 643 Biograph Company, 673, 776, 986
Beymer, Richard, 524 The Birdcage, 739, 764
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, 714 The Birdman of Alcatraz, 656–57
Beyond the Forest, 837 Bird on a Wire, 666
Beyond the Rocks, 830 Bird, Robert, 1017
Bezhin Meadow, 640 The Birds, 693, 1108
Biberman, Herbert, 973, 975 Birkin, Jane, 833
Biblical epic, 903–10. See also Religion in film The Birth of a Nation
Bickford, Charles, 118 African Americans and, 883, 911
The Bicycle Thief, 982, 1039 cinematography, 918
Biddle, Adrian, 491 disabilities in, 1049
Bierce, Ambrose, 452 film editing, 950
Big, 32–33 Gish in, 667
The Bigamist, 731 Griffith and, 261–62, 672–75
The Big Bird Cage, 671 John Ford in, 651
The Big Boss, 878 melodrama, 997–98
Big Brother, 929 Micheaux and, 744
The Big Chill, 33–35, 612, 699 overview, 41–46
The Big Combo, 963 politics, 1027–28
The Big Country, 866 silent era, 1081
The Big Doll House, 671 war in, 1115
Bigelow, Kathryn, 572–76, 881, The Birth of a Race, 883
1121, 1136 Bishop, Joey, 804
Big Fish, 586 Bissell, Whit, 264
The Big Fisherman, 906 The Bitter Tea of General Yen, 593
The Big Hangover, 822 Bitzer, Billy, 918
The Big Heat, 35–37, 713, 963 Blackboard Jungle, 524, 921–22, 1048
Big Jim McClain, 413, 848 Black Caesar, 885
Big John McLain, 976 The Black Cauldron, 585
The Big Knife, 576, 1049 Black Christmas, 1085
The Big Lebowski, 605 Blackface, 910–12
The Big Lift, 390 Black Gestapo, 885
The Big Parade, 37–38, 835, 1115 Black Hawk Down, 5, 802, 1121
The Big Red One, 1112 Black Lightning, 1047
The Big Shave, 796 Blackmail, 689
The Big Sleep, 38–40, 324, 677, 679, 680, Black Mama/White Mama, 671
897, 955, 968, 1049 Blackman, Honor, 210
The Big Trail, 846 Blackmer, Sydney, 714
Big Tree, John, 1020 Black Narcissus, 795
Big Trouble in Little China, 596 Black Panthers, 833
Biko, Steve, 841–42 The Black Pirate, 646, 877
Bill, 1049 Black Rain, 800

1146
 Index

The Black Stallion, 609 Body Heat, 699, 952

The Black Stork, 1046, 1047 Body of Lies, 802
Black Sunday, 657 Boetticher, Budd, 1126
Blackton, J. Stuart, 1114 Bogart, Humphrey
Blacula, 885 The Big Sleep, 38–40, 679
Blade, 1101 Casablanca, 84–85
Blade Runner, 5–6, 46–47, 486, Dead End, 865
489, 799–800, 1068, 1074 High Sierra, 731
Blair, Betsy, 15 HUAC and, 975, 1060, 1076
Blair, Linda, 155 The Maltese Falcon, 322–24, 697,
Blair Witch Project, 48–50, 916, 954–55
977, 978–79 The Roaring Twenties, 588
Blake, Michael, 115 romantic comedies, 962
Blanchard, Terence, 1008 Bogart, Paul, 955
Blanchett, Cate, 256 Bogdanovich, Peter, 295–96, 576–78, 611,
Blandick, Clara, 535 813, 923, 1059
Blatty, William Peter, 156 Boileau, Pierre, 692
Blaxploitation movies, 433–35, 671–72, Bolger, Ray, 535–36
778, 831–32, 878, 884–85. See also Bonanza, 555, 1126
Action-adventure films Bond, Anson, 731
Blazing Saddles, 584 Bond, James films, 51–54, 209–11, 878
Blind Ambition, 370 Bonds of Love, 1049
The Blind Boy, 1050 Bond, Ward, 364, 411, 427, 848
Blind Date, 1059 The Bone Collector, 1051
Blind Husbands, 838 Bonney, William, 298–300
The Blob, 1073 Bonnie and Clyde
Bloch, Robert, 1085 Beatty in, 563–65
Block, Harlon, 179 film editing, 550
Block, Robert, 402 gangster films, 963
Blondell, Joan, 587 independent films, 978
Blood Alley, 413 New American Cinema and, 181
Blood and Sand, 557, 830 Oscars and, 250, 778
Blood Simple, 604 overview, 54–62
Bloom, Orlando, 802 Penn and, 298, 300, 773–74
The Blot, 850 screenwriting, 824
Blow Up, 105 violence in, 24, 422
Blue Chips, 659 Bon Voyage, 690
The Blue Dahlia, 1079 Boogie Nights, 1009
The Blue Gardenia, 713 Book of Shadows:
The Blues, 798 Blair Witch 2, 49–50
Blue Steel, 574 Boomerang, 571
Blue Velvet, 50–51, 695, 732, 1049 Boone, Daniel, 463
The Boat, 703 Boone, Pat, 551, 1066
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, 460 Boorman, John, 124–26
Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre, 782 Borden, Lizzie, 579–80
Body and Soul, 744, 882 Bordwell, David, 949, 980
The Bodyguard, 613, 699, 700, 1092 Borgnine, Ernest, 531, 532, 602

1147
Index

Born in East L.A., 938 The Missouri Breaks, 774

Born in Flames, 579 roles, 390
Born on the Fourth of July, 369, 393, 810, A Streetcar Named Desire, 474–75
1029, 1046 Superman, 480
Bostwick, Barry, 415 On the Waterfront, 375–76
Bottoms, Sam, 295 Brandon, Henry, 428
Bottoms, Timothy, 295–96, 379 Brandt, Willy, 284
Bound for Glory, 559 Braugher, Andre, 202
The Bounty, 665 Braveheart, 664, 666, 880, 919
The Bounty Hunter, 1063 The Brave One, 655, 976, 1030
Bourneuf, Philip, 714 Brawne, Fanny, 591
Bow, Clara, 1131 Brazil, 29, 622
Bowling for Columbine, 62–63, 417, Bread and Roses, 1088
750–51, 929 The Breakfast Club, 66–68, 169, 451,
Bowman, Lee, 713 550, 923
Boxcar Bertha, 796 Breaking Away, 68–69
Boy and a Bicycle, 799 The Break-Up, 1063
Boyd, Stephen, 99–100 Breathless, 56, 69–71, 956
Boyd, William, 1123, 1126 Brecher, Irving, 343
Boyens, Philippa, 309 Brecht, Bertolt, 713
Boyle, Peter, 483 Breen, Joseph, 16–17, 970–71, 1003, 1038
Boyle, Rick, 810 Bremer, Arthur, 483
The Boys from Brazil, 1067 Bremer, Lucille, 343
The Boys in the Band, 64–65, 88, 659 Brennan, Eileen, 295
Boys’ Reformatory, 921 Brennan, Walter, 364, 412, 900
Boys Town, 17, 1038 Brenner, Marie, 258
Boyz N’ the Hood, 65–66, 805–6, Bresler, Jerry, 772
886, 964 Bresson, Robert, 792, 956
Bracco, Lorraine, 214, 800 Brewster McCloud, 335
Bracken, Eddie, 819 Brian’s Song, 1108
Brackett, Charles, 859, 860, 1080 Brice, Fanny, 1014
Brackett, Leigh, 39 Brickhill, Paul, 224–25
Bradbury, Ray, 159, 827 Brickman, Marshall, 19
Bradford, Jesse, 179 Brickman, Paul, 413–14
Bradley, John, 178–80 Bride of Frankenstein, 1067
Brady, Mathew, 196 Bride of the Monster, 1049
Brahm, John, 598 The Bride Wore Black, 827
Brakhage, Stan, 624–25 The Bride Wore Red, 557
Branagh, Kenneth, 553 The Bridge on the River Kwai (film),
Brancato, Lillo, 622 71–73, 224
Brando, Jocelyn, 36, 581, 609, 713 The Bridge over the River Kwai (novel), 1108
Brando, Marlon Bridges, Beau, 279
biography, 580–82 Bridges, Chris “Ludacris,” 111
Godfather, 203, 963 Bridges, Jeff, 266, 295, 596, 801, 814
The Island of Dr. Moreau, 658 Bridges, Lloyd, 242, 973
Kazan and, 701–2 The Bridges of Madison County, 634
method acting, 147, 1002 A Bridge Too Far, 1111–12

1148
 Index

Brigadoon, 1014 Buchman, Sidney, 1032

Bright Star, 591 Buck and the Preacher, 778, 885
Bright Victory, 1045–46, 1051 The Bucket List, 768
Bringing Out the Dead, 798 A Bucket of Blood, 1048
Bringing Up Baby, 385, 578, 670, 677, 680, Buck Rogers, 465
683, 813, 1054–56, 1067 Bucquet, Harold, 1059
The Brink’s Job, 659 Buddy, Buddy, 861
Broadbent, Jim, 357, 1012 Buena Vista Social Club, 856
The Broadway Melody, 920, 1013 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, 335, 760
Broccoli, Albert R., 51, 52, 53, 209 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1104
Broccoli, Barbara, 53 Bug, 659
Brockman, Susan, 579 A Bug’s Life, 504
Broderick, Matthew, 169–70, 201, 305, 362, Bugsy, 565, 566
763, 1015 Bugsy Malone, 655
Brody, Adrien, 781 Bull Durham, 612, 1094
Brokaw, Tom, 246, 421 Bullets over Broadway, 553
Brokeback Mountain, 73–74, 717, 938 The Bullfighters, 716
Broken Arrow, 772, 1019 Bullitt, 879
Broken Blossoms, 668, 674, 997–99 Bullock, Sandra, 111
The Broken Gate, 1047 Bulworth, 75–76, 563, 566, 572, 1031
The Broken Oath, 1004 Bundle of Joy, 1013
The Broker’s Daughter, 986 Bunny Lake Is Missing, 785
Brolin, Josh, 371 Buñuel, Luis, 792, 826
Bronson, Charles, 224, 319, 816 Bureau of Motion Pictures, 1116–17
Bronte, Emily, 865 Burke, Billie, 537, 558
A Bronx Tale, 622 Burn after Reading, 605
The Brood, 418 Burnett, W. R., 424
Brooks, Albert, 176 The Burning Season, 658
Brooks, James, 1062 Burns, Edward, 421, 1063
Brooks, Louise, 679, 1131 Burns, George, 911
Brooks, Mel, 400–401, 403, 582–84, 732, Burr, Raymond, 713
989, 1015 Burstyn, Ellen, 295, 797, 1002, 1130
Brooks, Peter, 631 Burton, Richard, 82, 99–101, 528–30, 612,
Brooks, Richard, 87, 163, 922, 988 762, 822–23
Brosnan, Pierce, 878 Burton, Tim, 26–27, 449, 584–86
The Brother from Another Planet, 147 Buscemi, Steve, 163
Brother’s Keeper, 244 Bush, George H. W., 493
Brown & Willliamson Tobacco, Bush, George W., 63, 751, 811, 1031
258–59 Bush, Jeb, 751
Brown, Jim, 885 The Business of Fancydancing, 1020
Brown, Lawrence, 789 Bus Stop, 749
Brown, Nacio Herb, 446 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Brown v. Board of Education, 199, 432, 1088 Kid, 76–79, 490, 530, 687, 760,
Brubeck, Dave, 1008 919, 1127
Bruckman, Clyde, 195 The Butcher Boy, 703
Brynner, Yule, 318–19 Bute, Mary Ellen, 794
Buchholz, Horst, 318–19 But Not for Me, 662

1149
Index

Butterfield 8, 822 Capitalism: A Love Story, 751

Büttner, Tilman, 919 Capite, Don, 760
Bwana Devil, 1107 Caplan, Twink, 103
By Love Possessed, 816 Capote, Truman, 578
By Right of Birth, 883 Capra, Francesco Rosario. See Capra, Frank
Capra, Frank
Caan, James, 204, 963 AMPAS, 875
Cabaret, 1013 Arsenic and Old Lace, 1059
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 954, 965 biography, 592–95
Cabin in the Sky, 270, 624, 883, For the Love of Mike, 606
1008 It Happened One Night, 267–70,
Cabiria, 1084 1052, 1054
The Cable Guy, 1050 It’s a Wonderful Life, 270–73
Cable television, 1108–9 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 359–60
Cabo Blanco, 86 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1008,
Caddyshack, 81–82, 1094 1027, 1032
Caesar, Sid, 583 Sullivan’s Travels and, 476–77
Caged Heat, 1049 war documentaries, 928, 1112,
Cage, Nicolas, 681, 802 1116–17
Cagney, James, 16–17, 424, 543–44, Capshaw, Kate, 255
587–89, 616, 867, 961, 1076 Captain America, 265
Cahiers du cinéma, 826, 834, 897–98, Captain Blood, 649, 877
947, 956 Captain Horatio Hornblower, 878
The Caine Mutiny, 1118 Captains Courageous, 647
Cain, James M., 134, 395, 859, 954 Captive City, 35
Calame, Niketa, 305 The Capture, 815
Calhern, Louis, 142 Carbon Copy, 841
Callaway Went Thataway, 822 The Cardinal, 697, 785
Call of the Wild, 662 Cardinal, Tantoo, 1021
Calvert’s Valley, 1047 Cardoso, Patricia, 923
Cambridge, Godfrey, 434, 832 Carhart, Timothy, 489
The Cameraman, 704 Carmen, 785
Cameron, James, 485–89, 494–97, 575, Carnal Knowledge, 82–84, 762
881, 997, 999 Carnival, 712
Camille, 614, 615, 663, 829 Caron, Glenn Gordon, 1060, 1063
Campbell, Joseph, 442, 726 Caro, Niki, 591, 1136
Campbell, Nell, 415 Caron, Leslie, 14, 562, 1014, 1060
Camp, Brandon, 1063 Carpenter, John, 186, 231–33, 595–97,
Campion, Jane, 386–87, 589–91 1085
Canadian Bacon, 750 Carradine, David, 937
Canby, Vincent, 234 Carradine, John, 462, 800
The Candidate, 765 Carrie, 866
Cannes Film Festival, 913–14 Carried Away, 695
Cannonball Run, 879 Carrier, Corey, 258
Cantor, Eddie, 569, 583, 911, 1076 Carroll, Diahann, 885
Canutt, Yakima, 847 Carroll, Joan, 344
Cape Fear, 798 Carroll, Madeleine, 516

1150
 Index

Cars, 504, 760 Preminger and, 785

Carter, Rubin, 842 religion and, 1037–40
Cartier, Walter, 707 Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, 423–25
Caruthers, Dorothea. See Allen, Dede Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 529–30
Carver, Raymond, 556 Chabrol, Claude, 70, 826, 947, 957, 958
Casablanca, 84–87, 324, 567, 616, Chakiris, George, 524
1029, 1077 The Challenge, 657
Casablanca: Script and Legend The Champ, 836
(Koch), 85 Chan, Charlie, 936
The Case of Mrs. Wingate, 743, 744 Chandler, Jeff, 1019, 1020
A Case of Rape, 1108 Chandler, Raymond, 39, 40, 134, 136, 860,
Casey, Warren, 219 952, 954–55, 967–69, 1079
Casino, 621 Chaney, Lon, 865, 1049
Casino Royale, 52, 53, 1049 Changeling, 635
Cassavetes, John, 418, 432–33, 597–99, Chan Is Missing, 938
739, 780, 796 Chan, Jackie, 878
Cassel, Seymour, 599 Channing, Stockard, 220
Castellano, Richard, 205 Chaplin, Charlie
Casualties of War, 1112 antiwar films, 1090
Catch-22, 82, 762, 1111 biography, 599–601
The Catered Affair, 602 Brando and, 582
Cates, Phoebe, 166 censorship, 1028
Catholicism, 17, 207–8 City Lights, 97–99
The Cat and the Fiddle, 920 The General, 194
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 87–88, 299, 460, The Great Dictator, 222–23, 987–88
701, 759, 822 HUAC, 973
Cats Don’t Dance, 1013 Laurel and, 715
The Cat’s Meow, 578 Limelight, 705
Catwoman, 572, 1101 Modern Times, 355–57
Cavell, Stanley, 386 romantic comedy and, 1053
Caviezel, James, 381, 909–10 Sarris and, 792
Cazale, John, 105, 205 silent era, 1081, 1084
CBS, 1108 sound in film, 1092
Cease Fire, 1112 United Artists, 645, 675, 775, 977, 1131
Cecil B. Demented, 845 Chapman, Graham, 560
Ceiling Zero, 588, 678 Chapman, Jan, 387
Celebrity, 553 Charade, 1049, 1060
Censorship. See also Hays, Will; Hollywood The Charge of the Light Brigade, 877
blacklist/Hollywood ten; Motion Charisse, Cyd, 562
Picture Producers and Distributors of Charles, Josh, 119
America; Production Code Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 586
Administration Charlie Chan, 936
Angels with Dirty Faces, 16–17 Charlie’s Angels, 731
The Big Sleep, 38–40 Charlie Wilson’s War, 766
Committee on Public Information, Charly, 1048, 1067
924–26, 1115 Chase, Borden, 532–33
Pillow Talk, 388–89 Chase, Chevy, 81, 681

1151
Index

Chasers, 695 Cinderfella, 722

Chasing Amy, 978 CinemaScope, 868, 1107
Chayefsky, Paddy, 602–3, 728, 1079–80 Cinematic value, 897
Cheadle, Don, 110, 505 Cinematography, 917–19
The Cheat, 619 Cinéma vérité, 914–16, 928. See also
Cheer Up and Smile, 846 Documentaries
Chelsom, Peter, 566, 1061 The Citadel, 836
Chenal, Pierre, 395 Citizen Kane
Chenoweth, Kristin, 362 American Film Institute on, 1029
Cher, 578, 659 cinematography, 918
Cherrill, Virginia, 97 film editing, 549
Chestnut, Morris, 65 film noir, 953
Cheyenne Autumn, 653, 1020 Kael on, 948
Chiba, Sonny, 878 Mulvey on, 753
Chicago, 1009 Oscar nomination, 247
Chicago Sun-Times, 636–37 overview, 92–97
Chicken Run, 666 Welles and, 317, 501, 853, 854, 865
A Child Is Waiting, 1049 World War II and, 897
Child, Julia, 643 Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic, 793
Child of the Ghetto, 986 City Lights, 97–99, 601
Children of a Lesser God, 297, 1051 City of Conquest, 588
The Children’s Hour, 865, 866 Civil Rights Act, 155
Chiles, Lois, 521 Civil rights movement, 1088. See also
Chimes at Midnight, 853 African Americans
China Gate, 1111 Civil War, 194–96, 201–3, 211–13,
The China Syndrome, 1070, 1134 672–75, 704
Chinatown, 89–91, 780, 823–25, The Clansman, 41–42, 674
952, 1079 Clark, Andrew, 67
Chinese Exclusion Act, 936 Clark, Carroll, 562
Chomsky, Noam, 329–31 Clark, “Crazy Joe,” 297
The Chosen, 990 Clarke, Arthur C., 508, 1073
Chow, Raymond, 878 Clarke, Mae, 587, 961
Christensen, Hayden, 470 Clarke, Shirley, 625
Christiani, Rita, 625 Clark, Larry, 923
Christie, Agatha, 728, 860 Clash by Night, 713
Christie, Julie, 159, 342, 555, 565, 1060 Claudine, 885
A Christmas Carol, 272, 1048 Cleese, John, 1059
Christmas in July, 818 Cléo from 5 to 7, 834, 958
Christopher, Dennis, 68 Cleopatra, 99–101, 606, 620, 822, 891, 892
Christopher Strong, 557, 683 Cleopatra Jones, 435, 885
Chronique d’un été, 916 Clift, Montgomery, 283, 389–90, 804,
Church, Denver, 771 866, 1002
Churchill, Berton, 463 Clifton, Elmer, 43
Cimino, Michael, 121–24, 240–41, 560, Climax!, 656
622, 708, 1029, 1111, 1128 Clinica Estetico, 382
The Cincinnati Kid, 772 Clinton, Bill, 73, 246, 764–65, 1030
Cinderella, 91–92, 627 Clive, Colin, 182

1152
 Index

Cloak and Dagger, 713 Rebel Without a Cause, 409–11

Clockers, 719, 917 Rio Bravo, 413
A Clockwork Orange, 101–3, 708 The Third Man, 491–93
The Clone Wars, 471, 473 Top Gun, 499–501
Clooney, George, 27, 493, 1030, 1060 On the Waterfront, 375–76
Clooney, Rosemary, 527 Cole, Lester, 973, 975
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 276, 808, Collateral, 735
863, 1073 The Collector, 866
Close, Glenn, 33, 167–68, 699, 1031 College, 704
Closer, 765–66 Collette, Toni, 453
Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 659 Collier, Patience, 174
Cloverfield, 48, 916 Collins, Joan, 99
Clueless, 103–4, 167, 681–82, 1136 Collins, Max Allan, 760
Clurman, Harold, 701, 1001 Collins, Stephen, 465
Cobain, Kurt, 449 Colman, Ronald, 614
Cobb, Lee J., 507, 581, 701, 973 Color films, 919–21
Coburn, James, 224, 319, 816 Color Me Perfect, 1048
The Cocoanuts, 737 The Color of Money, 759, 798
Cody, Iron-Eyes, 1021 The Color Purple, 145, 276, 809, 1135
Coen, Ethan, 163–64, 371–72, 603–6, Colors, 695
917, 1099 Colossus: The Forbin Project, 1068, 1070
Coen, Joel, 163–64, 371–72, 603–6, Columbia Pictures, 815, 831,
917, 1099 846, 1097
Coffy, 671 Columbia Records, 863
Cohan, George M., 543–45, Columbo: Murder by the Book, 808
588, 616 The Comancheros, 848, 1049
Cohen, Elliot, 988 Comden, Betty, 446
Cohn, Harry, 593, 694, 846, 987 Come Back Little Sheba, 460
Colbert, Claudette, 7, 267–68, 558, The Comedians, 668
593, 606–7, 819, 883, Comedy All-Stars, 716
1052–53, 1054 Comedy movies. See also Romantic comedies
Cold Mountain, 783 Caddyshack, 81–82
Cold Steel, 1049 My Man Godfrey, 366–67
Cold War films. See also Hollywood by Woody Allen, 1061
blacklist/Hollywood ten; House Come September, 1060
Un-American Activities Comic Book: The Movie, 1104
Committee Coming Home, 121, 234, 560,
Dead Poets Society, 118–20 1046, 1111
Dr. Strangelove, 708 Coming-of-age films
Fail-Safe, 160–62 Adventureland, 923
film noir and, 954 Almost Famous, 923
The Front, 187–88 American Beauty, 923
High Noon, 241–43 American Graffiti, 725, 923
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 263–65 American Pie films, 923
James Bond films, 51–54 Bambi, 24–25
The Magnificent Seven, 318–20 Beach Party, 922
The Manchurian Candidate, 324–26, 657 Big, 32–33

1153
Index

Blackboard Jungle, 921–22 Connelly, John, 281

Boys’ Reformatory, 921 Connelly, Marc, 883
The Breakfast Club, 66–68, 923 Connery, Sean, 51, 52, 53, 209, 255,
Breaking Away, 68–69 612, 878
Clueless, 103–4 Connick, Harry, 525
Dead Poets Society, 118–20 Connolly, Walter, 268
Dirty Dancing, 128–30, 923 Conover, David, 747
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Conquering Power, 829
165–67 Conquest, 663
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 923 The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer
Finding Nemo, 175–77 (Micheaux), 744
Going Steady?, 922 Conrad, Joseph, 20, 94, 609, 800, 854
The Graduate, 215–17, 922 Conroy, Pat, 814
Grease, 219–21 Conspiracy Theory, 666
High School, 922 Conspirator, 822
The Karate Kid, 287–88 Contact, 146, 655, 1070, 1072, 1074
Kids, 923 Contempt, 714
The Land beyond the Sunset, 293–94 Continental Divide, 699
The Last Picture Show, 923 The Contrast, 1028
Lean on Me, 297–98 The Conversation, 104–6, 609
Miracle on 34th Street, 353–55 Conway, Curt, 602
My Own Private Idaho, 923 Cook, Elisha, Jr., 323
Napoleon Dynamite, 923 Cooke, Sam, 3
An Officer and a Gentleman, 373–75 Cookie, 643
overview, 921–23 Cool Hand Luke, 106–8, 225, 694,
Porky’s, 923 760, 1049
Reality Bites, 923 Cooper, Gary
Real Women Have Curves, 923 Cloak and Dagger, 713
Rebel Without a Cause, 921 Fleming and, 647
Reefer Madness, 921 High Noon, 242, 575, 680
Risky Business, 413–14 HUAC, 848, 973
Rushmore, 923 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 359–60
School Daze, 923 Peter Ibbetson, 731
Singles, 448–49 The Pride of the Yankees, 399
Sixteen Candles, 450–52, 923 Rio Bravo, 411
Social Sex Attitudes in Adolescence, 922 romantic comedies, 1060
Tim, 665 war films, 1116
Comingore, Dorothy, 96, 953 western films, 1123, 1125
Committee on Public Information, Cooper, James Fenimore, 463,
924–26, 1115 736, 1017
Common Ground, 1091 Cooper, Miriam, 43
Computer animation, 895 Copland, Aaron, 1007
Conan the Barbarian, 485–86, 810 Coppola, Francis Ford
Condon, Richard, 324 1970s era, 23
Confessions of a Cultist (Sarris), 791 American Zoetrope, 725
Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchyfooted Apocalypse Now, 19–22, 121, 695,
Mutha, 832 708, 1111

1154
 Index

biography, 607–10 Cox, Ronny, 124, 125

Brando and, 582 Coy, Walter, 427
Campion and, 591 Cozzens, James Gould, 816
The Conversation, 104–6 The Cradle Snatcher, 678–79
Corman and, 611 The Cradle Will Rock, 853
De Niro and, 621 Craig, Daniel, 53, 760, 878
gangster films, 963 Craig’s Wife, 557
Godfather trilogy, 203–7, 937 Crain, Jeanne, 884
Lewis and, 722 Crane, Norma, 174
Murch and, 1093 Crash (1996), 108–10
New Hollywood, 560 Crash (2004), 110–12
Pacino and, 769 Crash (2005), 939
Palme d’Or, 914 Crash (2008), 696
war films, 1029 Craven, Wes, 233, 1043, 1085
Coppola, Sofia, 206, 311–13, 1136 Crawford, Broderick, 10, 714, 1029
Cops, 704 Crawford, Cheryl, 701, 1001
Coquette, 777 Crawford, Joan, 558, 616, 661, 1131, 1133
Corcoran, James, 459 Creed, Barbara, 944
Corey, Jeff, 79 Creel, George, 522, 924–25, 1115, 1116
Corman, Roger, 576–77, 608, Crichton, Charles, 1059
610–11, 671, 767, 796, Crichton, Michael, 284
824, 963 Cries and Whispers, 260
A Corner in Wheat, 673 The Crime of Dr. Forbes, 1047
The Corn Is Green, 615, 684 Crimes and Misdemeanors, 552, 553
Corpse Bride, 586 Crimes of the Heart, 706
The Corpse Vanishes, 1047 Crimewave, 604
The Corsican Brothers, 877 The Crimson Pirate, 878
Cort, Bud, 233–34, 559 The Cripple’s Marriage, 1050
Cortez, Stanley, 317 Crisp, Donald, 247, 998
Cosell, Howard, 4 The Critic, 583
Costner, Kevin, 115–17, 280–81, 612–14, Crockett, Davy, 463
814, 1019, 1021, 1092, 1128 Cromwell, James, 291, 602
Cotillard, Marion, 802 Cronenberg, David, 108–10, 431
Cotten, Joseph, 95 Crook Buster, 865
The Cotton Club, 609 Crooklyn, 719
Cotton Comes to Harlem, 434, 884 Crosby, Bing, 207–8, 527, 1013, 1038
Cotton, Joseph, 491 Crosland, Alan, 1091
Counselor at Law, 865 Crossan, John Dominic, 381
A Countess from Hong Kong, 601 Crossfire, 988
Courage of Lassie, 822 Cross of Iron, 773
The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell, 785 Crothers, Scatman, 439
Courtroom dramas, 171–73 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 73, 717
Coutard, Raoul, 70 Crouse, Russel, 459
The Covered Wagon, 557 The Crowd, 835
Cowan, Jerome, 322 The Crowd Roars, 678
Cowboys, 863 Crowe, Cameron, 165–67, 448–49,
Cox, Joel, 512 923, 1060

1155
Index

Crowell, Josephine, 262 Dances with Wolves, 115–17, 612–13, 978,

Crowe, Russell, 199–200, 258–59, 291, 1011, 1019, 1021, 1044, 1089, 1128
801, 802 Dancing Daze, 590
Crowley, Mart, 64, 659 Dancing Lady, 561
Crowther, Bosley, 538, 563, 947 Dandridge, Dorothy, 572, 884, 1135
The Crucible, 746, 747 Dane, Karl, 37
Cruise, Julee, 733 Danes, Claire, 488
Cruise, Tom, 172, 266, 279, 413, 500, 708, D’Angelo, Beverly, 681
783, 825 Danger, 656
Cruising, 659 Dangerfield, Rodney, 81
Cruz, Penelope, 1135 Danger, Love at Work, 784
Cry Baby, 844 Dangerous Minds, 297
The Cry Baby Killer, 767 Daniel, 727
Cry Freedom, 842 Daniell, Henry, 223, 1057
The Crying Game, 112–13, 636 Daniels, Anthony, 469
Crystal, Billy, 525–26, 643, 1060 Daniels, Harry H., Jr., 344
Crystal Gazing, 752 Daniels, Lee, 887
Cry, the Beloved Country, 777–78 Darabont, Frank, 438
CSI, 494 Daredevil, 1101
Cuban Rebel Girls, 650 The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, 460
Cuban Story, 650 Dark City, 685
Cukor, George, 385–86, 614–16, 683, 684, The Dark Knight, 1049, 1101, 1103
898, 1055, 1059 Darkman, 1101
Cunningham, Sean S., 186–87, 233, 1085 Dark Star, 595
Curry, Tim, 415 Darnell, Linda, 364
Curtis, Jamie Lee, 231, 574, 1059, 1135 Darrieux, Danielle, 858
Curtis, Tony, 749, 1053, 1059 Darwell, Jane, 219
Curtiz, Michael, 84–85, 544, 616–18, 961 Das Boot, 817
Cusak, John, 553, 1060 Dashed to Death, 638
Custer, George Armstrong, 649 Dash, Julie, 942–43
Cutter’s Way, 1046 Da Silva, Howard, 973
Cynthia, 822 A Date with Judy, 822
Daughters of the Dust, 942–43
DaCosta, Morton, 362 Davalos, Richard, 148
Daddy Long Legs, 562, 1013 Daves, Delmer, 1019
Dafoe, Willem, 176, 394, 573, 909 David and Bathsheba, 891, 906
Dahl, Roald, 586 David Holzman’s Diary, 928–29
Daisy Miller, 577 Davidson, Jaye, 112
Dali, Salvador, 690 Davies, Marion, 94, 661, 835
Dalton, Timothy, 53, 878 Davies, Valentine, 353
Daly, James, 392 The Da Vinci Code, 1039
D’Ambrosio, Franc, 206 Davis, Bette, 7–8, 538–39, 741, 837, 865,
Dames, 569 867, 999, 1004, 1131
Damita, Lili, 649 Davis, Geena, 489–91, 800–801
Damon, Matt, 53 Davis, Harry, 1024
Dance, Fools, Dance, 661 Davis, Mildred, 724
Dance, Girl, Dance, 557 Davis, Ossie, 133, 434, 884

1156
 Index

Davis, Sammy, Jr., 451, 804, 816 The Deer Hunter, 120–24, 394, 560, 622,
Dawley, J. Searle, 182 708, 1029, 1111
The Dawn Patrol, 678, 877 Dee, Ruby, 133
The Day After, 1108 The Defiant Ones, 282, 778
The Day after Tomorrow, 252, 1068 DeGeneres, Ellen, 176
Day, Doris, 388–89, 1060, 1133, 1134 de Grasse, Sam, 262
Daydreams, 704 de Havilland, Olivia, 211, 616, 866, 1076
Day for Night, 827 Dekker, Thomas, 489
The Day of the Dolphin, 762–63 De Laurentiis, Dino, 732
Day of the Flight, 707 de Lauretis, Teresa, 943–44
Days of Heaven, 23, 24 Deliverance, 124–26, 1048
Days of Our Youth, 777 Del Rio, Dolores, 561, 1020, 1132
Days of Thunder, 825 Del Toro, Benicio, 505
Days of Wine and Roses, 117–18 DeLuise, Dom, 891
The Day the Clown Cried, 723 Dementia 13, 608
The Day the Earth Stood Still, 146, Demetrius and the Gladiators, 889, 890,
868, 1073 891, 906
The Day the World Ended, 611 de Mille, Agnes, 447
D-Day, the Sixth of June, 1118 DeMille, Cecil B., 619–21, 685, 875, 889,
Dead Bang, 657 903–7, 1018, 1038, 1040
Dead End, 865 DeMille, William, 557
The Deadly Companions, 772 Demme, Jonathan, 383–84, 445–46,
Dead Poets Society, 118–20, 297 611, 801
The Dead Pool, 634 Demon Seed, 1068, 1070
The Deaf Mute’s Ball, 1050 De Mornay, Rebecca, 413
Deakins, Roger, 917 Dempster, Carol, 675
Deal of the Century, 659 Demy, Jacques, 834
Dean, James De Niro, Robert
Badlands, 23 Actors Studio, 1002
East of Eden, 147–48 biography, 621–23
Giant, 199 The Deer Hunter, 121
Hopper and, 694 Godfather, 205
Kazan and, 582, 701–2 Goodfellas, 213–14
method acting, 1002 Guilty by Suspicion, 188
Ray and, 788, 907 Heat, 770
Rebel Without a Cause, 409–10 Mann and, 735–36
roles, 390 Scorsese and, 797–98, 963
Dean, John, 370 Taxi Driver, 483–85, 655
Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis Show, 721 The Untouchables, 612
Dean, Quentin, 250 Wag the Dog, 1031
Death and the Maiden, 781 Dennis, Sandy, 528, 530
Death of a Salesman, 701, 746 De Palma, Brian, 29, 403, 425, 621, 659,
Death Twenty-Four Times a Second 964, 1112
(Mulvey), 753 Depardieu, Gérard, 801
Deconstructing Harry, 551 The Departed, 768, 795, 798, 799
The Deep, 855 Depp, Johnny, 585, 586, 844, 880
Deep Impact, 1031, 1040, 1068, 1070 Derenkowsky, Eleanora. See Deren, Maya

1157
Index

Deren, Maya, 623–26, 752 Diamond, I. A. L. “Izzy,” 859, 860

Der Knabe in Blau, 754 Diamonds Are Forever, 53, 54
Der letzte Mann, 754 Diary of a Mad Housewife, 1134
Dern, Laura, 50, 284 The Diary of Anne Frank, 989
Descriptive Zoopraxography (Muybridge), 757 Diaz, Cameron, 441, 443, 1062
Desert Fury, 955 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 494–95, 798, 799, 802
The Desert Song, 920 Dickerson, Ernest, 719
De Sica, Vittorio, 982, 1039 Dickey, Bill, 399
Desk Set, 684, 1060 Dickey, James, 125
Desmond, William, 1002 Dickinson, Angie, 412, 679
de Souza, Steven E., 126 Dick, Philip K., 46, 800
Desperate Hours, 866 Dickson, William Kennedy Laurie, 638
Desperate Living, 844 Dick Tracy, 430, 566, 770
Destination Tokyo, 1118 Dick Tracy vs. Cueball, 1049
Destiny, 966 Die Another Day, 53, 572, 1033–34
Destry Rides Again, 272, 461 The Died with Their Boots On, 877
Detective films Die Grosse Liebe, 784
The Big Heat, 35–37 Die Hard, 126–28, 880
The Big Sleep, 38–40, 968 Diesel, Vin, 421, 881
Chinatown, 89–91 Dieterle, William, 954
Die Hard, 126–28 Dietrich, Marlene, 7, 282, 284, 502, 713,
Dirty Harry, 130–32 752, 860, 1004, 1131
Double Indemnity, 134–36 Dietz, Howard, 561
Farewell My Lovely, 968 Dillon, Josephine, 661
The French Connection, 183–85 Dillon, Matt, 111, 448
James Bond films, 51–54 DiMaggio, Joe, 748
Lethal Weapon, 301–2 Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, 938
The Maltese Falcon, 322–24, 967–69 Dinner at Eight, 614
Murder My Sweet, 969 Dion, Celine, 494
Out of the Past, 968 Directed by John Ford, 577
overview, 967–69 Directors of photography (DP), 917–19
The Third Man, 491–93 Dirty Dancing, 14, 128–30, 923
Touch of Evil, 501–2 The Dirty Dozen, 225, 597, 599
Detour, 953 Dirty Harry, 130–32, 512, 630, 634,
Devane, William, 342 879, 1128
The Devil and Daniel Webster, 508 A Dirty Shame, 845
Devil Dogs of the Air, 588 Disabilities, 1045–52
The Devils, 1049 Disappearance of a Lady, 742
The Devil’s Advocate, 770 Disgraced Monuments, 752
The Devil’s Manor, 742 Disney films
The Devil Wears Prada, 1136 Bambi, 24–25, 627
Devine, Andy, 463 Cinderella, 91–92, 627
Devine, Loretta, 111 Dumbo, 627
DeVito, Danny, 291 Fantasia, 627
Dexter, Brad, 319 Finding Nemo, 175–77
Dhiegh, Khigh, 325 High School Musical 3, 1009
Dial M for Murder, 691 The Lion King, 305–6

1158
 Index

The Lion King, 1040 The Thin Blue Line, 929

The Little Mermaid, 1015 When the Levees Broke, 720
Mary Poppins, 333–35, 627 Woodstock, 794
Mulan, 1015 Dodge City, 461
Pinocchio, 627 Dodsworth, 865
Pocahontas, 666, 1044 Doebler, Scott, 376
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, 769
456–58, 627 Dog Day Afternoon, 550, 727, 769
Song of the South, 627 A Dog’s Life, 600
Toy Story, 503–4 Dominick, Andrew, 802
Disney-Pixar, 175–76, 442, 443, 503–4 Donahue, Heather, 48
Disney Studios, 585, 1035 Donald, John, 224–25
Disney, Walt, 24–25, 91–92, 305, 456–58, Donat, Robert, 649
626–29, 917, 920, 973, 975 Donen, Stanley, 446–47, 1013,
The Disorderly Orderly, 722 1014–15, 1060
Distant Drums, 1010 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 956
District 9, 48, 147 Don Juan, 1092
Divide and Conquer, 594, 1117 Donlevy, Brian, 818
Divine, 843, 844 Donnadieu, Marguerite. See Duras,
Divine Horsemen (Deren), 625 Marguerite
The Divine Woman, 663 Donnelly, Donal, 206
Divorce His, Divorce Hers, 823 Donner, Richard, 302, 480, 629–30
Dixon, Ivan, 884 Donnie Brasco, 430, 770, 1049
Dixon, Thomas, 41–46, 674 D’Onofrio, Vincent, 190
Dmytryk, Edward, 955, 969, 973, 975, 988 Donovan Affair, 593
D.O.A., 953 Donovan, King, 263
Dobson, Tamara, 435, 885 Don Q Son of Zorro, 877
Docter, Pete, 503 Don’t Bother to Knock, 748
Doctor Bull, 652 Don’t Look Back, 244, 916
Doctor Dolittle, 250, 778 Don’t Play Us Cheap, 832
Doctor Neighbor, 1047 Doody, Alison, 257
Doctorow, E. L., 727 Doohan, James, 465
Documentaries. See also Cinéma vérité Dooley, Paul, 68, 451
Bowling for Columbine, 62–63, The Doors, 369
750–51, 929 Do the Right Thing, 132–34, 140,
of Capra, 594 719, 886
Fahrenheit 9/11, 751, 929 Double Indemnity, 134–36, 395, 478, 713,
4 Little Girls, 720 859, 954, 1133
Hoop Dreams, 243–46 A Double Life, 614
Jim Brown: All American, 720 007 films, 51–54, 209–11
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky Dougherty, James, 747
and the Media, 329–31 Douglas, Kirk, 617, 707, 816, 860, 888
Nanook of the North, 927 Douglas, Melvyn, 859, 1056
overview, 927–29 Douglas, Michael, 162–63, 167, 505,
The Plow That Broke the Plains, 927–28 800, 1031
Roger & Me, 416–17, 929 Douglas, Paul, 713
Sicko, 929 Down Argentine Way, 936

1159
Index

Downey, Robert, Jr., 265–66, 884 Dunaway, Faye, 54–55, 59, 90, 563, 728,
Downs, Cathy, 364 780, 825, 1134
Doyle-Murray, Brian, 81 Dundee, Angelo, 4
Dracula, 182, 609, 754 Dune, 50, 732
Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 584 Dunham, Katherine, 624
Drake, Charles, 533 Dunne, Dominick, 607
Drake, Tom, 343 Dunne, Irene, 670, 1054, 1059
Dr. Cyclops, 1066, 1067, 1068 Dunne, Philip, 247
Dr. Dolittle, 778 The Dupont Cavalcade of America, 746
Dreamworks Animation, 442, 622 Duras, Marguerite, 630–32
DreamWorks SKG, 809 Duryea, Dan, 533
DreamWorks Studio, 199 Duvall, Robert, 20, 105, 162, 203, 335, 498,
Dreiser, Theodore, 389, 640 706, 963
Dressed to Kill, 403 Duvall, Shelley, 439
Drew, Robert, 915, 928 Dvorak, Ann, 424
Dreyer, Carl Theodore, 792 Dwan, Allan, 576
Dreyfus Affair, 743 Dye, Dale, 394
Dreyfuss, Richard, 12, 275–76, 1031 Dyketactics, 942
Dr. Fu Manchu, 936 Dykstra, John, 725
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog, 1104 Dylan, Bob, 798, 916
Drive-in theaters, 930–31
Driver, Minnie, 1061 The Eagle Has Landed, 815, 817
Driving Miss Daisy, 139–41 Earle, John, 1098
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 567, Early movie houses, 933–35
648, 1066 Earp, Wyatt, 364–66, 653, 816
Dr. Kildare, 731 Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, 1073
Dr. Mabuse, 35, 36, 711, 965, 966 Easter Parade, 562, 1013
Dr. No, 51, 52, 1049 Eastman Kodak, 920–21
Droids, 473 East of Eden, 147–48, 199, 702
The Drowning Pool, 759 Eastwood, Clint
Dr. Strangelove, 136–39, 161, 189, 708, 735, biography, 633–35
1030, 1049, 1069 Dirty Harry, 130–31, 879
The Drum, 1042 Flags of Our Fathers, 177–80
Drums along the Mohawk, 461, 652, Letters from Iwo Jima, 302–4
1018, 1049 Million Dollar Baby, 351–52
Dr. Zhivago, 914 Pale Rider, 1042
Duck Soup, 141–43, 737 performing in own films, 814
Duel, 145 Play Misty for Me, 168
Duel in the Sun, 668, 837, 977, Spielberg and, 809
996, 1132 Sturges and, 816
The Duellists, 800 Unforgiven, 511–14
Dugan, Dennis, 1063 war films, 1121
Duke, Patty, 774 western films, 341, 1123, 1128
The Duke’s Jester, 645 Easy Living, 818
du Maurier, Daphne, 690 Easy Rider, 149–51, 225, 577, 611, 695,
Dumbo, 627 767, 978
Dumont, Margaret, 142 Easy to Love, 570

1160
 Index

Eat a Bowl of Tea, 938 The Electric House, 703

Eaton, Shirley, 210 Elena et les hommes, 568
Eat Your Makeup, 843 The Elephant Man, 732, 1051
Ebeling, LuLu, 176 Elephant Walk, 822
Ebert, Roger Elfman, Danny, 26
Annie Hall, 19 Elizondo, Hector, 398
Battleship Potemkin, 28 Ellen, 74
biography, 636–37 Elliott, David, 3
Blade Runner, 47 Ellison, Harlan, 486
In the Company of Men, 249 Ellroy, James, 291–92
Crash, 111 Elmes, Frederick, 732
film criticism, 948–49 El Norte, 938
Harold and Maude, 234 The Emerald Forest, 1044
Hoop Dreams, 244 Emerald Productions, 731
The Shining, 440 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 327
Eckhart, Aaron, 249 Emma, 681
Eckstein, Ashley, 471 Emmerich, Ann Catherine, 909
Economic change, 68–69 Emmerich, Roland, 252
Eddington, Nora, 649 The Emperor Jones, 789–90, 882
Eddy, Bob, 592 The Empire Strikes Back, 468, 470, 472,
Edelman, Herb, 521 699, 1073
The Edge of Darkness, 666 Enchanted, 1015
Edison, Thomas, 182, 226, 293, 637–39, The End of Violence, 857
875, 950, 1081 Endowing Your Future, 549
Editing. See Film editing The Enforcer, 35, 512, 634, 879
Editorial, 726 Enos, Busby Berkeley William. See Berkeley,
Edson, Margaret, 765 Busby
EdTV, 695 Enter Laughing, 739
Edward, David, 771 Enter the Dragon, 878, 937
Edwards, Anthony, 500 Ephron, Delia, 643
Edwards, Blake, 117, 1059 Ephron, Nora, 525–26, 642–44, 763, 1060,
Edward Scissorhands, 585 1061, 1080, 1136
Edwards, Hilton, 853 Epps, Bobby Van, 862
Edwards, Stacy, 249 Eraserhead, 732
Ed Wood, 586 Erin Brockovich, 151–53, 1062
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the- E-Ring, 696
Moon Marigolds, 760 Ermay, R. Lee, 190
Egoyan, Atom, 431 Erotique, 580
Eichmann, Adolf, 282 The Errand Boy, 722
The Eiger Sanction, 1049 Escalante, Jaime A., 297
8 1/2, 981, 983 The Escape Artist, 609
8 Mile, 1005, 1008 Escape from Fort Bravo, 816
Eisenstein, Sergei, 27–29, 639–42, 792, Escape from New York, 596
946–47, 979–80 Escape to Nowhere, 808
Eisner, Michael, 175 Esposito, Giancarlo, 132
El Cid, 685 Esposito, Jennifer, 110
El Dorado, 428, 680, 848 Essanay Studios, 600

1161
Index

Estevez, Emilio, 451 AMPAS, 875–77

Eszterhaus, Joe, 1080 biography, 645–47
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 145–47, 276, Chaplin and, 601
426, 809, 1073 MPPDA, 1002, 1004
Ethnic/immigrant culture Pickford and, 776
Crash (2004), 110–12 silent era, 1084
Do the Right Thing, 132–34 studio system, 1097
Glory, 201–3 United Artists, 674–75, 775, 977, 1131
The Jazz Singer, 277–79 Falk, Peter, 599, 739
To Kill a Mockingbird, 497–99 Fallen Angel, 785
overview, 935–39 Fallen Angels, 578
West Side Story, 524–25 Falling Down, 162–63
Eugenics, 1046–47, 1074 Fall of the Roman Empire, 889, 891, 892, 893
Evans, Dale, 1008 Fame, 747, 1015
Evans, Evans, 61 Family Guy, 473
Evans, Hiram W., 45 The Family Jewels, 722
Evans, Maurice, 392 Family Plot, 693
Evans, Robert, 824 Family Viewing, 431
An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine Famous Players-Lasky, 830, 1083, 1096–97
May, 739 Fanchon the Cricket, 1048
Everett, Rupert, 1062 Fan culture, 310
Everybody’s Shakespeare, 853 Fandango, 612
Everybody Wins, 747 Fantasia, 627
Everyone Says I Love You, 552 The Fantastic Four, 1101
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Fantastic Voyage, 1068, 1073
Sex, 553, 1061 Faragoh, Francis, 182
Every Which Way but Loose, 634 Farber, Emanuel “Manny,” 947
Ewers, Hanns Heinz, 965 Farewell My Lovely, 952, 968
Ewoks, 473 Fargo, 163–65, 604, 605
An Exercise in Discipline-Peel, 589 The Farmer Takes a Wife, 647
The Exile, 744 Farrow, Mia, 418–19, 552, 780, 1061
Exodus, 785 Fashions for Women, 557
The Exorcist, 153–56, 658–59 The Fast and the Furious, 610, 881
Experiment in Terror, 1049 Fast Company, 815
Eye of the Cat, 1050 Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, 1048
Eyes in the Night, 1051 Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 165–67,
Eyes Wide Shut, 708 449, 681
Eyre, Chris, 1020 Fatal Attraction, 167–69, 1135
Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid, 1050
Faces, 598–99 Father Goose, 670
Fadiman, Clifton, 737 Father of the Bride, 707, 822
Fahrenheit 9/11, 63, 417, 751, 914, 929 Father’s Little Dividend, 822
Fahrenheit 451, 159–60, 827, 1074 Fat Man and Little Boy, 1112
Fail-Safe, 160–62, 727 Faulkner, William, 39, 759, 897, 1079
Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 645, 877 Faust, 754
Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr. Favreau, Jon, 266
Academy Awards, 873 Faye, Alice, 570

1162
 Index

Fazil, 679 Filming Othello, 853, 855

Fear and Desire, 707 Film noir
The Fearless Vampire Killers, 780 The Big Heat, 35–37
Federal Theatre Project, 853, 854, 972 The Big Sleep, 38–40, 955
Feeney, John Martin Aloysius. See Ford, John Blade Runner, 46–47
Feiffer, Jules, 83, 762 Body Heat, 952
Feinstein, Dianne, 505 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 954
Fellini, Federico, 898, 981–83 Chinatown, 89–91, 952
Felton, Tom, 238 Citizen Kane, 92–97
Female Trouble, 844 Desert Fury, 955
Feminist film criticism. See also Male gaze; Detour, 953
Women in film D.O.A., 953
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 196–98 Double Indemnity, 134–36, 859, 954
Thelma and Louise, 491 Fallen Angel, 785
overview, 941–45 Farewell My Lovely, 952
Sex, Lies and Videotape, 431–32 Fargo, 163–65
The Silence of the Lambs, 444–46 Force of Evil, 953
Fenelon, Fania, 747 The Gangster, 953
Ferber, Edna, 198 gangster films and, 962–63
Fernandez, Emilio, 531 The Glass Key, 954
Ferrell, Tyra, 65 Human Desire, 714
Ferrell, Will, 553 The Killers, 953
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 66–68, 169–71, Kiss Me Deadly, 952, 954
451, 923 L.A. Confidential, 291–92
A Few Good Men, 171–73, 768 Laura, 785
Ffolkes, 1049 Leave Her to Heaven, 955
F for Fake, 855 The Long Goodbye, 952, 955
Fiddler on the Roof, 174–75, 863, 989, 1015 M, 952
Field of Dreams, 612 The Maltese Falcon, 322–24, 952,
Field, Sally, 1134 954, 955
Fields, W. C., 1054 Marlow, 955
Fiennes, Ralph, 236, 425, 575 Murder My Sweet, 955
52 Pick-Up, 657 Night Moves, 952
Fight Club, 1094 Out of the Past, 954
Fighter Squadron, 1118 overview, 951–55
The Fights of Nations, 985–86 The Postman Always Rings Twice, 395–97
Fig Leaves, 678 Scarlet Street, 713
Film, 705 Sorry, Wrong Number, 953
The Filmmakers, 731 Sunset Blvd., 478–79
Film criticism, 946–49 Touch of Evil, 501–2
Film Culture, 598 While the City Sleeps, 714
Film editing Woman in the Window, 713
Bonnie and Clyde, 54–62 The Films of Josef von Sternberg (Sarris), 791
Citizen Kane, 92–97 Finch, Peter, 99–100, 603, 728
Memento, 344–46 Finding Nemo, 175–77, 504
overview, 949–51 Find Me Guilty, 727
Pulp Fiction, 404–5 Finian’s Rainbow, 608

1163
Index

Finklehoffe, Fred E., 343 Flynn, Errol, 616, 649–50, 877

Finnegan’s Wake, 794 Foch, Nina, 14
Finney, Albert, 152, 802 Focus (Miller), 746
Fire Maidens from Outer Space, 1073 The Fog, 596, 597
The Firm, 783, 825 Foley, Jack, 1093
First Artists, 761 Fonda, Bridget, 448
The First Avenger, 265 Fonda, Henry
First Blood, 880 Fail-Safe, 161
First Comes Courage, 557 Ford and, 652–53
First National Films, 600, 1083 On Golden Pond, 684
First Person Singular, 853 The Grapes of Wrath, 217–19, 1029
The First Wives Club, 707 The Lady Eve, 819
Fishburne, Laurence, 65, 338–39, 719, 887 Lang and, 712
A Fish Called Wanda, 1050, 1059 My Darling Clementine, 364
Fisher, Carrie, 469, 764 romantic comedies, 1059
Fisher, Eddie, 100 12 Angry Men, 507, 727
Fisher, Frances, 496 western films, 1125
A Fistful of Dollars, 511, 633, 1128 Fonda, Jane, 560, 684, 782, 1002,
Fist of Fury, 878 1060, 1134
Fists of Fury, 937 Fonda, Peter, 149–50, 611, 695
Fitzgerald, Barry, 207, 408 Fool for Love, 556
Five Easy Pieces, 767 Foolish Wives, 838, 1048
Five Graves to Cairo, 859 A Fool There Was, 1129
Fixed Bayonets, 1119 Footlight Parade, 569
Fix, Paul, 847 For a Few Dollars More, 511, 633
Flags of Our Fathers, 177–80, 302–4, 809, Forbidden, 593
1021, 1121 Forbidden Valley, 1047
Flaherty, Robert, 755, 792, 927 Force of Arms, 1118
Flannery, Sean Patrick, 258 Force of Evil, 953
Flash Gordon, 465 Ford, Glenn, 36, 713, 714, 963
Flatland, 696 Ford, Harrison
Fleischer, Richard, 250 Air Force One, 1031
Fleischman, Stephen, 549 Bigelow and, 575
Fleischman, Tom, 549 Blade Runner, 46, 800
Fleming, Ian, 51, 52, 54, 209 The Conversation, 105
Fleming, Victor, 535–38, 615, Indiana Jones series, 254–58
647–49, 1123 Nichols and, 763–64
Flesh and Blood, 841 Pollack and, 781
Flesh and the Devil, 663 Star Wars series, 469
Flightplan, 655 Witness, 534
The Flintstones, 572 Working Girl, 539–40
Florey, Robert, 182 Ford, Henry, 328
The Fly, 108, 1066, 1067 Ford, John
Flying Down to Rio, 561, 1052 auteur theory, 956
Flying Leathernecks, 422, 787, 1118 Bazin on, 947
Flying Padre, 707 biography, 650–54
Flying Tigers, 1118 Bogdanovich and, 295, 576

1164
 Index

The Grapes of Wrath, 217–19 Foster, Jodie, 444, 483, 655–56, 801,
How Green Was My Valley, 246–48 1072, 1074
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Foster, Stephen, 911
331–33 Foucault, Michel, 901, 943
Mary of Scotland, 683 The Fountainhead, 837
My Darling Clementine, 364–66 Four Brothers, 807
The Quiet Man, 407–8 The Four Feathers, 1042
Rio Grande, 1010 Four Friends, 775
Sarris on, 792 The 400 Blows, 180–81, 826–27
The Searchers, 300, 427–29, 1020 4 Little Girls, 720, 886
Stagecoach, 461–64, 1018, 1029 1492: Conquest of Paradise, 801
themes, 530 The Fourth War, 657
war documentaries, 928 The Fox and the Hound, 585
Wayne and, 846–48 Foxfire, 920
Wenders and, 856 Fox Studios, 75, 754–55, 846, 1096
western films, 307, 341, 772, 1124, Fox, Virginia, 867
1126 The Fox Woman, 1050
Ford Motor Company, 1033–34, 1108 Foxy Brown, 435, 671, 885
Ford, Paul, 363 Frame, Janet, 590
Ford Star Jubilee, 537 Franju, Georges, 743
Foreign Correspondent, 690 Frankel, David, 1063
Foreman, Carl, 241 Frankenheimer, John, 324–26, 656–58, 782
Foreman, George, 3 Frankenstein, 182–83, 471, 1065, 1067
Forever Young, 666 Frankenweenie, 585
The Forged Note (Micheaux), 744 Frank, Melvin, 1060
Forget Paris, 1060 Frank, Nino, 952
For Keeps?, 451 Frantic, 781
For Love of the Game, 612 Franzoni, David, 199
Forman, Milos, 588 Fraser, Brendan, 111
For Me and My Gal, 570 Freaks, 1051
For Pete’s Sake, 813 Freaky Friday, 655
For Queen and Country, 842 Frears, Stephen, 1061
Forrestal, James, 178 Freckles, 1051
Forrest, Frederic, 105 Freed, Arthur, 15, 343, 446
Forrest Gump, 1008, 1009–10, 1046, Freeman, Morgan
1048 African Americans in film, 887
Fort Apache, 307, 653, 1124–25 The Bucket List, 768
Fort Apache: The Bronx, 672 Driving Miss Daisy, 139
Fort, Garrett, 182 Glory, 201
For the Love of Mike, 606 Lean on Me, 298
The Fortune, 565, 762–63 The Man, 1031
The Fortune Cookie, 861 Million Dollar Baby, 351
48 Hours, 886 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1044
42nd Street, 569, 919 Shawshank Redemption, 438
For Whom the Bell Tolls, 86, 567 Unforgiven, 511–12
For Your Eyes Only, 53–54, 1050 The French Connection, 183–85,
Foster, Alan Dean, 473 658–59, 879

1165
Index

French Connection II, 657 Gabin, Jean, 713

French New Wave, 56, 69–71, 180–81, Gable, Clark
947–48, 955–58. See also Auteur biography, 661–62
theory; Godard, Jean-Luc; Truffaut, Capra and, 594
François; Varda, Agnès Colbert and, 606
The French They Are a Funny Race, 820 Cukor and, 615
Frenzy, 693 Fleming and, 648
The Freshman, 724, 819 Garbo and, 663
Frey, Leonard, 64, 174 Gone with the Wind, 211–12
Friday Foster, 671 It Happened One Night, 267–68,
Friday the 13th, 186–87, 233, 403, 1052–54
1049, 1085 McDaniel and, 740
Friedan, Betty, 941, 1133 The Misfits, 697
Fried Green Tomatoes, 1135 western films, 1127
Friedkin, William, 64–65, 154, 156, Gabriel over the White House, 1029
184–85, 658–60 Gaby: A True Story, 1051
Friendly, Fred W., 928 Gagnon, Rene, 178–79
Friendly Persuasion, 866 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 328
Friml, Rudolf, 1007 Gallagher, Peter, 431
Frobe, Gert, 209 Gallipoli, 665
From Here to Eternity, 804, 1118 Gallo, Vincent, 1099
From Russia with Love, 52, 53, 878 Galloway, Don, 34
From the Manger to the Cross, 904 Gambon, Michael, 236
From the Terrace, 759 Gandhi, 1041, 1044
The Front, 187–88, 973, 976 Gang in Blue, 832
Frontier Marshall, 461 The Gang’s All Here, 570, 936
Front Page Woman, 538 Gangs of New York, 795, 798, 978
Frost-Nixon, 370 The Gangster, 953
The Frozen North, 704 Gangster films, 15–17
Fugate, Caril Ann, 23 Al Capone, 963
The Fugitive, 782 Angels with Dirty Faces, 961–62
Fuller, Charles, 841 The Asphalt Jungle, 963
Fuller, Martin, 293 Baby Face Nelson, 963
Fuller, Samuel, 300, 856, 900 The Big Combo, 963
Fuller, William Allen, 195 The Big Heat, 963
Full Frontal, 978 Bonnie and Clyde, 54–62, 963
Full Metal Jacket, 136, 189–91, Boyz N’ the Hood, 964
422–23, 708, 1112 ethnic/immigrant culture and, 936
Funny Face, 562 Get Rich or Die Trying, 964
Funny Girl, 813, 814, 866, 1014 G-Men, 961
Funny Lady, 813 Godfather, 203–7, 963
A Funny Thing Happened on the Goodfellas, 213–15, 963
Way to the Forum, 889 Guys and Dolls, 963
Furlan, Mira, 1072 The Killing, 963
Furlong, Edward, 487 Little Caesar, 961, 962
Furthman, Jules, 39 Machine Gun Kelly, 963
Fury, 712 Mean Streets, 963

1166
 Index

Menace II Society, 964 Gazzo, Michael V., 205

New Jack City, 964 Geer, Will, 532, 973
overview, 961–64 Geffen, David, 809
The Public Enemy, 961 Gehrig, Lou, 399–400
Pulp Fiction, 404–5, 964 Gein, Ed, 402, 446
Reservoir Dogs, 964 Gelius, Joanna, 561
The Roaring Twenties, 962 The General, 194–96, 704
Scarface, 961, 964 General Motors, 416–17
Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, 423–25 Generation X, 449
White Heat, 962 Genthe, Arnold, 663
Garber, Victor, 495 Gentlemen Jim, 650
Garbitsch, 223 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 196–98, 677, 748
Garbo, Greta, 615, 663–64, 859, 1004, Gentlemen’s Agreement, 701, 937, 988
1056, 1131 George, Dan, 1020
Garcia, Allan, 98 George, Peter, 136
Garcia, Andy, 206 George Wallace, 658
Gardens of Stone, 609 Gerard, James W., 926
Gardiner, Reginald, 223 Gere, Richard, 373–74, 397–98, 1015, 1062
Gardin, Vladimir, 994 German Expressionism, 424–25, 964–66
Gardner, Ava, 804, 1133 Gershwin, George, 14, 326, 561
Garfield, John, 395 Gershwin, Ira, 14
Garfunkel, Art, 83, 84, 217, 762 The Getaway, 773
Garland, Judy, 282–83, 343, 535–36, 562, Get on the Bus, 720
570, 615, 648, 836, 1014–15 Get Rich or Die Trying, 964
Garmes, Lee, 919 Get Smart, 584
Garner, Don, 364 The Ghetto Seamstress, 986
Garner, James, 224, 955 The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, 731
Garnett, Tay, 395, 396 Ghost Dad, 778
Garrett, Betty, 1014 Ghost Rider, 1100
Garrick, Barbara, 454 Ghosts of Mars, 597
Garrison, Jim, 280–82 Ghostwatch, 49
Garr, Terri, 105 Giant, 198–99, 694, 937
Gaslight, 567, 607, 614 Gibbons, Cedric, 873
Gates, Larry, 250, 263 Gibson, Mel, 301–2, 380–82, 664–67, 880,
Gates, William, 244, 245–46 905, 909–10, 1062
Gattaca, 193–94, 1046, 1074 Gibson, Tyrese, 806
The Gaucho, 876–77 Gibson, William, 774
Gauntier, Gene, 904, 1131 Gideon, 603
The Gauntlet, 634 Gielgud, John, 582, 590
Gavin, John, 402 Gigi, 1014
Gay, Alden, 1076 Gigot, 1048
The Gay Divorcee, 562 G.I. Jane, 6, 801
Gaye, Howard, 262 Gilbert, Billy, 223
Gaynor, Janet, 755 Gilbert, John, 37, 446–47, 663
Gays and lesbians, 64–65, 73–74, 87–88, Gilbert, Peter, 243
349–50, 382–84, 1090–91 Gilda, Live, 763
Gazzara, Ben, 577, 599 Gilliam, Terry, 622

1167
Index

Gilligan’s Island, 731 The Godfather, 29, 582, 609, 706, 769–70,
Gilmore, Geoffrey, 1098 824, 963
Girl 6, 719 The Godfather II, 621
Girl Crazy, 570 Godfather trilogy, 29, 203–7, 430,
A Girl in Every Port, 679 582, 609, 937
A Girl Named Tamiko, 816 God’s Little Acre, 88
Girl Shy, 724, 1050 Godspell, 907, 908, 1100
The Girls of the Ghetto, 986 Godzilla, 252, 1034
A Girl’s Own Story, 590 Goebbels, Joseph, 711
The Girl Who Had Everything, 822 Going My Way, 207–9, 1038
Giroud, Françoise, 955 Going Steady?, 922
Gish, Dorothy, 672, 674 Goldblum, Jeff, 33, 253, 284, 699
Gish, Lillian, 43, 261, 667–69, 672, Gold Diggers of 1933, 569, 919
674–75, 998, 1004, 1084, 1129 Gold Diggers of Broadway, 920
Gladiator, 5, 101, 199–201, 801, 880, 889 Golden Dawn, 669
Glaser, Paul Michael, 174 GoldenEye, 54
The Glass Key, 954 Golden Harvest, 878
The Glass Menagerie, 760 The Golden West, 740
Glass, Philip, 1007 Goldfinger, 52–53, 54, 209–11, 389
The Gleaners and I, 833, 834 Goldman, William, 76, 1080
Gleason, Jackie, 550, 716 The Gold Rush, 601
Gleason, Paul, 67 Goldwyn, Samuel, 30–31, 225, 865, 985, 987
Glenn, Scott, 444, 612 Goltz, Otto, 925
Gloria, 599 Gone with the Wind
Glory, 201–3, 842 African Americans and, 883
The Glory Days, 772 cinematography, 919
Glover, Bruce, 90 color and, 920
Glover, Danny, 301–2, 665–66, 887 Cukor and, 615
Glover, Julian, 256 Fleming and, 647–48
Glumov’s Diary, 640 Gable and, 662
Glynn, Carlin, 450 independent films, 977
G-Men, 961 McDaniel and, 740–41
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 856 melodrama, 999
Godard, Jean-Luc music in, 1011
auteur theory, 791, 826, 897 overview, 211–13
Bonnie and Clyde, 55–56, 774 on television, 1108
Breathless, 69–71, 956 women in, 1132
Contempt, 714 Goodbye Columbus, 989
French New Wave, 947, 957–58, (See also Goodbye, Mr. Chips, 863
Auteur theory; French New Wave) Goodfellas, 213–15, 226, 621, 795, 798, 963
on Nicholas Ray, 787 Good Guys Wear Black, 880
Varda and, 834 Gooding, Cuba, Jr., 65, 279
Welles and, 855 Good Neighbor Policy, 936
Goddard, Erwin, 747 Good Night and Good Luck, 1030
Goddard, Grace, 747 The Good Shepherd, 623
Goddard, Paulette, 223, 356 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 331, 511,
The Goddess, 602 512, 633, 1123

1168
 Index

Good Times, 659 Graver, Gary, 855

The Good Wife, 802–3 Graves, Peter, 1040
A Good Year, 802 Gray, Charles, 415
The Goonies, 630, 809 Grease, 219–21, 1009, 1015
Gordon, Josh, 1063 Greased Lightning, 672
Gordon, Michael, 1060 Great Debaters, 843
Gordon, Ruth, 233–34, 559 Great Depression
Gorman, Cliff, 64 Barton Fink, 604–5
Gosford Park, 556 The Grapes of Wrath, 217–19, 1029
The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 907 To Kill a Mockingbird, 497–99
Gossett, Louis, Jr., 373 Miller’s Crossing, 604
Gould, Alexander, 176 Modern Times, 355–57
Gould, Chester, 566 My Man Godfrey, 366–67
Gould, Elliott, 335–36, 555, 955 O Brother Where Art Thou?, 605
Go West, 704, 737 Stagecoach, 1029
Grable, Betty, 820, 868, 1133 Sullivan’s Travels, 476–77
Grace of My Heart, 795 The Wizard of Oz, 535–38
The Graduate The Great Dictator, 222–23, 355, 601, 987,
cinematography, 918 1090, 1092
coming-of-age film, 413, 922 The Great Escape, 224–26, 814, 816, 1118
independent film, 978 The Greatest Show on Earth, 620
music in, 1092 The Greatest Story Ever Told, 685, 903, 907
Nichols and, 82, 761–63 The Great Gatsby, 614
Oscar nomination, 251–52, 778 The Great K & A Train Robbery, 845
overview, 215–17 The Great McGinty, 818
Production Code, 611 The Great Moment, 819
sexual mores, 460, 908 The Great Train Robbery, 226–27,
Grahame, Gloria, 36, 714 917, 950, 1122
Grand Canyon, 700 The Great Waldo Pepper, 688
Grand Hotel, 663 The Great White Hope, 885
Granger, Farley, 691 Greed, 479, 839
Granger, Stewart, 878 Greeley, Andrew, 1039
Grant, Cary Green, Adolph, 446
auteur theory, 897, 900 The Green Berets, 848, 1111, 1119
biography, 669–70 Greenberg, Jerry, 185, 550
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 88 Greene, Graham, 491, 713, 1021
Curtiz and, 617 Greene, Leon, 889
Hawks and, 677, 679 The Green Mile, 438, 1021, 1048
Hitchcock and, 690, 692 Green Pastures, 883
The Philadelphia Story, 385 Greenstreet, Sydney, 323
romantic comedies, 1054–58, 1060 Green, Walon, 531
Grant, Hugh, 1062, 1063 Greer, Jane, 1133
Grant, Lee, 250, 559, 973 Greetings, 621
Gran Torino, 635 Gregory, James, 325
The Grapes of Wrath, 217–19, 652, 1029 Gremlins, 809
Grapewin, Charles, 535 Grey, Jennifer, 128–29, 169
Grauman’s Chinese Theater, 646 Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, 825

1169
Index

Grier, Pam, 435, 671–72, 885 The Gulf Between, 920

Griffin, Junius, 434 Gulf War, 493–94, 1121
Griffith, D. W. Gunfight at Dodge City, 1048
biblical epics, 903, 905 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 814, 816
biography, 672–75 Gunga Din, 816, 877, 1042
The Birth of a Nation, 41–46, Gunn, Moses, 435
881, 883, 911, 925, 997–99, Gunsmoke, 772, 1126
1027–28, 1115 Gustafsson, Greta Lovisa. See Garbo, Greta
cinematography, 918 Guthrie, A. B., Jr., 435, 437
Eisenstein and, 640 Guthrie, Arlo, 774
Fairbanks and, 645, 876 Guthrie, Woody, 559
film editing, 950–51 Guy-Blaché, Alice, 1130
A Fool There Was, 1129 A Guy Named Joe, 270, 648
Ford and, 651 Guys and Dolls, 582, 963
Gish and, 667–68 Guzmán, Luı́s, 505
Intolerance, 261–62 Gwenn, Edmund, 353–54
Judaism in film, 986 Gyllenhaal, Jake, 73
Keaton and, 704 Gypsy, 614, 1014
Micheaux and, 744
Musketeers of Pig Alley, 961 Hackett, Buddy, 551
Native Americans in film, 1018 Hackford, Taylor, 373
Pickford and, 775–76 Hackman, Gene, 59, 105, 183–84, 480,
Sarris on, 792 511, 512, 563, 764, 1112, 1128
silent era, 1081, 1083 Hadi, Shafi, 598
United Artists, 601, 977, 1131 Hagen, Jean, 446–47
von Stroheim and, 838 Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, 843
Griffith, Kristin, 260 Hagman, Larry, 161
Griffith, Melanie, 352, 539–40, 763 Hail the Conquering Hero, 819
Griggs, Lloyd, 437 Hair, 220, 706
Grigorieva, Oksana, 665 Hairspray, 844
Grint, Rupert, 238 Haley, Alex, 320, 572, 885
Grisham, John, 783 Haley, Jack, 535
Grodin, Charles, 739 Hall, Albert, 321
Gromley, Paul, 111 Hall, Anthony Michael, 67, 451
Grosse Point Blank, 1061 Hall, Conrad L., 919
Group Theater, 701, 1001 Hall, Diane. See Keaton, Diane
Grover, Ed, 429 Hallelujah!, 836, 883
Gruenberg, Louis, 953 The Hallelujah Trail, 815, 816
The Gruesome Twosome, 1048 Haller, Ernest, 919
Guber, Peter, 26 Halliday, John, 1057
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 228–30, 250, Halloween, 186, 231–33, 403, 595–97,
684, 778 1049, 1085
Guest, Christopher, 519 Hall, Philip Baker, 259
Guétary, Georges, 14 Halls of Anger, 1009
Guillaume, Robert, 297, 305, 306 Hamburg, John, 1063
Guilty by Suspicion, 188 Hamill, Mark, 469, 1104
Guinness, Alec, 71–72, 469 Hamilton, Guy, 209

1170
 Index

Hamilton, Linda, 6, 486, 488, 1072, 1135 Harris, Leonard, 483

Hamilton, Margaret, 537 Harrison, Rex, 99, 819
Hamlet, 305 Harris, Paul, 110–11
Hammer, Barbara, 625, 942 Harris, Richard, 200, 236, 511, 512, 801
Hammerstein, Oscar, 458–59, 1013 Harris, Rosalind, 174
Hammett, 609 Harron, Robert, 43, 262
Hammett, Dashiell, 322–23, 697, 954–55, Harry & Son, 759, 760
967–68 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,
Hammid, Alexander, 624 235, 238
Hamm, Sam, 26 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,
The Handmaid’s Tale, 1074 235, 239
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 235, 238
850, 1048 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 235,
Hang ’Em High, 511, 634, 1128 238, 239
Hanging Up, 643 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,
Hangmen Also Die!, 713 235, 238
Hanks, Tom Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,
Band of Brothers, 1121 235, 237
Big, 32 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, 235
Charlie Wilson’s War, 766 Harry Potter series, 235–40
Philadelphia, 383–84, 842 Hart-Cellar Act (1965), 937
Road to Perdition, 760 Hartley, Hal, 886
romantic comedies, 1061 Harvey, Laurence, 326, 657
Saving Private Ryan, 421–22 Hasford, Gustav, 189
Sleepless in Seattle, 454–55, 643 Haskell, Molly, 83–84, 793, 942, 948
That Thing You Do, 1014 Haskin, Byron, 1072
Toy Story, 503 Hathaway, Henry, 848, 1127
Hannah and Her Sisters, 261, 552, 553 Hauer, Rutger, 46, 800
Hannah, Daryl, 46 The Haunted Bride, 851
Hannibal, 801 Havana, 86
Hansen, Gale, 119 Hawke, Ethan, 119, 193
Hanson, Curtis, 291–92 Hawkins, Jack, 72
Happy Days, 13, 725 Hawkins, Judith Ann, 571
Happy Face Murders, 1048 Hawks, Howard
Hard, Fast and Beautiful, 731 auteur theory, 897–99, 947
Harding, William, 1003 The Big Sleep, 38–40, 955, 968
Hard Luck, 704 biography, 677–81
Hardware Wars, 473 Bogdanovich and, 295, 576, 813
The Hard Way, 731 Carpenter and, 595
Hardy, Norvell. See Hardy, Oliver French New Wave, 956
Hardy, Oliver, 715–17, 1054 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 196–98
Harlan County, USA, 244 on High Noon, 241
Harlow, Jean, 614, 648, 661, 1131 Red River, 390
Harold and Maude, 233–35, 559 Rio Bravo, 411–13
Harris, Eric, 62–63 romantic comedies, 1052, 1054, 1059
Harris, John, 1024 Sarris on, 792
Harris, Julie, 148, 701 Scarface, 424, 961

1171
Index

Twentieth Century, 267 Helgeland, Brian, 291

war films, 1116, 1117 Hellcats of the Navy, 1118
Wayne and, 848 Heller, Joseph, 762
Hawks, Spencer, 600 Heller, Randee, 287
Hawn, Goldie, 1134 Hell in the Pacific, 1118
Hayashi, Fumihiro, 312 Hell Is for Heroes, 1118
Haycox, Ernest, 461 Hellman, Lillian, 865, 972, 973
Hayden, Sterling, 137, 1030 Hello Americans, 854
Hayek, Salma, 1135 Hello Dolly!, 813, 1008, 1015
Hayes, Helen, 661 Hell’s Angels, 423
Hayes, Ira, 178–79 Hemingway, Ernest, 567, 679, 697
Hayes, Isaac, 435 Hemingway, Mariel, 327, 1061
Hays, Will, 424, 529, 946, 969–71, 1003, Henner, Marilu, 681
1038–39 Henreid, Paul, 85, 616, 999
Hayward, Louis, 713 Henry and June, 550
Hayworth, Rita, 1133 Henry, Buck, 762, 1060
The Hazards of Helen, 1130 Henson, Jim, 726
HBO, 720, 1108, 1121 Hepburn, Audrey, 334, 578, 1060
Headey, Lena, 489 Hepburn, Katharine
Head of State, 1031 The African Queen, 697
Health, 556 Arzner and, 558
Hearst, William Randolph, 94, 835, biography, 682–85
854, 1029 Cukor and, 614–15
The Heartbreak Kid, 739 Funny Girl, 814
Heartburn, 643, 763 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 228
Heart Condition, 842 Love Affair, 566
Heart of Darkness, 609, 854 The Philadelphia Story, 385–86
The Heart of Humanity, 838 romantic comedies, 1055–58, 1060
Hearts in Dixie, 883 Sylvia Scarlett, 670
Hearts of the World, 668, 1028, 1115 Woman of the Year, 538–39
Heat, 4, 735, 770 women in film, 1131
Heaven and Earth, 393, 810, 1029, 1112 Herberg, Will, 989
Heaven Can Wait, 86, 270, 563, 565, Herbert, Frank, 732
739, 1060 Herbert, Will, 907
Heaven’s Gate, 240–41, 1128 Hercules, 1009
Hecht, Ben, 424, 679, 897 Hercules in New York, 485
Heckerling, Amy, 103–4, 165–67, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, 270
681–82, 1136 Herlihy, James Leo, 349
Hedren, Tippi, 516 Herman, Edward S., 329
Heflin, Van, 436 Heroes, 1104
Hefner, Hugh, 577–78 Herrmann, Bernard, 317, 329, 403, 863,
He Got Game, 720 1007, 1008
Heinz, Wolfgang, 754 Herrmann, Edward, 379
The Heiress, 866 Herron, Frederick L., 1003
Heise, William, 639 Hershey, Barbara, 162, 590
Heisler, Stuart, 954 Hess, Jared, 923
The Helen Morgan Story, 617 Hester Street, 937

1172
 Index

Heston, Charles, 63, 391–92, 501, 685–86, Bogdanovich and, 576

866, 890, 904, 906, 1076 cinematography, 919
Hewitt, Christopher, 401 French New Wave, 947, 956
Hickenlooper, George, 578 Grant and, 670
Hickey, William, 739 Mulvey on, 752
The Hidden Eye, 1051 music in film, 1006–7
Higgins, Colin, 233 Psycho, 231, 325, 402–3, 446,
Higgins, Jack, 817 1084–85
High Anxiety, 403, 584 romantic comedies, 1060
Higher Learning, 805 Sarris on, 792
High Fidelity, 1061 Spellbound, 226
High Noon Vertigo, 515–17
as allegory, 375, 976 The Hitchhiker, 731
Bigelow and, 575 H.M. Pulham, Esq., 836
Hawks and, 411, 680 Ho, A. Kitman, 280
music in, 1008–9, 1011 Hoffman, Dustin
overview, 241–43 Actors Studio, 1002
religion in, 1042 All the President’s Men, 1028, 1030
western films, 1125 ethnicity, 937
High Plains Drifter, 511, 635 The Graduate, 215–17, 762
High School, 922 Ishtar, 565, 739
High School Musical 3, 1009, 1013 Little Big Man, 307, 1019
High Sierra, 731 Midnight Cowboy, 349
Hill, Billy, 228 Oscar nomination, 250
Hill, Debra, 231 Straw Dogs, 773
Hiller, Arthur, 602–3, 1060 Tootsie, 783
Hillerman, Tony, 1020 Hoffman, Michael, 1060
Hill, George Roy, 76–79, 490, 687–88, Hogan, P. J., 1062
760, 1127 The Holcroft Covenant, 657
Hillis, Aaron, 949 Holden, William, 72–73, 224, 478–79,
Hill, Jack, 671 530–32, 860
Hill, Roger, 853 Holiday, 385, 615, 670, 683, 1055
Himes, Chester, 434 Holiday Inn, 527, 528
Hi, Mom!, 621 Holliday, Doc, 816
Hinckley, John, Jr., 483, 655 Holliday, Judy, 615
Hinwood, Peter, 415 Hollingshead, Richard, 930
Hiroshima, mon amour, 630–31, 958 Hollywood blacklist/Hollywood ten, 15,
Hirsch, Judd, 377 187–88, 375–76, 522–23,
His Girl Friday, 538, 670, 677, 679–80, 897, 971–73, 975–76. See also House
900, 1059 Un-American Activities
His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, 535 Committee
History of the World: Part I, 584, 891 Hollywood or Bust, 722
Hitchcock, Alfred The Hollywood Review of 1929, 446
auteur theory, 826, 898 Hollywood Voices (Sarris), 791
Bergman and, 567 Holmes, Helen, 1130
biography, 688–94 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 815
The Birds, 1108 Holmes, Taylor, 196

1173
Index

Holt, Tim, 364 House of Cards, 1023

Holy Smoke, 590–91 House of Dracula, 1066
Home Alone, 863 The House of Rothschild, 920
Homeless, 695 House of Wax, 1049
Home of the Brave, 884 House Un-American Activities Committee
The Homesteader (Micheaux), 744 (HUAC). See also Hollywood blacklist/
Homosexuality. See Gays and lesbians Hollywood ten
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, 1067 Buchman and, 1032
Hoodlum Empire, 35 film noir and, 954
The Hook, 746 The Front and, 187–88
Hoop Dreams, 243–46 Hollywood blacklist and, 971–76
Hooper, 879 Hollywood Ten, 523
Hooper, Tobe, 1085 Kazan and, 375–76, 700–702, 727
Hoosiers, 695, 1094 Miller and, 746–47
The Hopalong Cassidy Show, 1126 SAG and, 1076–77
Hopkins, Anthony, 370, 444–45, 801 Wayne and, 848
Hopkins, James, 530 Houston, Whitney, 842, 1092
Hopper, Dennis, 50, 149–50, 611, Howard, John, 385, 1057
694–96, 788 Howard, Kevyn Major, 190
Hopper, Hedda, 607 Howard, Leslie, 211
The Horn Blows at Midnight, 270 Howard, Ron, 12, 13, 363, 370, 611, 666
Horne, Lena, 884 Howard, Terrence, 111
Horner, Harry, 1040 How Green Was My Valley, 246–48
Horner, William George, 894 How to Marry a Millionaire, 748
Horror films. See also Slasher films How to Steal a Million, 863, 866
The Exorcist, 153–57 The Hucksters, 662
Halloween, 231–33 Hud, 428, 1127
Psycho, 402–3 Hudson, Hugh, 825
Rosemary’s Baby, 418–19 Hudson, Rock, 198–99, 388–89,
The Shining, 439–41 533, 657, 816, 999, 1004,
The Sixth Sense, 452–54 1020, 1059–60
Horse Eats Hat, 853 The Hudsucker Proxy, 605, 760
Horse Feathers, 737 A Huey P. Newton Story, 720
Horton, Peter, 449 Huggins, Roy, 975
The Hospital, 603 Hughes, Albert, 886
Hotchner, A. E., 761 Hughes, Allen, 886
Hot Spell, 88 Hughes, Howard, 423–25, 713, 787, 798, 819
The Hot Spot, 695 Hughes, John, 66–68, 169–70, 450–51, 923
Houdini, Harry, 703 Huie, William Bradford, 602
Houghton, Katharine, 228 Hulfish, David, 1025
Hour of the Gun, 816 The Hulk, 717, 1101
The Hours, 1007 Human Desire, 714
Houseboat, 1060 The Human Factor, 785
The House by the River, 713 The Human Figure in Motion
The House I Live In, 803–4 (Muybridge), 757
Houseman, John, 379, 787, 853, 1079 Humphrey, Hubert H., 915
House, MD, 494 Hunchback of Notre Dame, 865

1174
 Index

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1050 Ice Castles, 1051

Hungry Hearts, 985 Ice Cube, 65, 494, 806
Hunt, Bonnie, 280 The Iceman Cometh, 657
Hunter, Holly, 109, 386–87, 590 Ice Station Zebra, 816
Hunter, Jeffrey, 427, 907 The Ice Storm, 717, 938
Hunter, Kim, 392, 474–75, 973 I Could Never Be Your Woman, 682
Hunter, Kristin, 559 Identity Crisis, 832
Hunter, Stephen, 511 Idiot’s Delight, 662
Hunter, Tab, 844 Idle Wives, 851
Hunt, Helen, 1062 Idziak, Slawomir, 194
Hunt, Peter, 52 I Feel Bad about My Neck (Ephron), 644
The Hun Within, 838, 925–26, 1115 If These Walls Could Talk, 1090–91
Hurd, Gale Anne, 486 I’ll Cry Tomorrow, 118
The Hurricane, 842, 1094 Illegally Yours, 578
Hurston, Zora Neale, 572 Imaginary Friends, 643
Hurt, John, 5, 34, 800 I Married a Monster from Outer Space, 1075
The Hurt Locker, 573, 575–76, 881, 1121 Imar the Servitor, 1043
Hurt, Mary Beth, 260 Imitation of Life, 606, 883
Hurt, William, 297, 699 I’m No Angel, 670
Husbands, 599 Impatient Maid, 740
Hussein, Saddam, 493 Impossible Object, 657
Hussey, Ruth, 385–86, 1057 Impossible Voyage, 742
The Hustler, 549, 759, 798 Inarritu, Alejandro Gonzales, 502
The Hustler of Muscle Beach, 1048 Ince, Thomas, 1018
Huston, Angelica, 697 In Cold Blood, 163
Huston, John The Incredible Hulk, 266, 1101
The Asphalt Jungle, 963 The Incredibles, 504, 1100
biography, 696–98 The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, 1048
Brando and, 582 Independence Day, 146, 252–54, 1070, 1075
Chinatown, 89–90, 825 Independent films
HUAC, 975 The Best Years of Our Lives, 977
The Maltese Falcon, 247, 322–24, 952, Blair Witch Project, 48–50, 977, 978–79
954, 968–69 Chasing Amy, 978
Sturges and, 817 Dances with Wolves, 978
war documentaries, 928 Duel in the Sun, 977
western films, 1127 Full Frontal, 978
Huston, Walter, 697 Gangs of New York, 978
Hutton, Betty, 819 Gone with the Wind, 977
Hutton, Timothy, 376 A Nightmare on Elm Street, 978
Hyams, Peter, 1128 overview, 977–79
Hyde, Jonathan, 495 Rock All Night, 978
Hynes, Fred, 459 Sex, Lies and Videotape, 431–32
Hypocrites, 851 Shadows, 432–33
Hytner, Nicholas, 1063 Spy Kids trilogy, 978
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 978
I Am Legend, 1069 The Terminator series, 978
I Can Get It for You Wholesale, 812 The Wild Angels, 978

1175
Index

Independent Motion Picture Company, Gish in, 667

1004 Griffith and, 674
Indiana Jones, 254–58, 276, 699, 726, 809, Keaton and, 704
880, 1043 overview, 261–63
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal von Stroheim in, 838
Skull, 254–57 Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, 571
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Intruder, 610
254–57 Intruder in the Dust, 884
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Invaders from Mars, 1073
254–57 The Invasion, 264
The Indian Runner, 695 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 146, 160,
The Indian Tomb, 714 263–65, 772, 1073, 1075
India Song, 631 Invincible, 1095
Indiscreet, 1060 The Invisible Boy, 1073
Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), 725–26 The Invisible Man, 1066, 1068
Industrial Symphony #1, 733 The Invisible Ray, 1068
Infamous, 578 Iraq War, 1121
The Informer, 652 Ireland, John, 364
Inge, William, 460–61, 563, 746 I Remember Mama, 581
In Harm’s Way, 785 Their Eyes Were Watching God, 572
Inherit the Wind, 282 Irma la Douce, 861
Inland Empire, 625 Iron Horse, 651
Innocent, 1050 Iron Jawed Angels, 1086–87
I Notti di Cabiria, 982 Iron Man, 265–67, 1100, 1101
Inside Man, 655, 721, 843, 886 Irons, Jeremy, 305, 306
The Insider, 4, 258–60, 735 Irving, Amy, 506
Insomnia, 770 Ishtar, 565, 739
Inspiration Pictures, 668 The Island of Dr. Moreau, 658, 1066, 1067
Insurrection, 735 Island of Lost Souls, 1066
Intellectual montage, 27–29, 979–80 Isn’t Life Wonderful?, 675
Interiors, 260–61, 552, 553, 706, 1061 Is Paris Burning?, 608
Intermezzo, 567 It, 1131
Internet Movie Database, 949 Italian neorealism, 980–83
Interrupted Melody, 1051 It Happened One Night, 267–70,
In the Company of Men, 249–50, 1050 360, 592, 593, 606, 661,
In the Cut, 591 1052, 1054
In the Heat of the Night, 250–52, It’s Alive, 418
559, 778 It’s a Wonderful Life, 270–73, 360, 389, 439,
In the Spirit, 739 592, 594, 1049
In the Wake of the Bounty, 649 It’s Not Just You Murray!, 796
In This Our Life, 741 It Started in Naples, 662
Intolerable Cruelty, 605 Ivanhoe, 822
Intolerance Ivan the Terrible, 29, 640
ancient world in, 889 Ives, Burl, 87
biblical epic, 903, 905 I Vitelloni, 983
Eisenstein and, 640 I Was a Male War Bride, 1059
film editing, 950 I Was/I Am, 625

1176
 Index

Jack, 609 Jewison, Norman, 174–75, 250, 321, 559,

Jackie Brown, 672 905, 1060
The Jack Paar Show, 812 Jezebel, 865
Jackson, Janet, 806 JFK, 280–82, 360, 369, 370, 613, 811–12
Jackson, Michael, 795, 805 Jim Brown: All American, 720
Jackson, Peter, 309, 380 Jimmy the Gent, 588
Jackson, Samuel, 133, 284, 404–5, Joan of Arc, 567
471, 719, 887 Jobs, Steve, 503–4, 726
Jacobs, Jim, 219 Joe Kidd, 511, 816, 1128
Jacobs, Lewis, 947 Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop, 719
Jacobson, Nina, 1136 Joe Versus the Volcano, 455, 1061
Jade, 659 Joffe, Charles, 551
Jagged Edge, 1080 Joffé, Roland, 288–90, 622, 1112
Jagger, Dean, 527 Johansson, Scarlett, 311–13
James, Anthony, 250 John and Kate Plus Eight, 929
James Bond films, 51–54, 209–11, 878 John, Elton, 305
James, Henry, 452, 590 John Goldfarb, Please Come Home, 863
James, Steve, 243–44, 246 Johnny Belinda, 1050
Jane Eyre, 822, 852 Johnny Dangerously, 681
Janssen, Elsa, 399 Johnny Guitar, 787
Jarhead, 1121 Johnny Staccato, 597
Jarman, Derek, 625 Johns, Geoff, 630
Jarmusch, Jim, 787, 886, 1099 Johnson, Ben, 295–96, 531, 532, 577
Jarre, Maurice, 534 Johnson, Chandler, 178
Jaws, 6, 145, 275–77, 426, 808, Johnson County War, 240–41
863, 1097 Johnson, Diane, 439
The Jazz Singer Johnson, Don, 736
blackface in, 911–12 Johnson, George, 744
Curtiz and, 617 Johnson, Noble, 744
Judaism in, 936, 986–87 Johnson, Nunnally, 219, 328–29
music in, 1013 Johnston, Claire, 941
overview, 277–79 Johnston, Eric, 1003, 1039
sound in, 1081, 1091, 1092, 1096 Johns, Tracy Camilla, 719
Zanuck and, 867 Jolie, Angelina, 1135
Jefferson, Arthur Stanley. See Laurel, Stan Jolson, Al, 277, 911–12, 936,
Jenet, Veronika, 387 986–87, 1013
Jenson, Vicky, 441 Jonathan: The Boy Nobody Wanted, 1049
Jeopardy, 815 Jones, Carolyn, 263
Jeremiah Johnson, 782–83 Jones, James Earl, 305, 306, 469,
The Jericho Mile, 735 885, 1031
Jerry Maguire, 279–80, 1094 Jones, Jeffrey, 169
Jesse James, 461 Jones, Jennifer, 837
Jest of God, 760 Jones, L. Q., 530
Jesus, 907 Jones, Shirley, 362–63
Jesus Christ Superstar, 905, 907, 908, 1015 Jones, Tommy Lee, 280, 371
Jesus of Nazareth, 907, 908–9 Jonze, Spike, 494
Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 958 Jordan, Dorothy, 427

1177
Index

Jordan, Michael, 719 Kaminsky, Melvin. See Brooks, Mel

Jordan, Neil, 112–13 Kane, Bob, 26
Journey to the Bottom of the Sea, 1069 Kanin, Garson, 815, 1059
Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1066, 1068 Kansas City Confidential, 35
Journey to the Lost City, 714 Kantor, MacKinley, 31
Jovovich, Milla, 1135 Kapelos, John, 451
The Joy Luck Club, 938 Kaplan, E. Ann, 944–45
Juanpuri, 735 The Karate Kid, 287–88, 297, 938
Judaism and film, 985–91 Karloff, Boris, 182, 576, 936, 1076
The Judge, 731 Karno, Fred, 600
Judge, Mike, 1063 Karns, Todd, 271
Judge Priest, 652 Kasdan, Lawrence, 33–34, 612,
Judgment at Nuremberg, 282–84, 508 699–700, 952
Judgment Day, 1072 Katzenberg, Jeffrey, 809
Judith of Bethulia, 673 Katz, Samuel, 934
Jules and Jim, 56, 827 Kauffmann, Stanley, 900
Julia Misbehaves, 822 Kaufman, Charlie, 1078, 1080
Julie & Julia, 643, 1136 Kaufman, George S., 737
Julius Caesar, 582, 685, 853 Kavner, Julie, 643
Jumbo, 570 Kaye, Danny, 527, 716, 1014
The Jungle, 1028 Kaye, Sammy, 551
Jungle Fever, 571, 719, 886 Kazan, Elia
Junior Bonner, 731, 773 biography, 700–702
Jurado, Katy, 242, 243 Brando and, 580–82
Jurassic Park, 276, 284–86, 426, 487, 809, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 87
863, 1067, 1068, 1108 Chayefsky and, 603
Just Go with It, 1063 East of Eden, 147–48
Just Nuts, 724 Gentleman’s Agreement, 988
HUAC, 746, 973, 975, 976
K-19: The Widow-Maker, 575 method acting, 1001, 1002
Kael, Pauline, 47, 512, 555, 563, Pinky, 884
792, 948 sexual mores, 460
Kafka, Franz, 855 Splendor in the Grass, 563
Kagan, Jeremy, 990 A Streetcar Named Desire, 474–76
Kagemusha, 609 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 787
Kahler, Wolf, 256 On the Waterfront, 375–76, 727
Kahn, Herman, 161 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 798, 909
Kahn, Madeline, 1059 Keaton, Buster, 32, 194–96, 479,
The Kaiser, 925–26, 1115 702–5, 1053
Kaleidoscope, 564 Keaton, Diane, 18–19, 204, 260, 327, 552,
Kalem Company, 904–5, 986 705–7, 1061–62
Kalinak, Kathryn, 428 Keaton, Joseph Frank. See Keaton, Buster
Kalmar, Bert, 141 Keaton, Michael, 26, 585, 681
Kamen, Robert Mark, 287 Keats, John, 591
Kaminer, Manó Kertész. See Curtiz, Keeler, Ruby, 569, 570
Michael Keel, Howard, 1014, 1076
Kaminski, Janusz, 917 Kefauver, Carey Estes, 35

1178
 Index

Keighley, William, 883, 961 The Killer Elite, 773

Keitel, Harvey, 386–87, 405, 484, 489, The Killers, 597, 953
590–91, 800, 801 Killer’s Kiss, 707
Kelland, Clarence Budington, 359 The Killing, 707, 963
Kellerman, Sally, 335, 337 The Killing Fields, 288–90, 1112
Kelley, DeForest, 465 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 599
Kelley, Sheila, 448 The Killing of the Unicorn (Bogdanovich),
Kelley, William, 534 577
Kelly, Andrew, 10 Kilmer, Val, 27, 500, 658
Kelly, Gene, 14–15, 446–47, 562, 803, 1014 Kindergarten Cop, 488
Kelly, Grace, 242, 411, 516, 691, 692, 706, Kinemacolor Company, 920
1006, 1060, 1125 Kinetoscope, 933, 950
Kelly, Moira, 305 King, Adrienne, 186
Keneally, Thomas, 425 King David, 891
Kennan, George, 492 Kingdom of Heaven, 802
Kennedy, Arthur, 713 King Kong, 1006
Kennedy, Edgar, 142 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1088
Kennedy, George, 106–7 The King of Comedy, 622, 723, 798
Kennedy, Jihmi, 202 The King of Kings, 619, 905, 907, 1038
Kennedy, John F., 52, 153, 281–82, Kingpin, 1050
325, 915 King, Rodney, 163
Kennedy, Joseph P., 839 Kingsley, Ben, 425, 1041
Kennedy, Robert, 657 Kings of the Road, 856
Kenney, Douglas, 81 King Solomon’s Mines, 258
Kern, Jerome, 1013 King, Stephen, 438, 439–41
Kerouac, Jack, 432 Kinsella, W. P., 612
Kerr, Deborah, 804, 1060 The Kiss, 663
Kershner, Irvin, 469 Kiss and Make-Up, 670
Kesey, Ken, 760 Kiss Me Deadly, 396, 952, 954
Key Largo, 396, 697 Kiss Me, Stupid, 861
Keystone Film Studio, 600 Klebold, Dylan, 62–63
The Key to Reserva, 799 Klein, Joe, 765
Khambatta, Persis, 465 Kleiser, Randal, 219–21
Khartoum, 685 Kline, Kevin, 34, 699, 1059
Khouri, Callie, 489, 491, 801 Kluge, Alexander, 856
Kickinger, Roland, 489 Klugman, Jack, 118, 506
The Kid, 600 Knife in the Water, 780
Kid Brother, 724 Knight, Ted, 81
Kidder, Margot, 480 Knight, Wayne, 284, 285
Kidman, Nicole, 357, 590, 591, 643, 708, Knockaround Guys, 695
1012, 1015 Knots Landing, 571
Kid Millions, 920 Know Your Enemy: Japan, 594
Kidnapped, 784 Koch, Howard, 85
Kids, 923 Kodar, Oja, 855
Kids Like These, 1049 Koenig, Walter, 465
Kienzle, Raymond Nicholas. See Ray, Kolker, Robert, 56, 999
Nicholas Koman, Jacek, 1012

1179
Index

Konigsberg, Allen Stewart. See Allen, Woody Kussman, Dylan, 119

Kopple, Barbara, 244 Kutschera, Maria Augusta, 458
Korean War
Battle Hymn, 1119 La Bamba, 938
Fixed Bayonets, 1119 LaBeouf, Shia, 255
The Manchurian Candidate, La Boheme, 668
324–26, 1119 Labyrinth, 726
M*A*S*H*, 335–37 La Cage aux Folles, 764
One Minute to Zero, 1119 La Cava, Gregory, 366–67, 1059
Pork Chop Hill, 1119 L.A. Confidential, 291–92
Retreat, Hell!, 1119 Lacy Jerry, 1061
The Steel Helmet, 937 Lacy, Ronald, 256
Korngold, Erich, 1006 Ladd, Alan, 240, 436, 954, 1125
Kosinski, Jerzy, 560 Ladd, Diane, 90
Kosslyn, Jack, 633 The Ladies Man, 583, 722
Kostal, Irwin, 459 Ladies of Leisure, 268, 593
Koteas, Elias, 109 La Dolce Vita, 983
Kovacs, Laszlo, 150 Lady and Gent, 847
Kramer, Stanley, 228–30, 250, The Lady Bug, 591
282–84 Lady by the Sea, 798
Kramer vs. Kramer, 398, 1134 The Lady Eve, 819, 1059
Kristeva, Julia, 944 Lady for a Day, 593, 594
Kubert, Adam, 630 The Lady from Shanghai, 854, 1049, 1133
Kubrick, Stanley Lady in a Jam, 1059
biography, 707–10 The Ladykillers, 605
A Clockwork Orange, 101–3 Lady Sings the Blues, 882, 885
Dr. Strangelove, 136–39 The Lady Vanishes, 689
Full Metal Jacket, 189–91, 1112 Laemmle, Carl, Jr., 182, 838, 864, 1004,
The Killing, 963 1083, 1129
Mann and, 735 La Grande Illusion, 839
music in film, 1007 Lahr, Bert, 535
politics in film, 1029, 1030 Lake, Ricki, 844
The Shining, 439–41 Lake, Stuart N., 364–66
Spartacus, 888 Lake, Veronica, 477
2001: A Space Odyssey, 508–10, 1073 Lamarr, Hedy, 906
Kuchar brothers, 843 The Lamb, 645
Ku Klux Klan, 41–46, 674, 911, 997–98, Lambert, Catherine, 312
1027–28 Lancaster, Burt, 282, 656, 782, 804, 816,
Kuleshov effect, 993–94 878, 953
Kuleshov, Lev, 640, 993–94 The Land beyond the Sunset, 293–94
Kundun, 798, 1044 The Landlord, 559
Kung Fu, 1044 Land of Plenty, 857
Kung Fu cinema, 878, 937 Land of the Pharaohs, 891
Kuribayashi, Tadamichi, 177, 303–4 Lane, Burt, 598
Kurosawa, Akira, 318, 591, 609, 633, Lane, Nathan, 305, 1015
816, 1100 Langdon, Harry, 592–93
Kushner, Tony, 765 Lange, Jessica, 706, 783

1180
 Index

Langella, Frank, 370 Laughlin, Tom, 879

Lang, Fritz Laughton, Charles, 891
auteur theory, 897 Laura, 713, 785
Bazin on, 947 Laurel, Stan, 715–17, 1054
The Big Heat, 35–37, 963 Laurence, Margaret, 760
biography, 711–15 Laurents, Arthur, 524
Bogdanovich and, 576 Laverne & Shirley, 13
Dr. Mabuse, 965–66 Law, Clara, 580
film noir, 952, 954 Lawford, Peter, 451, 804
French New Wave, 956 A Law for the Defective, 1047
German expressionism, 652 Law, Jude, 193
Metropolis, 346–48 The Lawnmower Man, 1048
Sarris on, 792 Lawrence, Florence, 1004, 1129
Langley, Noel, 536 Lawrence, Martin, 571, 719
Langlois, Henry, 831 Lawson, John Howard, 973, 975
Lang, Walter, 1060 Lawton, J. F., 397
Lansbury, Angela, 325, 657 Lazenby, George, 53, 878
Lansing, Sherry, 1136 Leach, Alexander Archibald. See Grant, Cary
Lanzmann, Claude, 426 Leachman, Cloris, 295, 577
La Permission, 831 Leacock, Richard, 928
La Pointe Courte, 833 A League of Their Own, 455
Lardner, Ring, Jr., 335, 555, 973, 975 Lean, David, 563, 684
Lasky, Jesse L., 619 Lean on Me, 297–98
Lasser, Louise, 1061 Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 181, 826–27, 957
Lasseter, John, 503–4 Leave Her to Heaven, 955
Lassie Come Home, 822 Le bonheur, 958
The Last Boy Scout, 571 le Carré, John, 706
The Last Days of Patton, 1112 Le coup du berger, 958
Last Days of Pompeii, 889 Leder, Mimi, 1136
The Last Detail, 559, 767, 824 Ledger, Heath, 73–74
The Last Gun, 808 Lee, Ang, 73, 938
The Last Mile, 661 Lee, Bruce, 878, 937
The Last Movie, 695 Lee, Christopher, 471
The Last of His Tribe, 1044 Lee, Florence, 97
The Last of the Mohicans, 736, Lee, Gerard, 589, 590
1020, 1021 Lee, Harper, 497
The Last Picture Show, 295–96, 577, Lee, Joie, 132
578, 923 Lee, Shelton Jackson. See Lee, Spike
The Last Starfighter, 470 Lee, Spike
Last Tango in Paris, 582 biography, 719–21
The Last Temptation of Christ, 798, 903, Do the Right Thing, 132–34, 140
907, 909 Malcolm X, 320–22, 571
The Last Time I Saw Paris, 822 Mo’ Better Blues, 842
Last Train from Gun Hill, 816 Poitier and, 778
The Last Waltz, 797 Reagan era, 886
The Last Woman on Earth, 824 School Daze, 923
Latin Americans, 1132, 1135 Singleton and, 806

1181
Index

The Left Handed Gun, 55, 298–300, 774 Lewis, Jerry, 583, 622, 716, 721–23
Legally Blonde, 1136 Lewis, Joseph H., 963
Legend, 800 Lewis, Robert Q., 602, 1001
The Legend of Bagger Vance, 5 Lewis, Sinclair, 865
Legends of the Fall, 919 Lewis, Vera, 261
Legion of Decency, 17, 1003, 1038–39 Leyda, Jay, 29
Le Grande Méliès, 743 Leyton, John, 224
Leguizamo, John, 1012 The Liberation of L. B. Jones, 866
Lehman, Ernest, 459, 524, 528–30, 761 Licence to Kill, 53–54, 1050
Lehmann, Michael, 1062 Liebman, Nina, 460
Leigh, Janet, 231–32, 402–3, 501, 516, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 1049
1127, 1134 Lifeboat, 690
Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 165, 681 Life of Brian, 892
Leigh, Vivien, 211–12, 474, 476, 648 Life with Father, 822
Le joli mai, 244 Lightning over Water, 856
Le Mat, Paul, 12 The Lights of New York, 1092
Le May, Alan, 427 The Light That Failed, 1047
Lemmon, Jack, 117, 749, 861, 1053, 1059 Like Normal People, 1049
Leonard, Robert Sean, 119 Lilies of the Field, 778
Leone, Sergio, 331, 511, 512, 633, 1123, Liliom, 712
1128 Lilith, 564
Le petit soldat, 957 The Lily of the Tenement, 673
Lepine, Jean, 919 Limelight, 705
LeRoy, Mervyn, 961 Lindsay, Howard, 459
Lesbians and gays, 64–65, 73–74, Lindsay, Vachel, 946
87–88, 349–50, 382–84, 557–58, The Lion in Winter, 684
1090–91 The Lion King, 305–6, 895, 1015, 1040
Les Girls, 614 Lions Gate, 556
Les mistons, 958 Liotta, Ray, 214, 963
Les quatre cents coups, 826, 957–58 Liponicki, Jonathan, 279
Lester, Adrian, 1030 Liston, Sonny, 3–4
Lethal Weapon, 301–2, 629–30, Lithgow, John, 441
665–66, 880 Little Big Man, 298, 307–8, 550, 774, 908,
Let There Be Light, 697 1019, 1020–21, 1044
Let’s Do It Again, 885 Little Buddha, 1044
Let’s Make Love, 749 Little Caesar, 16, 867, 936, 961, 962
Letterman, David, 246 The Little Colonel, 741, 1014
Letters from Iwo Jima, 177, 302–5, The Little Drummer Girl, 706
809, 1121 Little Man Tate, 655
Lettieri, Al, 204 The Little Mermaid, 1009, 1015
Levant, Oscar, 14 A Little Night Music, 823
Levine, Ted, 384, 444 A Little Romance, 687
Levinson, Barry, 360, 566 Little Shop of Horrors, 611, 767
Levitch, Jerome. See Lewis, Jerry Little Women, 614, 683, 822
Levy, Eugene, 520 Litvak, Anatole, 953
Lewinsky, Monica, 765, 1031 Live and Let Die, 53, 54, 878, 1043, 1050
Lewis, Gary, 755 Live on the Sunset Strip, 885

1182
 Index

The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 1042 The Lord of the Rings:

The Living Daylights, 53–54 The Fellowship of the Ring, 309
Living Dolls, 571 The Lord of the Rings:
Livingston, Jimmy, 602 The Return of the King, 380, 1005
Llewellyn, Richard, 247, 408 Lord of the Rings trilogy, 309–11
The Lloyd Bridges Show, 824 The Lord of the Rings:
Lloyd, Danny, 439 The Two Towers, 309
Lloyd, Harold, 194, 723–25, 819, Loren, Sophia, 1060
1053, 1084 Lorentz, Pare, 927, 947
Lloyd, Jake, 470 The Loretta Claiborne Story, 1049
Lloyd, Norman, 973 Lorre, Peter, 323, 711
Thelma and Louise, 5, 489–91, 800–801, 1135 Loser, 167, 682
Local News, 707 The Losers, 405
Lockhart, June, 344 Losing Isaiah, 572
Lockwood, Gary, 509 A Loss of Roses, 563
The Lodge in the Wilderness, 1047 Lost Boundaries, 884
The Lodger, 689 Lost Forever, 807
Loew, Marcus, 934 Lost Highway, 625
Loew’s Inc., 1097 Lost in Translation, 311–13
Logan, Joshua, 603 Lost in Yonkers, 1048
Logan’s Run, 1070 The Lost Patrol, 652
Lohman, Alison, 802 The Lost Squadron, 839
Lolita, 460, 708 Lost Weekend, 117, 860
Lollobrigida, Gina, 1060 The Lost World, 1067
Lombard, Carole, 367, 661, 662, 900, 1052 Lottman, Evan, 550
Lombardo, Guy, 551 Love, 663
London, Jack, 673 Love Affair, 563, 566, 1060
Lonely Are the Brave, 1049 Love among the Ruins, 684
The Lone Ranger, 1020, 1126 Love and Basketball, 1094
Lone Star, 662 Love and Death, 706
Lone Wolf McQuade, 1049 Love at Twenty, Stolen Kisses, 827
Longbaugh, Harry, 76–77 Love Bound, 740
Long Day’s Journey into Night, 684 Love Crimes, 579
The Longest Day, 868, 1118 Love Happens, 1063
The Long Goodbye, 335, 555, 952, 955 Love Happy, 748
The Long Hot Summer, 299, 759 Love in the Afternoon, 1060
Long, Huey, 10–12, 1029 Love Is Better Than Ever, 822
Long Pants, 592 The Loveless, 573
The Long Walk Home, 1088 Lovelock, Raymond, 174
Long, Walter, 43, 997 Love on the Run, 181, 827
Looking for Richard, 770 The Lover, 630–32
Look Who’s Talking, 681 Lover Come Back, 388, 1060
Loos, Anita, 196, 1130 Lovers and Other Strangers, 706
L’Opéra-Mouffe, 834 Love Story, 313–15
Lopez-Dawson, Kamala, 580 Love Streams, 599
Lopez, Jennifer, 938, 1135 The Love Trap, 865
Lord, Daniel A., 906, 970, 1038–39 Lovett, Lyle, 113

1183
Index

Lowery, Louis R., 178 MacLaine, Shirley, 563, 861, 764

Loy, Myrna, 30, 865, 1052 MacLean, Alistair, 816
Loy, R. Philip, 428 MacLeish, Archibald, 853
Lubitsch, Ernst, 859, 1056 MacLiammóir, Micheál, 853
Lucasfilm, 725–26 MacMurray, Fred, 135–36, 859
Lucas, George Macy, William H., 163
action-adventure films, 880 Made in Milan, 798
American Graffiti, 12–13, 923 The Mad Genius, 1049
biography, 725–27 Mad Max series, 665, 880
Indiana Jones, 254–58, 1043 Madoc, Ruth, 174
Kasdan and, 699 Madonna: Truth or Dare, 566
The Searchers and, 428 Madsen, Michael, 489, 801
Star Wars series, 468, 659 Mafia, 35–37, 203–7, 213–15
THX 1138, 609 Magalhães, Ana Maria, 580
A Lucky Dog, 716 Magistrale, Tony, 440
Lucky Numbers, 643 The Magnificent Ambersons, 317–18,
Lucky Star, 1050 549, 854
Lucy, Arnold, 9 The Magnificent Seven, 318–20, 428, 530,
Lugosi, Bela, 182 814, 816
Luhrmann, Baz, 357, 1012, 1015 The Magnificent Yankee, 815
Luhr, William, 63 Magnum Force, 512, 634, 879
Luke Cage, 807 Maguire, Tobey, 1034
Lumet, Sidney, 360, 429–30, 507, 582, 603, Maibaum, Richard, 52
727–29 Maid in Manhattan, 938
Lumière, Antoine, 742, 1081 Mailer, Norman, 989
Lumière, August, 729–30 Mainwaring, Daniel, 969
Lumière, Louis, 729–30 The Major and the Minor, 859
Lupino, Ida, 713, 714, 730–32 Major Dundee, 772
Luv, 739 Malamud, Bernard, 989
The L Word, 672 Malcolm X, 3–4, 841
Lydiard, Robert, 379 Malcolm X, 320–22, 719, 842, 886,
Lynch, David, 50–51, 625, 707, 732–33 1008, 1009
Lysistrata, 777 Malden, Karl, 17, 581, 875
Male gaze. See also Women in film
M, 35, 36, 711, 952 Erin Brockovich, 151–53
Maas, Peter, 429 Fatal Attraction, 167–69
Mabel’s Strange Predicament, 600 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 196–98
MacArthur, Charles, 679, 897 Thelma and Louise, 489–91
Macbeth, 853, 854 overview, 995–96
Macchio, Ralph, 287 Sex, Lies and Videotape, 431–32
MacDonald, Ian, 242 The Silence of the Lambs, 444–46
MacDowell, Andie, 431 Malice in Wonderland, 823
MacGraw, Ali, 314 Malick, Terrence, 23–24, 1120
Machinal, 661 Malinger, Ross, 454
Machine Gun Kelly, 963 Malkin, Barry, 550
Mack, Marion, 195 Malkovich, John, 590
MacLachlan, Kyle, 50 Malle, Louis, 957

1184
 Index

Mallory, George, 589 Mantegna, Joe, 206

Malloy, Matt, 249 Mantell, Joe, 90
The Maltese Falcon, 40, 247, 322–24, 697, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and
952, 954, 955, 967–69 the Media, 329–31
Maltz, Albert, 973, 975 The Man Who Dared, 815
Mamet, David, 612, 1080 The Man Who Knew Too Much, 689, 692
Mamma Mia!, 1013 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 331–33,
Mamoulian, Rouben, 99 428, 847, 848
The Man, 1031 The Man Who Wasn’t There, 604
Management, 1063 The Man without a Face, 666
A Man Betrayed, 1047 The Man with the Golden Arm, 785, 1050
A Man Called Horse, 1044 The Man with the Golden Gun, 53–54
The Manchurian Candidate, Marchand, Corinne, 957
324–26, 657, 804, 843, March, Fredric, 30–31, 865
1030, 1119 Marcus, Greil, 804
Mancini, Henry, 863 Marcus Welby, M.D., 808
Mandela and de Klerk, 778 Margin for Error, 784–85
Man from Del Rio, 937 Margulies, Julianna, 802
The Man from Laramie, 533, 1009, 1010 Marilyn Monroe Productions, 749
The Man from U.N.C.L.E., 824 Marin, Cheech, 938
Manhattan, 326–28, 551, 552, 553, Marine Battleground, 1111, 1119
706, 1061 Marion, Frances, 1130
Manhattan Murder Mystery, 19 Marker, Chris, 243, 244, 515, 834
Man Hunt, 712 The Mark of Zorro, 646, 876
Manhunter, 735 Marks, Richard, 550
The Man I Love, 731 Marley & Me, 1063
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Marley, John, 204
328–29, 1007 Marlow, 955
Mankiewicz, Herman J., 948, 1029 Marnie, 460, 693
Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 7–8, 94–95, Marooned, 816
99–100, 684, 963 The Marriage Go-Round, 606
Mann, Abby, 282 Marrs, Jim, 280
Mann, Anthony, 300, 532–33, 947, 1126 Mars Attacks!, 586
Mann, Delbert, 602, 1060 Marshall, E. G., 260
Mann, Hank, 98 Marshall, Garry, 1062
Manning, Irene, 543 Marshall, Penny, 32, 1136
Mann, Michael, 3–5, 258, 735–36, Marsh, Mae, 262, 672, 674
887, 1020 Marsh, Michelle, 174
Mann, Paul, 174 Mars, Kenneth, 78, 401
Mann, William, 539 Martin, Dean, 412, 451, 721–22, 804, 816
Man of Conquest, 461 Martino, Al, 204
Man of the Year, 360 Martin, Strother, 107, 530
Manoogian, Haig, 796 Marty, 602, 914, 937
Manovich, Lev, 1022–23 Marvel Studios, 265
Man’s Favorite Sport?, 1059 Marvin, Lee, 331
A Man’s Man, 663 Marvin’s Room, 706
Manson family, 90, 154–55, 780, 824 Marx Brothers, 86, 141–43, 737–38, 1054

1185
Index

Marx, Fred, 243 McCarthy, Andrew, 451

Marx, Groucho, 141–42 McCarthy, Joseph, 160, 188, 222, 325, 746,
Marx, Harpo, 141–42 893, 1030
Mary of Scotland, 652, 683 McCarthy, Kevin, 263, 264
Mary Poppins, 333–35, 627 The McCartney Years, 795
M*A*S*H*, 335–37, 422, 555, 762, McClellen, George B., 1037
908, 1029 McConaughey, Matthew, 655
Mask, 578 McCord, Ted, 147
Mason, James, 582 McCrea, Joel, 819, 1127
Masquerade, a Historical Novel, 745 McDaniel, Hattie, 648, 740–42, 883, 1132
Massey, Raymond, 148 McDermott, Dylan, 354
Mastbaum, Jules, 934 McDiarmid, Ian, 469, 471
Mastbaum, Stanley, 934 McDonald, Christopher, 489–91, 801
Mata Hari, 663 McDonald, Garry, 1012
Match Point, 552, 553 McDonald’s, 1035
Matchstick Men, 802 McDormand, Frances, 164, 604
Maté, Rudolph, 953 McDowall, Roddy, 247, 392
Matewan, 1088 McDowell, Malcolm, 101–2
The Matinee Idol, 268 McElwee, Ross, 916
Matlin, Marlee, 297 McGee, Patrick, 113
The Matrix, 1035, 1040, 1072, 1074 McGovern, Elizabeth, 377
The Matrix Reloaded, 338–40 McGovern, George, 565
The Matrix Revolutions, 338–40 McGregor, Ewan, 357, 470, 1015
The Matrix series, 338–40, 1023 McGuire, Biff, 429
Matsuda, Yusaku, 800 McIntire, John, 533
Matthau, Walter, 161, 739 McLaglen, Victor, 407, 679
Mature, Victor, 364 McLean, Alison, 591
Mauvaise, 858 McMurtry, Larry, 73, 295
Maverick, 666 McNally, Stephen, 532
Max, Maria, 831 McQ, 816
Mayberry, R.F.D., 655 McQueen, Steve, 224–25, 318–19, 761,
May, Elaine, 565, 738–40, 765 773, 816
Mayer, Louis B., 94, 224, 804, 868, 873, McTiernan, John, 126–27
875, 973, 987 Mean Streets, 621, 795–96, 937, 963
Mayhew, Peter, 469 Meditation on Violence, 625
Mayne, Judith, 558 Medium Cool, 919
Mayo, Virginia, 30 Meek, Donald, 463
Maysles, Albert, 915, 916, 928 Meeker, Ralph, 954
Maysles, David, 244, 915, 916, 928 Meet John Doe, 268, 272, 273, 359, 360
Mazursky, Paul, 1134 Meet Me in St. Louis, 343–44, 1014
McAdoo, William G., 645 Meet the Fockers, 622, 814
McBride, Jim, 928–29 Meet the Parents, 622
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 335, 341–43, 555, Meisner, Sanford, 706, 739, 781
564–65 Mekas, Jonas, 598
McCain, John, 1031 Méliès, Georges, 742–43, 950
McCarey, Leo, 141, 208, 643, 1054, Melinda and Melinda, 553
1059, 1060 Melnick, Daniel, 772

1186
 Index

Melodrama The Mexican, 1062

All about Eve, 7–8 Mexican Americans, 198–99
All That Heaven Allows, 999 Meyer, Brecklin, 103
The Birth of a Nation, 997–98 Meyers, Nancy, 1062, 1136
Broken Blossoms, 997–99 MGM Studios
Days of Wine and Roses, 117–18 Astaire and, 562
Dead Poets Society, 118–20 Ben-Hur, 866
Giant, 198–99 Bergman and, 567
Gone with the Wind, 211–13, 999 Berkeley and, 569–70
In the Heat of the Night, 250–52 The Big Parade, 38
How Green Was My Valley, 246–48 The Catered Affair, 602
The Magnificent Ambersons, 317–18 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 87
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 328–29 Fleming and, 647
Now Voyager, 999 Gable and, 661
overview, 997–1000 Garbo and, 663
The Paper Chase, 379–80 Gibson and, 665
The Quiet Man, 407–8 Gish and, 668
A Streetcar Named Desire, 474–76 Keaton and, 704–5
Titanic, 494–97, 997, 999–1000 Lang and, 712
12 Angry Men, 506–8 Marx Brothers and, 737
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 528–30 musicals, 1013
The Melody Man, 920 Nicholson and, 767
Melville, Jean-Pierre, 957 Shaft, 435
Memento, 344–46 Singin’ in the Rain, 446, 448
Memphis Belle, 1112 Sturges and, 815–16
The Memphis Belle, 865 Taylor and, 822
The Men, 581, 1045, 1051 Vidor and, 835
Menace II Society, 886, 964 von Stroheim and, 838
Menace on the Mountain, 655 The Wizard of Oz, 535–38
Mendes, Sam, 760, 923 Miami Vice, 4, 735, 736
Menjou, Adolphe, 848 Michael, 643
Menshen am Sonntag, 858 Michael Clayton, 783
The Merchant of Venice, 850 Micheaux, Oscar, 743–45, 881
Mercury Productions, 853 Mickey and Family Honeymoon, 741
Mercury Theatre, 853 Mickey and Nicky, 739
Meredith, Lee, 401 Mickey One, 55, 564, 774
Merrily We Go to Hell, 557 Middle of the Night, 602, 603
The Merry Widow, 839 Midnight Cowboy, 349–50, 978
The Merv Griffin Show, 794 Midnight Express, 810
Meshes of the Afternoon, 623–26, 752 Midnight Run, 622
Messemer, Hannes, 225 A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, 553
The Metaphor, 837 Midway, 1111
Method acting, 147–48, 1001–2. See also The Mighty Quinn, 842
Strasberg, Lee A Mighty Wind, 519
Metropolis, 346–48, 711, 966, 1074 The Milagro Beanfield War, 550
Metty, Russell, 919 Mildred Pierce, 616, 1133
Metz, Christian, 752 Milestone, Lewis, 8–9, 38, 679, 1028, 1116

1187
Index

Miles, Vera, 332, 402 Mississippi Mermaid, 827

Milk, 1091 The Missouri Breaks, 550, 774
Milland, Ray, 117, 691, 713, 860 Mitchell, Margaret, 211–13
Millan, Victor, 502 Mitchell, Millard, 447, 532
Miller, Ann, 1014 Mitchell, Roger, 1062
Miller, Arthur, 603, 701, 727, 745–47, 749, Mitchell, Thomas, 271, 361, 462
973, 1079 Mitchum, Robert, 954, 969
Miller, Barry, 990 Mixed Nuts, 643
Miller, Frank, 26, 1022 Mix, Tom, 845
Miller, Jim, 550 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 792
Miller, J. P., 118 The Mob, 35
Miller’s Crossing, 604 Mo’ Better Blues, 719, 842, 886,
Miller v. California (1973), 83 1008, 1011
Million Dollar Baby, 351–52, 635, 1047 Mowbray, Alan, 1076
The Million Dollar Hotel, 857 Moby Dick, 697
The Million Dollar Movie, 1107 Mockumentaries, 519
The Mind of Mr. Soames, 1048 Modern Times, 355–57, 601, 1028,
Mineo, Sal, 409–10, 1020 1081, 1092
Minghella, Anthony, 783 Modine, Matthew, 189
Mingus, Charles, 598 Mohr, Jay, 279
Ministry of Fear, 713 Molander, Gustaf, 567
Minkoff, Rob, 306 The Mollycoddle, 647
Minnelli, Vincente, 14–15, 343, 813, 883 Mondo Trasho, 843
Minnie and Moskowitz, 599 Money from Home, 722
Minority Report, 46, 809 Mo’Nique, 887
Miracle at St. Anna, 721 Monkey Business, 670, 1059
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, 819 Monogram/Lone Star Studios, 846, 1107
Miracle on 34th Street, 353–55 Monroe, Marilyn
The Miracle Woman, 593 biography, 747–49
The Miracle Worker, 55, 298, 774 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 196–97
Mirage, 1049 The Goddess, 602
Mirage Enterprises, 783 Lang and, 713
Miramax, 386, 751, 978 Miller and, 745, 747
Miranda, Carmen, 570, 1132 The Misfits, 697
Miranda v. Arizona (1966), 131 Some Like It Hot, 1053, 1059
Mirisch Brothers, 174, 816 women in film, 1133
Mirisch, Walter, 815 Zanuck and, 868
The Mirror Crack’d, 823 Monsieur Verdoux, 355, 601
The Mirror Has Two Faces, 814 Monster’s Ball, 572, 887
The Misfits, 662, 697, 747, 749, 1127 Monsters, Inc., 504
Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest, 589 Monstrosity, 1048
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, 609 Montalban, Ricardo, 815, 1020
Missing in Action series, 880, 1112–13 Monterey Pop, 916
The Mission, 622, 1044 Montgomery, Elizabeth, 1108
Mission: Impossible, 825 Montgomery, Monty, 573
Mississippi Burning, 1088 Montgomery, Robert, 973, 1076
Mississippi Masala, 938 Moonfleet, 714

1188
 Index

The Moon Is Blue, 785, 971 Motion Picture Editors Guild, 550, 795
Moonlighting, 126 Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC),
Moon of Israel, 616 1082, 1096
Moonraker, 53, 54 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors
Moonstruck, 938 of America (MPPDA), 946, 970–71,
Moontide, 713 1002–3, 1037–38
Moore, Colleen, 1131 Mottershaw, Frank, 950
Moore, Demi, 6, 173, 801 Mottola, Greg, 923
Moorehead, Agnes, 96 Moulin Rouge (1952), 697
Moore, Julianne, 801 Moulin Rouge! (2001), 357–58, 1007, 1009,
Moore, Mary Tyler, 377 1012, 1015
Moore, Michael, 62–63, 416–17, 749–51, The Movie Channel, 1108
914, 929 Movie stars, 1004–5
Moore, Owen, 776 Mr. Adams and Eve, 731
Moore, Robin, 184 Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, 759
Moore, Roger, 52, 53, 878 Mr. Arkadin, 855
Moran, Tony, 231–32 Mr. Blandings Builds a Dream House, 670
Morath, Inge, 747 Mr. Brooks, 613
Moreau, Jeanne, 855, 957 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 268, 272, 359–60,
Moreno, Rita, 524, 937 592, 594
Morgan, Cindy, 81 Mrs. Miniver, 865
Morgan, Frank, 536 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Morgan, Marion, 558 Capra and, 268, 273, 592, 594
Morgan, Ralph, 1076 Erin Brockovich and, 151
Morgenthau, Henry, 179 music in, 1008, 1011
Morin, Edgar, 916 overview, 360–62
Morita, Pat, 287 politics, 508, 1027, 1032
Morning Glory, 683 Stewart and, 272
Morricone, Ennio, 764 Mrs. Soffel, 665
Morris, Errol, 929 Mr. Twilight, 815
Morris, Haviland, 451 Muggeridge, Edward James. See Muybridge,
Morrison, Marion Robert. See Wayne, John Eadweard
Mortenson, Norma Jean. See Monroe, Muhammad, Elijah, 321
Marilyn Mulan, 1009, 1015
Morton, Joe, 488 Mulgrew, Kate, 1072
Morton, William, 819 Mulholland, William, 90
Moss, Carrie-Anne, 338–39, 1072 Mulligan, Richard, 307
Mostel, Zero, 175, 187, 400, 583, 973 Mulligan, Robert, 497–98, 1060
Mostow, Jonathan, 488, 1120 Mulroney, Dermot, 1062
The Mother and the Law, 261 Multiple Maniacs, 843
Mother Jones, 750 Mulvey, Laura, 51, 431, 491, 752–53,
Motion Picture Alliance for the 941–45, 995–96
Preservation of American Ideals The Mummy Returns, 1043
(MPA), 848 Muni, Paul, 424, 961, 1034
Motion Picture Association (MPA), 1003 Munkbrogreven, 567
Motion Picture Association of America Munro, H. H., 452
(MPAA), 1003 Munsterberg, Hugo, 946

1189
Index

The Muppet Movie, 852, 1015 Fiddler on the Roof, 174–75, 1015
Murch, Walter, 1093 Forrest Gump, 1008, 1009
Murder at Monte Carlo, 649 Funny Girl, 1014
Murder My Sweet, 955, 969 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 196–98
Murder on the Orient Express, 568, 728 Gigi, 1014
Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1067 Gone with the Wind, 1011
Murnau, F. W., 652, 753–55, 792, 965 Grease, 219–21, 1009, 1015
Murphy, Audie, 697 Gypsy, 1014
Murphy, Brittany, 103 Halls of Anger, 1009
Murphy, Eddie, 441, 443, 571, Hello Dolly!, 1015
778, 886 Hercules, 1009
Murphy, Michael, 327, 551, 1061 High Noon, 1009, 1011
Murray, Arthur, 551 High School Musical 3, 1009, 1013
Murray, Bill, 81–82, 311–13 The Hours, 1007
Murrow, Edward R., 1030 The Jazz Singer, 277–79, 1013
Muscular Dystrophy Association, 723 Jesus Christ Superstar, 1015
Museum of Modern Art, 576 King Kong, 1006
Musical biopics, 543–45, 617 The Lion King, 1015
Music in films. See also Williams, John The Little Colonel, 1014
Across the Universe, 1015 The Little Mermaid, 1009, 1015
Aladdin, 1009, 1015 Malcolm X, 1008, 1009
American Graffiti, 1009 Mamma Mia!, 1013
An American in Paris, 14–15 The Man from Laramie, 1009, 1010
An American Tail, 1014 The Man in the Gray Flannel
Anatomy of a Murder, 1008 Suit, 1008
Annie, 1013, 1015 Mary Poppins, 333–35
Annie Get Your Gun, 1009 Meet Me in St. Louis, 343–44, 1014
Apollo 13, 1009 Mo’ Better Blues, 1008, 1011
August Rush, 1005 Moulin Rouge!, 357–58, 1007, 1009,
Back to the Future trilogy, 1009 1015
Bathing Beauty, 1008, 1009 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1011
Beauty and the Beast, 1015 Mulan, 1009, 1015
Boogie Nights, 1009 The Muppet Movie, 1015
Brigadoon, 1014 The Music Man, 362–64
The Broadway Melody, 1013 Oklahoma!, 1014
Bundle of Joy, 1013 The Old Maid, 1011
Cabaret, 1013 overview, 1005–16
Cabin in the Sky, 1008 Panther, 1009
Cats Don’t Dance, 1013 Pleasantville, 1008, 1009
Chicago, 1009 The Producers, 400–402, 1015
Daddy Long Legs, 1013 Psycho, 1007
Distant Drums, 1010 Rear Window, 1007
Easter Parade, 1013 The Red Pony, 1006
8 Mile, 1005 Rio Grande, 1010
Enchanted, 1015 The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1015
Fame, 1015 Romeo and Juliet, 1015
Fast Company, 815 Rose Marie, 1007

1190
 Index

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, 1013, My Fair Lady, 614, 615
1014–15 My Family/Mi Familia, 938
1776, 1014 My Favorite Wife, 1054, 1059
Shaft, 1009 My Four Years in Germany, 925–26
The Shining, 1007 My Friend Irma, 722
On with the Show, 867 My Left Foot, 1051
Show Boat, 1013 My Man Godfrey, 366–67
The Singing Fool, 1013 My Own Private Idaho, 923
Singin’ in the Rain, 446–48, 1014 Myrick, Daniel, 49
Singles, 448–49 Mysterious Island, 1067
Sixteen Candles, 450–52 The Mysterious Lady, 663
With Six You Get Eggroll, 1008 Mystery Men, 1101–4
Slumdog Millionaire, 1011 Mystery of Natalie Wood, 578
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1009 The Mystery of the Passion Play of
Some Like It Hot, 1013, 1014 Oberammergau, 903
The Sound of Music, 458–59, 1015 Mystery Science Theater 3000, 86
Stand By Me, 1009 Mystery Street, 815
A Star Is Born, 1014 My Wicked, Wicked Ways (Flynn), 650
Star Wars series, 1007
Super Fly, 1008, 1009 Nabokov, Vladimir, 708
That Thing You Do, 1014 Nair, Mira, 938, 1136
Thoroughly Modern Millie, 1013 The Naked and the Dead, 1118
3:10 to Yuma, 1007 Naked City, 578
On the Town, 1014 The Naked Gun 33 1/3, 29
Toy Story, 1009 Naked Lunch, 108
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1007 The Naked Spur, 533, 1126–27
Victor Victoria, 1015 Nana, 557
Walk the Line, 1005 Nanook of the North, 927
Wall-E, 1007 Napoleon and Samantha, 655
Watch on the Rhine, 1011 Napoleon Dynamite, 923
Were the World Mine, 1013 Napoloni, 222
West Side Story, 524–25, 1013, 1015 Narcejac, Thomas, 692
White Christmas, 527–28, 1014 Nashville, 335, 555, 1093
The Wizard of Oz, 535–38, 1009, 1014 National Board of Censorship/Review,
The Wrong Man, 1008 1037
Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1014 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA),
The Music Man, 362–64 1076
The Musketeers of Pig Alley, 673, 961 Nationalism in film, 207–9, 380–82,
Mutual Film Corporation, 600 1040–45
Muybridge, Eadweard, 638, 755–57 National Labor Relations Act, 1076
My Best Friend’s Wedding, 1062 National Lampoon’s European Vacation, 681
My Blue Heaven, 643 National Organization for Women (NOW),
My Boys Are Good Boys, 731 1134
My Darling Clementine, 364–66, 653, 1008 National Origins Act (1924), 936
Myers, Harry, 98 National Public Radio, 750
Myers, Isadore, 905 National Rifle Association (NRA), 686
Myers, Mike, 441, 443 National Velvet, 822

1191
Index

Native Americans. See also Western films A New Hope, 470

Broken Arrow, 1019 New Jack City, 964
The Business of Fancydancing, 1020 A New Kind of Love, 759
Cheyenne Autumn, 1020 A New Leaf, 739
Dances with Wolves, 115–17, New Line Cinema, 978
1019, 1021 Newman, Alfred, 863
Drums along the Mohawk, 1018 Newman, David, 55, 480, 563
The Last of the Mohicans, 1020, 1021 Newman, Elinor, 761
Little Big Man, 307–8, 1019, 1020–21 Newman, Leslie, 480
The Outlaw Josey Wales, 1021 Newman, Paul
overview, 1017–21 Actors Studio, 1002
Powwow Highway, 1020 biography, 759–61
The Searchers, 427–28, 1019 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 77
Smoke Signals, 1020, 1021 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 87–88
social movements in film, 1089 The Color of Money, 798
Soldier Blue, 1019 Cool Hand Luke, 106–8
Stagecoach, 1018 Hill and, 687–88
They Died with Their Boots On, 1018 The Hustler, 550
Thunderheart, 1020 The Left Handed Gun, 298–99, 774
Union Pacific, 1018 roles, 390
Native Son, 853 Taylor and, 822
Nativism, 938–39 western films, 1127
Natural Born Killers, 24, 811, 821 Newman, Randy, 503
Naughton, James, 379 Newman’s Own Organics, 761
Nava, Gregory, 938 New Moon, 1136
The Navigator, 703 Newton-John, Olivia, 220
Nazimova, Alla, 558 Newton, Thandie, 111
The Nazis Strike, 594, 1117 The New World, 24
NBC, 1108 New World Pictures, 611
Neal, Tom, 953 New York Hat, 776
Near Dark, 573–74 New York, New York, 622, 797
Neeson, Liam, 425, 426, 470, 575, 802 New York Observer, 791
Negroponte, Nicolas, 1022 New York Stories, 798, 1050
Neill, Sam, 284, 386–87, 590 Ngor, Haing, 288
Nell, 655 Niagara, 748
Nelson, Barry, 52 Niblo, Fred, 876
Nelson, Craig, 379 Niccol, Andrew, 194
Nelson, Judd, 67, 451 Nichols, Bill, 63
Nelson, Kenneth, 64 Nichols, Mike, 82–84, 215–17, 250, 528,
Nelson, Ralph, 1019 688, 738, 739, 761–66, 918
Nelson, Ricky, 412 Nichols, Nichelle, 465
Neorealism. See Italian neorealism Nicholson, Jack
Network, 603, 727, 728, 1080, 1134 Actors Studio, 1002
Never Fear, 731 Ashby and, 559
Never Let Me Go, 662 Batman, 26
Never So Few, 816 Beatty and, 565
New German Cinema, 856 biography, 766–68

1192
 Index

Carnal Knowledge, 83–84 12 Angry Men, 506–8

Chinatown, 89–90, 780, 1079 women in film, 1133
Easy Rider, 149–50 1990s era, 938–39
A Few Good Men, 171–72 1970s era
Heartburn, 643 Chinatown, 89–91
Keaton and, 1062 The Exorcist, 153–57
The Missouri Breaks, 774 Serpico, 429–30
Nichols and, 762–64 1960s era
The Shining, 439–41 Ali, 3–5
The Trip, 611 The Big Chill, 33–35
Nickelodeon, 577 Dirty Dancing, 128–30
Nickelodeons, 934, 1024–26, 1081 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 228–30
Nick Fury, 265 In the Heat of the Night, 250–52
Nielsen, Connie, 200 Love Story, 313–14
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 509 Planet of the Apes, 391–93
Night and Day, 617 Splendor in the Grass, 460–61
A Night at the Opera, 737 women in film, 1133–34
A Night at the Roxbury, 682 Nine to Five, 352, 1134
A Night in Casablanca, 86 99 and 44/100% Dead, 657
The Nightmare Before Christmas, 586, 895 Ninotchka, 663, 859, 1056
A Nightmare on Elm Street, 978, 1049 Nixon, 360, 369–70, 811
’night Mother, 1047 Nixon, Richard, 105, 154, 273, 565,
Night Moves, 774, 952 975, 1030
Night Must Fall, 1050 Noah’s Ark, 616
The Night of the Hunter, 668 Noble, Thom, 491, 534
Night of the Living Dead, 153, 264 Nobody’s Fool, 760
Night Watch, 823 No Country for Old Men, 371–72, 502,
The Night They Raided Minsky’s, 659 604, 605
Nigh, William, 926 No Direction Home, 798
Nimoy, Leonard, 465 Noé, Gasper, 382
1980s era, 165–67. See also Reagan era Nolan, Christopher, 27, 344–46
ethnic/immigrant culture and, 937–38 Nolan, Jeanette, 36
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 169–71 Nolte, Nick, 814, 1062
Lethal Weapon, 301–2 None but the Lonely Heart, 670
Risky Business, 413–14 No, No Nanette, 570
women in film, 1135 Noonan, Tommy, 196
Working Girl, 539–41 Noon Wine, 772
1984, 1074 No Other Love, 1049
Nineteen Eighty-Four, 159 Norma Rae, 763, 1087, 1134
1950s era Norris, Chuck, 878, 880, 1113
American Grafitti, 13 Norris, Frank, 673
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 87–88 North, Alan, 297
East of Eden, 147–48 Northam, Jeremy, 421
The Left Handed Gun, 299 North by Northwest, 670, 692
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, North Country, 1087–88
328–29 North to Alaska, 848
Shadows, 432–33 Northwest Passage, 837

1193
Index

Nosferatu, 754, 965 The Odyssey, 714

Nothing but Trouble, 1050 Office of War Information, 522, 787
No T. O. for Love, 602 An Officer and a Gentleman, 373–75
Notorious, 567, 670, 690 Office Space, 1063
Notting Hill, 1062, 1063 O’Flaherty, Liam, 652
Not Wanted, 731 Of Mice and Men, 1047
Novak, Kim, 515–16 Oglesby, Mary Perkins, 673
Novarro, Ramon, 935 O’Hara, Catherine, 520
No Way Out, 612, 884, 1049 O’Hara, Maureen, 247, 353, 407–8, 558
Now Voyager, 999 O’Herlihy, Dan, 161
Noyes, Betty, 448 O’Keefe, Michael, 81
Nucci, Danny, 495 Okinawa, 1118
Nunn, Bill, 132 Oklahoma!, 447, 1014
Nussbaum, Max, 989 The Oklahoma Kid, 461
Nuts, 814 Oland, Warner, 936
Nuts in May, 716 Olcott, Sidney, 903, 904
Nutter, David, 1112 Old and New, 640
The Nutty Professor, 722, 1065, 1067 Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker, 986
Nuyen, France, 816 The Old Maid, 1011
Nyby, Christian, 677 The Old Man and the Sea, 816
Nyman, Michael, 387 Oldman, Gary, 801
Old Wives for New, 619
Oakie, Jack, 222 Olivier, Laurence, 684, 690, 749
Oakley, Annie, 638 Olmos, Edward James, 297, 938
Oates, Warren, 23, 250, 531 Omega Man, 1069
Obama, Barack, 62, 779, 1031 The Omen, 629
Oberon, Merle, 558 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 813
Objective Burma, 1118 On Any Given Sunday, 811
The Object of My Affection, 1063 On Borrowed Time, 1047
O’Brien, Edmond, 953 Once Upon a Honeymoon, 1059
O’Brien, George, 846 On Dangerous Ground, 731, 787
O’Brien, Margaret, 343 O’Neal, Ryan, 314, 1059
O’Brien, Pat, 16–17, 588, 962 One False Move, 636
O’Brien, Richard, 414, 415 One Fine Day, 1060
O’Brien, Tom, 37 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 767
O Brother Where Art Thou?, 605, 917 One from the Heart, 609
Ocean’s Eleven, 805 O’Neill, Eugene, 882
O’Connell, Jerry, 279 One Minute to Zero, 1119
O’Connor, Donald, 447, 527 One Romantic Night, 668
October, 29, 640 One Saliva Bubble, 733
Octopussy, 52, 53 One Special Victory, 1048
Odds Against Tomorrow, 549 One, Two, Three, 588
Odessa Steps, 29 One Week, 703
Odets, Clifford, 576 On Golden Pond, 684
O’Donnell, Cathy, 30 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 52, 53
O’Donnell, Peter, 405 Only Angels Have Wings, 677, 678, 679
O’Donnell, Rosie, 455 On the Beach, 160–61

1194
 Index

On the Town, 15, 803, 1014 Out of the Past, 954, 968–69, 1133
On the Waterfront, 17, 375–76, 581, 702, Outpost in Morocco, 1043
727, 976, 1002 Outrage, 731
On with the Show, 867 The Outsiders, 609
Open City, 1039 Over the Fence, 724
Opening Night, 599 The Owl and the Pussycat, 813
Open Range, 613 Owl Cigars, 1034
Operation Desert Storm, 493–94 The Ox-Bow Incident, 936
Operation Pacific, 1118 Oz, Frank, 469
Ophüls, Max, 792, 954
The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour, 740 The Pacific, 1121
Orbach, Jerry, 129 Pacino, Al
The Ordeal of Bill Carney, 1051 Actors Studio, 1002
Ordinary People, 376–77, 797 Angels in America, 765
The Organization, 252 biography, 769–70
Organized crime. See Gangster_films Cruising, 659
The Original Kings of Comedy, 720 Dog Day Afternoon, 727
Orion, 978 gangster films, 963–64
Ornitz, Samuel, 973, 975 The Godfather, 204, 706
Orphans of the Storm, 674, 1050 The Insider, 258
Orr, Mary, 7 Mann and, 735–36
Orwell, George, 159 Serpico, 429–30
Osborn, John J., Jr., 379 The Package, 672
Osborn, Paul, 147 Page, Geraldine, 260
Oscars. See Academy Awards Paid to Love, 679
Osment, Haley Joel, 452–53 The Painted Desert, 661
Ossana, Diana, 73 The Painted Lady, 673
Ossessioni, 982 The Painted Veil, 663
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 281 Paint Your Wagon, 603, 634
Othello, 789, 853, 854 Paisan, 982, 1039
The Other Side of the Mountain, Pakula, Alan J., 1028
1051 Palance, Jack, 436, 714
The Other Side of the Wind, 855 The Paleface, 704
The Other Sister, 1049 Pale Rider, 511, 634, 1042, 1128
Our Betters, 614 Palermo Shooting, 857
Our Daily Bread, 836 The Palm Beach Story, 819
Our Gang, 592–93 Palme d’Or, 913–14
Our Hospitality, 704 Palmer, Betsy, 186
Our Town, 759 Palminteri, Chazz, 622
Ouspenskaya, Maria, 738 Paltrow, Bruce, 841
Outbreak, 1067 Pan, Hermes, 562
The Outer Limits, 486, 824 Panic, 853
Outland, 1068, 1128 Panic in the Streets, 701
The Outlaw, 423 The Panic in Needle Park, 769
The Outlaw Josey Wales, 511, 635, 1021 Panic Room, 655
Out of Africa, 782–83 Panther, 1009–10
Out of the Fog, 1047 The Paper Chase, 379–80, 577

1195
Index

The Paperhanger’s Helper, 716 Pat and Mike, 615, 684, 1059
Paquin, Anna, 387, 590 A Patch of Blue, 1050
The Paradine Case, 691 Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, 773
The Parallax View, 565, 824 Pathé, Charles, 730
Paramount Decree of 1948, 977–78 Pathé Films, 724, 904
Paramount Studios Paths of Glory, 136, 189, 508, 707
Arzner and, 557 Paths to War, 658
Chandler and, 1079 Patrick, Dorothy, 713
DreamWorks, 809 Patrick, Robert, 487
Fairbanks and, 645 The Patriot, 666, 880
Famous Players-Lasky, 678, 830, 1083 The Patsy, 722
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 169 Patterson, Janet, 387
Fleming and, 647 Patton, 608
Grant and, 670 Paull, Lawrence G., 800
Harold and Maude, 233 Paul, R. W., 742
Hitchcock and, 692 Payback, 666
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 331 Payne, John, 353, 354
Marx Brothers, 141, 737 Pear, 726
An Officer and a Gentleman, 373 Pearce, Guy, 344–45
Psycho, 402 Pearl Harbor, 1121
Shane, 437 Pecker, 845
studio system, 1096–97 Peck, Gregory, 328–29, 497–98, 697, 706,
Sturges and, 816, 818 875, 878, 988
White Christmas, 527 Peckinpah, Sam, 149, 331, 530–32, 731,
Wilder and, 134 771–73, 948, 1127
Paraplegics. See Disabilities Peeping Tom, 753, 1085
Paris Blues, 759 Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, 26, 585
Paris, Texas, 856 Peggy Sue Got Married, 609
Paris Trout, 695 Peirce, Kimberly, 1136
Parker, Charlie, 432 The Pelican Brief, 842
Parker, Dorothy, 973 The Penalty, 1049
Parker, Lula, 77–78 Peña, Michael, 111
Parker, Robert Leroy, 76–77 Penn and Teller Get Killed, 775
Park, Ray, 471 Penn, Arthur
Parks, Gordon, 434, 878, 885 1970s era, 23, 275, 688
Parsons, Estelle, 59 biography, 773–75
Parton, Dolly, 352, 1134 Bonnie and Clyde, 54–62, 250,
Pasdar, Adrian, 574 563–64, 963
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 903, 907 Brando and, 582
Passage to India, 1044 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 530
Passion Fish, 1051 The Left Handed Gun, 298–300
Passionless Moments, 589 Little Big Man, 307–8, 1019
The Passion of the Christ, 380–82, 664, 666, Night Moves, 952
905, 907, 909 Pennebaker, D.A., 244, 916, 928
The Passion Play, 904 Pennebaker, Dorothy Julia, 581
A Passover Miracle, 986–87 Penn, Sean, 166, 681
Pasternak, Joe, 767 Penny Arcade, 587

1196
 Index

The People Versus Paul Crump, 659 United Artists, 674, 977
The People vs. John Doe, 850 women in film, 1129, 1131
Pepper, Barry, 421 Pickles, Vivian, 233
Perez, Rosie, 132 The Pickup Artist, 451
Perfect Gentlemen, 643 Picnic, 460
A Perfect World, 613 Picture Perfect, 1063
The Perils of Pauline, 1130 Picture This: The Times of Peter
Period of Adjustment, 687 Bogdanovich in Archer City,
Perkins, Anthony, 402 Texas, 578
Perkins, Elizabeth, 354 Pidgeon, Walter, 247, 712
Perrault, Charles, 91 The Pied Piper, 784
Personal Best, 825 Pierce, Jack, 182
Pesci, Joe, 213–14, 963 Pierrot le fou, 957
Peter Ibbetson, 731 Pileggi, Nicholas, 215, 798
Peter Pan, 1049 Pillow Talk, 388–89, 1060
Peters, Brock, 498 Pilma, Pilma, 608
Peters, Jean, 581 Pingatore, Gene, 245
Peters, Jon, 26 Pink Flamingos, 843, 844
Petschler, E.A., 663 Pinky, 701, 884, 1135
Pfeiffer, Michelle, 297, 682, 1060 Pinky and the Brain, 809
The Phantom, 1101 The Pinnacle, 838
The Phantom Creeps, 1068 Pinocchio, 627, 1008
The Phantom Menace, 468, 471, 726, 863 Pinter, Harold, 659
Phantom of the Opera, 1049 Piranha II: The Spawning, 486
Philadelphia, 382–84, 446, 842 The Pirate, 15
The Philadelphia Experiment, 1112 Pirates of the Caribbean, 880
The Philadelphia Story, 272, Pitt, Brad, 489, 801, 1062
385–86, 614, 615, 670, Piven, Jeremy, 449
684, 1056–58 A Place in the Sun, 389–91, 822
Phillippe, Ryan, 111, 179 Place, Mary Kay, 33, 699
Phillips, Gene, 204 Places in the Heart, 1134
Phoenix, Joaquin, 200 Planet of the Apes, 145, 391–93, 586,
Phoenix, River, 255 685, 868
Piaf, Edith, 422 Plateau, Joseph, 895
The Pianist, 781 Platinum Blonde, 268, 593
The Piano, 386–88, 590 Platoon, 24, 393–95, 708, 810, 1029
Pickens, Slim, 137 Platt, Louise, 462, 463
Pickett, Cindy, 169 Platt, Polly, 577
Pickford, Mary The Player, 556, 919
AMPAS, 875 Playhouse 90, 656, 782
biography, 775–77 Playing for Time, 747
Chaplin and, 601 Play It Again, Sam, 86, 706, 1061
ethnicity, 936 Play Misty for Me, 168, 635
Fairbanks and, 645–46, 1002 Pleasance, Donald, 231
Gish and, 667 Pleasantville, 14, 1008, 1009
silent era, 1084 The Plow That Broke the Plains, 927–28
studio system, 1097 Plummer, Christopher, 259, 458–59

1197
Index

Plumpe, Friedrich Wilhelm. V for Vendetta, 1031

See Murnau, F. W. Wag the Dog, 1031
Pocahontas, 666, 1044 Wilson, 1029
Poe, James, 87 Politics, 1087
Poetic Justice, 805 Politics and Cinema (Sarris), 791
Point Break, 574 Pollack, Sydney, 521–23, 781–84
Poiret, Jean, 764 Pollard, Michael, 59
Poitier, Sidney, 228, 250, 433, 777–79, 782, Polonsky, Abraham, 953
884, 885 Poltergeist, 809
Polanski, Roman, 23, 89–91, 153, 418–19, Polyester, 844
779–81, 824–25, 952, 1079 Pommer, Erich, 966
Polglase, Van Nest, 562 Ponicsan, Darryl, 559
Political films. See also Social Pork Chop Hill, 1119
movements; War films Porky’s, 413, 923
Air Force One, 1031 Porter, Cole, 561
All the King’s Men, 10–12, 1029 Porter, Edwin, 226–27, 911, 917, 950, 1122
All the President’s Men, 1028, 1030 Porter, Katherine Anne, 772
The American President, 1031 Portman, Natalie, 470
The Birth of a Nation, 1027–28 Portnoy’s Complaint, 989
The Brave One, 1030 Portrait of a Lady, 590
Bulworth, 75–76, 1031 Posey, Parker, 520
Casablanca, 1029 Postcards from the Edge, 764
Citizen Kane, 1029 The Postman, 613
The Conversation, 104–6 The Postman Always Rings Twice, 395–97,
Cool Hand Luke, 106–8 1133
Deep Impact, 1031 Potok, Chaim, 990
Dr. Strangelove, 1030 Potter, Phyllis Livingston, 562
Gabriel over the White House, 1029 Potter, Sally, 591
Gattaca, 193–94 Powell, Dick, 569, 818, 955, 1052
Good Night and Good Luck, 1030 Powell, Jane, 562
The Grapes of Wrath, 1029 Powell, Julie, 643
Head of State, 1031 Powell, Michael, 753, 795, 1085
JFK, 280–82 Powell, William, 366–67
The Man, 1031 Power, 841
The Manchurian Candidate, 324–26, The Power and the Glory, 818, 819
1030 Power, Tyrone, 713, 860
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky Powwow Highway, 1020, 1044
and the Media, 329–31 A Prairie Home Companion, 556
Modern Times, 355–57, 1028 Pran, Dith, 288–90
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 360–62, Praxinoscopes, 895
1027, 1032 Prayers for Bobby, 1091
Nixon, 369–70 The Preacher’s Wife, 842
overview, 1027–32 Precious, 887
Primary Colors, 1030 Prelude to a Kiss, 455
science and, 1065–71 Prelude to War, 594, 1117
Stagecoach, 1029 Preminger, Otto, 508, 713, 784–86, 954,
Traffic, 505–6 971, 987

1198
 Index

Prentiss, Paula, 1059 Puri, Amrish, 256

Preston, Kellie, 279 The Purple Heart, 937
Preston, Robert, 362 Purple Rose of Cairo, 553
Pretty in Pink, 66–68, 169, 170, 451 Putney Swope, 884
Pretty Woman, 397–99, 1062 Putting on the Ritz, 920
Previn, Soon-Yi, 552, 1061 Putting Pants on Philip, 716
Price, Richard, 719 Puzo, Mario, 203, 480, 609, 769
Price, Vincent, 585, 611 Pyle, Ernie, 746
Pride of the Marines, 1045, 1051
The Pride of the Yankees, 399–400 Quaid, Dennis, 68
The Primal Screen (Sarris), 791 Quaid, Randy, 559
Primary, 915 Quality Street, 683
Primary Colors, 739, 764–65, 1030 Quan, Jonathan Ke, 255
Prince, 26, 163 Quantum of Solace, 53
The Prince and the Pauper, 650 Queen Christina, 663, 1090
The Prince and the Showgirl, 749 Queen Elizabeth, 1084
Prince of Darkness, 596 Queen Kelly, 839, 1049
The Prince of Tides, 814 Queen: The Story of an American
Printer’s Measure, 602 Family, 572
Private Benjamin, 1134 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, 74
Private Hell 36, 731 Queer theories, 944
The Private Life of Don Juan, 646 The Quiet American, 783
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, 650 The Quiet Man, 407–8, 652, 847
Prizzi’s Honor, 697, 768 Quigley, Martin, 970
The Prodigal, 906 Quinn, Anthony, 581, 1020
The Producers, 400–402, 583, 1015 Quinn, Patricia, 415
Production Code Administration, 15–17, Quintet, 335, 556
969–71, 1003, 1038–39, 1131 Quis, Chez, 171
Product placements, 1032–33 Quo Vadis, 889, 890, 891, 892, 893, 906
Product tie-ins, 1033–35
Project Moonhouse, 1087 Rabe, David, 556
Project Runway, 929 Rachel, Rachel, 550, 760
Promise Her Anything, 564, 1060 Radcliffe, Daniel, 235
Proposition 187, 938 Radner, Gilda, 763
The Proud Valley, 882 Rafelson, Bob, 395
Proulx, Annie, 73 Raft, George, 424
Prowse, David, 469 Raging Bull, 3, 213, 621–22, 793,
The Prussian Cur, 925–26, 1115 795, 797, 937, 1094
Pryor, Richard, 885 Ragtime, 588
Psycho, 231, 325, 402–3, 446, 693, 1007, Raiders of the Lost Ark, 145,
1084–85 254–57, 1070
The Public Enemy, 16, 133, 424, 587, The Railroader, 705
867, 961 Raimi, Sam, 604
Pullman, Bill, 253, 448, 454 The Rainmaker, 609
Pulp fiction, 954–55 Rain Man, 1048
Pulp Fiction, 404–5, 821, 914, 964 The Rain People, 608
Punisher, 1101 Rains, Claude, 84–85, 361, 1032

1199
Index

Raising Arizona, 605 Redford, Robert

A Raisin in the Sun, 777, 778 All the President’s Men, 1028, 1030
Rally ’round the Flag Boys, 299, 759, 1010 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 77
Rambo series, 394, 630, 880, 1112–13 Hill and, 687–88
Rambova, Natacha, 830 Newman and, 760
Ramis, Harold, 81 Ordinary People, 376–77, 797
Rancho Notorious, 713 Pollack and, 782–83
Randall, Will, 764 romantic comedies, 1060
Random Hearts, 783 Sundance Film Festival, 1098
Ranft, Joe, 503 The Way We Were, 521–22, 813
Rankin, John, 975 Redgrave, Michael, 713
Ransohoff, Martin, 772 Red Kimono, 557
Ransom, 666 Red Line 7000, 678
Ratatouille, 504 Red Planet Mars, 1040
Rathbone, Basil, 731 The Red Pony, 1006
The Raven, 767, 1067 Red River, 390, 576, 677, 680, 848
Rawhide, 633, 1128 Reds, 550, 563, 565, 706, 739
Ray, Bobby, 716 Red Shoe Diaries, 580
Raymond, Gene, 561 The Red Shoes, 15, 795
Ray, Nicholas, 300, 409–11, 787–88, 856, Reed, Donna, 271, 389
900, 907, 947, 956 Reed, Peyton, 1063
The Reader, 783 Reefer Madness, 921
Reagan era. See also 1980s era Reeve, Christopher, 480–81
African Americans and, 886 Reeves, George, 480
dystopic films, 169–71 Reeves, Keanu, 338–39, 574, 1040
Lethal Weapon, 301–2 Refugee Act (1980), 938
macho movies, 127–28 Regarding Henry, 764
An Officer and a Gentleman, 373–75 Regrouping, 579
Superman, 480–81 Reid, Harry, 505
Top Gun, 499–501 Reid, Wallace, 1002
Wall Street, 811 Reindeer Games, 658
women in film, 1134–35 Reiner, Rob, 171–73, 454, 519,
Reagan, Ronald, 474, 483, 493, 525–27, 1063
589, 655, 973, 975, 1076, Reinhardt, Max, 753, 784
1113, 1119 Reinhold, Judge, 166
Reality Bites, 923 Religion in film. See also Ancient
Real Women Have Curves, 923 world in film; biblical epic; Judaism
The Real World, 929 and film
Rear Window, 691, 1006, 1007 censorship and, 1037–40
Rea, Stephen, 112 Going My Way, 207–9
Rebecca, 690 King of Kings, 619
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 776 nationalism and, 1040–45
Rebel Without a Cause, 199, 409–11, 524, The Passion of the Christ, 380–82,
694, 787–88, 907, 921 664, 666
Reckless, 647 Planet of the Apes, 391–93
The Red Badge of Courage, 697 Samson and Delilah, 619
Red Dust, 647 The Ten Commandments, 619, 889

1200
 Index

Relyea, Robert, 815 Riefenstahl, Leni, 890

Remarque, Erich Maria, 8–9 The Rifleman, 772
Remember the Night, 818 The Right Stuff, 1069
Remember the Time, 805 The Right to Live, 1047
Remember the Titans, 842, 1094 Ringwald, Molly, 67, 450–51
Remick, Lee, 117 Rio Bravo, 241, 411–13, 677, 679, 680,
Remodeling Her Husband, 668 848, 900
Renner, Jeremy, 575 Rio Grande, 307, 653, 1010, 1124–25
Renoir, Jean, 568, 713, 792, 826, 897, 956 Rio Lobo, 680, 848
Republic Pictures, 847, 1107 Riot in Cell Block 11, 772
Requiem for a Heavyweight, 1094 Riskin, Robert, 360, 593
Reservoir Dogs, 821, 964 Risky Business, 413–14
Resnais, Alain, 631, 834, 947, 958 Ritchie, Michael, 765
Retreat, Hell!, 1119 Ritt, Martin, 187–88, 1127
The Return of Frank James, 712 Ritual in Transfigured Time, 625
Return of the Jedi, 468, 470, 473, 699, The River, 665
725, 1073 River of No Return, 748, 785
The Return of the King, 309 Rivero, Jorge, 1020
The Return of the Secaucus 7, 33 Rivette, Jacques, 791, 947, 957, 958
Reubens, Paul, 585 RKO Studios
Rey, Fernando, 185 Astaire and, 561–62
Reynaud, Charles-Émile, 895 Day of the Fight, 707
Reynolds, Burt, 124, 125, 879 Hitchcock and, 690
Reynolds, Debbie, 100, 447, 448 Hughes and, 423
Reynolds, William, 459 Ray and, 787
Rhames, Ving, 404 studio system, 1097
Rhapsody, 822 Sturges and, 815
Rhodes, Cynthia, 128 television and, 1107
Rhys-Davies, John, 256 Welles and, 92–94, 317–18, 854
Ribisi, Giovanni, 312 Roach, Hal, 592, 716, 724
Rice, Thomas D. “Daddy,” 911 The Road to Glory, 678
Rice, Tim, 305 Road to Morocco, 1050
The Richard Boone Show, 824 Road to Perdition, 760, 919
Richard III, 1049 The Roaring Twenties, 588, 962
Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, 885 Robbery Homicide Division, 735
Richards, Dick, 952 Robbins, Jerome, 174, 524–25
Richardson, Miranda, 113 Robbins, Tim, 438, 556, 612
Richardson, Tony, 631 The Robe, 889, 891, 893, 903, 906
Rich, B. Ruby, 948 Roberts, Julia, 151–52, 397–98, 842,
Richmond, Bill, 583 1062, 1063
Rickman, Alan, 126, 237 Roberts, Tony, 429, 1061
Riddles of the Sphinx, 752, 996 Robeson, Paul, 788–91, 882, 973
Ride Him Cowboy, 847 Robin and the Seven Hoods, 805
Riders of Destiny, 847 Robin Hood, 646, 802, 877, 1044
Ride the High Country, 532, 772, 1127 Robin Hood: Men in Tights, 584
Ridgely, John, 39 Robinson, Andy, 130
Ridley Scott Associates, 799 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” 741, 883

1201
Index

Robinson, Edward G., 135, 713, 731, Blind Date, 1059

961, 962 The Bounty Hunter, 1063
Robot Chicken, 473, 895 The Break-Up, 1063
Rob Roy, 880 Bringing Up Baby, 1054–56
Rockabye, 614 To Catch a Thief, 1060
Rock All Night, 978 Charade, 1060
Rock, Chris, 571, 1031 Come September, 1060
Rockshow, 795 Desk Set, 1060
Rockwell, Sam, 802 A Fish Called Wanda, 1059
Rocky, 3, 297, 937, 1094 Flying Down to Rio, 1052
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 414–16, Forget Paris, 1060
1015, 1065 As Good As It Gets, 1062
Rocky III, 1032 Grosse Point Blank, 1061
Rodat, Robert, 421 Heaven Can Wait, 1060
Roddenberry, Gene, 464 High Fidelity, 1061
Rodgers, Gaby, 952 His Girl Friday, 1059
Rodgers, Richard, 458–59 Holiday, 1055
Rodrı́guez, Javier, 505 Houseboat, 1060
Rodriguez, Robert, 1022, 1099 Indiscreet, 1060
Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, 808 It Happened One Night, 267–70,
Roeper, Richard, 636–37 1052, 1054
Roe v. Wade (1973), 156, 418 I Was a Male War Bride, 1059
Roger & Me, 63, 416–17, 750, 929 Jerry Maguire, 279–80
Rogers, Buddy, 776 Joe Versus the Volcano, 1061
Rogers, Ginger, 561–62, 1014, Just Go with It, 1063
1052, 1059 The Lady Eve, 1059
Rogers, Mimi, 800 Lady in a Jam, 1059
Rogers, Roy, 1008, 1010, 1124 Love Affair, 1060
Rogers, Will, 652 Love Happens, 1063
Rohmer, Erich, 791, 826, 947, 957 Love in the Afternoon, 1060
Roizman, Owen, 185 Lover Come Back, 1060
Rollins, Jack, 551 Management, 1063
Roman Candles, 843 Manhattan, 326–28, 1061
Romance of a Jewess, 986 Man’s Favorite Sport?, 1059
Romancing the Stone, 258 Marley & Me, 1063
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, 781 Monkey Business, 1059
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, 564 My Favorite Wife, 1054, 1059
Romantic comedies. See also Comedy Notting Hill, 1063
movies The Object of My Affection, 1063
Adam’s Rib, 1059 Office Space, 1063
Along Came Polly, 1063 Once Upon a Honeymoon, 1059
America’s Sweethearts, 1060, 1062 One Fine Day, 1060
An Affair to Remember, 1060 overview, 1052–63
Annie Hall, 18–19, 1061 Pat and Mike, 1059
Arsenic and Old Lace, 1059 The Philadelphia Story, 385–86,
The Awful Truth, 1054 1056–58
Barefoot in the Park, 1060 Picture Perfect, 1063

1202
 Index

Pillow Talk, 388–89, 1060 Rosenberg, Stuart, 106–7

Play It Again, Sam, 1061 Rosen, Marjorie, 942
Pretty Woman, 397–99 Rosenthal, Joe, 177, 303
Promise Her Anything, 1060 Rose, Reginald, 506, 507
Rumor Has It, 1063 The Rose Tattoo, 937
Sabrina, 1060 Rosewood, 805
Say Anything, 1060 Rosie the Riveter, 1087
Send Me No Flowers, 1060 Ross, Diana, 882, 885
Serendipity, 1061 Rossellini, Isabella, 50, 568
Shampoo, 1060 Rossellini, Roberto, 567, 792, 826,
She’s the One, 1063 982, 1039
The Shop Around the Corner, 1061 Rossen, Robert, 10–11, 549,
Singles, 448–49 798, 1029
Sixteen Candles, 450–52 Ross, Herbert, 1061
Sleeper, 1061 Roth, Eric, 3
Sleepless in Seattle, 454–56, 1061 Roth, Joe, 1060
Some Like It Hot, 1053, 1059 Roth, Philip, 989
Strange Bedfellows, 1060 Rotter, Steven, 550
The Switch, 1063 Rotunno, Giuseppe, 764
That Touch of Mink, 1060 Rouch, Jean, 916
The Thin Man, 1052 Rough Rider, 846
Twentieth Century, 1052 Roulien, Raul, 561
Up Close and Personal, 1060 Roundtree, Richard, 434–35, 885
What’s Up, Doc?, 1059 Rowlands, Gena, 598, 599
What Women Want, 1062 Rowling, J. K., 235–40
When Harry Met Sally, 525–27, 1060 Roxburgh, Richard, 357
Without Love, 1059 Royal Wedding, 562
Woman of the Year, 538–39 Rubinek, Saul, 511
You’ve Got Mail, 1061 Ruby Gentry, 837
Romanus, Robert, 166 Ruby, Harry, 141
Romeo and Juliet, 614, 1015 Ruby, Jack, 281
Rome, Open City, 982 Ruck, Alan, 169
Romero, George A., 153 Rudd, Paul, 103
Romola, 668 Rudy, 1095
Romona, 1132 Ruffalo, Mark, 591
Ronin, 658 Ruggiero, Allelon, 119
Ronnie Rocket, 733 Ruint, 696
The Rookie, 634, 1094 Rumble Fish, 609
Rooney, Mickey, 570, 1049 Rumor Has It, 1063
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 521 Runaway Bride, 1062
Roosevelt, Franklin, 179, 522, 537, The Runaway Jury, 508
927–28, 1029 Runyon, Damon, 399
Roots, 885–86 Rush Hour series, 879
The Roots of Heaven, 650 Rushmore, 923
Rope, 691, 919 Ruskin, Robert, 359
Rose Marie, 1007 Russell, David O., 493
Rosemary’s Baby, 153, 418–19, 597, 780 Russell, Harold, 30–31, 865

1203
Index

Russell, Jane, 196, 1133 Sarandon, Susan, 415, 489–91, 612, 801
Russell, John, 182, 411 Sarris, Andrew, 791–93, 898–99, 948
Russell, Ken, 603 Sascha Films, 616
Russell, Kurt, 596 The Satan Bug, 816
Russell, Rosalind, 538, 558, 677, 679, 897, Saturday Night at the Movies, 1108
900, 1059, 1131 Saturday Night Fever, 937
Russian Ark, 919 Savage, John, 122, 133
Russo, Gianni, 203 Saving Private Ryan, 145, 276, 421–23, 809,
Ruth, Babe, 399 1119–20
Ryan, Meg, 454–55, 525–26, 591, 643, Sawyer, William A., 1093
1060, 1061, 1062 Say Anything, 449, 1060
Ryan, Robert, 530, 532, 549, 713, 1126 Sayeed, Malik, 917
Ryerson, Florence, 536 Sayles, John, 611, 886
Ryskind, Morrie, 737 Scaramouche, 878
The Scarecrow, 703
Sabella, Ernie, 305 Scarface, 423–25, 677, 680, 769–70, 810,
Saboteur, 690 936, 961, 964, 1034
Sabrina, 783, 860, 1060 Scarlet Empress, 1047
Sackter, Bill, 1049 The Scarlet Ladder, 867
The Sacred Flame, 1047 The Scarlet Letter, 668
Safari, 877 Scarlet Street, 713
Safety Last, 724 Scary Movie, 1085
Sahara, 422 Scent of a Woman, 508, 769, 770, 1046
Saint, Eva Marie, 375–76, 516, 581, 759 Schaefer, George, 93
Saint Jack, 577 Schaefer, Jack, 435
Sakata, Harold, 210 Schaffner, Franklin, 360, 392
Salesman, 244, 915, 916 Schanberg, Sydney, 288–90
Salinger, J. D., 215 Schary, Dore, 988
Salkind, Alexander, 480 Scheider, Roy, 184–85, 275–76
Salkind, Ilya, 480 Schell, Maximilian, 282, 283, 990
Salome, 906 Schenck, Joseph, 704, 784, 868, 1083
Salten, Felix, 24 Schickel, Richard, 948
Salt of the Earth, 937, 976 Schindler’s List, 145, 276, 425–27, 809, 863,
Saltzman, Harry, 51, 52, 53, 209 917, 1108
Salvador, 810 Schlesinger, Arthur M., 369
Samson and Delilah, 619, 905, 906, 989 Schlesinger, John, 349–50
Sanchez, Eduardo, 49 Schlöndorff, Volker, 856
Sanchez, Jaime, 531 Schneerson, Menachem M., 990
Sanders, George, 714 Schoeffling, Michael, 450
Sandler, Adam, 360 School Daze, 719, 886, 923
Sandrich, Mark, 562 Schoonmaker, Thelma, 793–95
The Sands of Iwo Jima, 1118 Schrader, Paul, 483
San Francisco, 662 Schreck, Max, 754
Sanger, Margaret, 850 Schulman, Tom, 119
San Giacomo, Laura, 398, 431 Schumacher, Joel, 27, 162–63
Sarafian, Richard C., 879 Schwartz, Arthur, 561
Sara, Mia, 169 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 485–89, 880

1204
 Index

Schwarzkopf, Norman, 493 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, 1072

Science fiction films 2001: A Space Odyssey, 508–10, 1073
Alien, 5–7 War Games, 1074
Altered States, 1073 War of the Worlds, 1072
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, 1073 When Worlds Collide, 1073, 1075
Babylon 5, 1072 Science in films, 1065–71
Blade Runner, 46–47, 1074 Sciorra, Annabella, 571
The Blob, 1073 Scorsese, Martin
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1073 1970s era, 23, 275, 688
Contact, 1072, 1074 Ali, 3
The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1073 auteur theory, 900
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, 1073 The Aviator, 423
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 145–47, biblical epics, 903, 909
1073 biography, 796–99
Fahrenheit 451, 159–60, 1074 Cassavetes and, 599
Fantastic Voyage, 1073 Clockers, 719
Fire Maidens from Outer Space, 1073 Corman and, 611
Gattaca, 193–94, 1074 De Niro and, 621–22
The Handmaid’s Tale, 1074 Eastman Kodak and, 920
I Married a Monster from Outer Ebert and, 636
Space, 1075 ethnic/immigrant culture, 937
Independence Day, 252–54, 1075 gangster films, 963
Invaders from Mars, 1073 Goodfellas, 213–15, 226
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 263–65, Kundun, 1044
1073, 1075 Lewis and, 723
The Invisible Boy, 1073 Palme d’Or, 914
Iron Man, 265–67 Ray and, 787
Judgment Day, 1072 Schoonmaker and, 793–95
Jurassic Park, 284–86 The Searchers, 428
Them!, 1073 Taxi Driver, 483–85, 654
The Matrix, 1072, 1074 women in film, 1134
The Matrix series, 338–40 Scott, A. O., 153
Metropolis, 346–48, 1074 Scott, Campbell, 448
1984, 1074 Scott Free Productions, 802–3
overview, 1071–75 Scott, George C., 138, 550, 763
Planet of the Apes, 391–93 Scott, Randolph, 712, 1127
The Sixth Sense, 452–54 Scott, Ridley, 5–7, 46–47, 199–201, 226,
Soylent Green, 1074 486, 489–91, 799–803
Starman, 1073–74 Scott, Robert Adrian, 973, 975
Star Trek series, 464–68 Scott, Tony, 799, 821
Star Wars series, 468–74, 1074 Scott, Waldo, 429
Superman series, 480–81 Scourby, Alexander, 36
The Terminator series, 485–89, 1074 Scream, 233, 1085, 1136
This Island Earth, 1074 Screen Actors Guild, 685, 1076–77
The Time Machine, 1074 Screenplays/screenwriters, 1077–80
A Trip to the Moon, 1072 Scrooged, 630
Tron, 1073 Seagal, Steven, 880

1205
Index

The Sea Hawk, 650 Sex, Lies and Videotape, 151, 431–32,
The Search, 390 579, 914
The Searchers, 300, 341, 427–29, 530, 653, The Shadow, 1101
772, 847, 1019, 1126 Shadowed, 815
The Sea Wolf, 731 Shadow of a Doubt, 690
Seberg, Jean, 70, 956 Shadows, 432–33, 598
The Second Hundred Years, 716 Shaft, 433–34, 805–6, 878, 885,
Seconds, 657 1008, 1009
Secret beyond the Door, 713 Shakur, Tupac, 806
Secrets, 777 Shampoo, 234, 559, 565, 824, 1060
Sedgwick, Kyra, 448 Shandling, Gary, 765
See It Now, 928 Shane, 240, 435–37, 1042, 1125–26
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, 885, 1050 Shanghai Noon, 1011
Segal, Erich, 313–14 Shanley, John Patrick, 1061
Segal, George, 528 Sharaff, Irene, 530
Seidelman, Susan, 886 Sharett, Christopher, 63
Seitz, John, 136 Shark Tale, 622
Seldes, Gilbert, 947 Shatner, William, 465, 610
Selena, 938 Shavelson, Melville, 1060
Sellers, Peter, 137–38, 560, 1030 Shaw, Clay, 280–82
Selznick, David O., 211, 492, 567, 607, Shawn, Dick, 401
689–90, 740–41, 920, 987 Shawn, Wallace, 103
Semon, Larry, 536 Shaw, Robert, 275–76
Send Me No Flowers, 388, 1060 Shaw, Robert Gould, 201–2
Sennett, Mack, 592, 600, 1083 The Shawshank Redemption, 438–39
Sense and Sensibility, 717, 938 Shaw, Tom, 501
September, 553 Shearer, Norma, 1131
Serendipity, 1061 Sheba Baby, 671
Sergeants Three, 816 She Done Him Wrong, 670
Sergeant York, 677, 1116 Sheedy, Ally, 67, 451
Serial Mom, 844 Sheen, Charlie, 24, 394
Serling, Rod, 391 Sheen, Martin, 23–24
The Serpent and the Rainbow, 1043 She Hate Me, 720
Serpico, 429–30, 550, 727, 769 The Sheik, 830, 935
Serrone, Chris, 214 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 182, 1065
These Three, 865 Shepard, Matthew, 74
Seven Arts Studio, 608 Shepard, Sam, 556
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, 1013, Shepherd, Cybill, 295–96, 483, 577, 739
1014–15 Sheridan, Jim, 964
Seven Chances, 704 Sherlock, Jr., 704
Seven Days in May, 656–57 Sherwood, Robert, 947
Seven Samurai, 318, 816 She’s Gotta Have It, 719, 886
1776, 1014 She’s the One, 1063
77 Sunset Strip, 731 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 307, 576, 653,
The Seven Year Itch, 748, 860 847, 1124–25
Seven Years in Tibet, 1044 Shigeta, James, 126
Sex and the City, 1136 Shine a Light, 799

1206
 Index

The Shining, 439–41, 707, 708, 767, 1007 The General, 194–96
Shipman, Nell, 1131 The Great Dictator, 222–23
Shire, Talia, 203 Intolerance, 889
Shoah, 426 The Land beyond the Sunset, 293–94
The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, 748 For the Love of Mike, 606
Shoes, 850 Meshes of the Afternoon, 623–26
Shoeshine, 982 Metropolis, 346–48
The Shootist, 848 overview, 1081–84
Shoot the Piano Player, 56, 827 screenplays/screenwriters in, 1077
Shoot to Kill, 778 The Ten Commandments, 889
The Shop Around the Corner, 643, Silk Stockings, 562
1056, 1061 Silkwood, 643, 763, 1134
Shore, Dorothy, 293 Sillato, Giuseppe, 205
Short Cuts, 556 Silly Symphonies, 627, 917, 920
Shotgun Slade, 782 Silverado, 612, 700
Shoulder’s Arms, 601 The Silver Chalice, 759, 889, 891, 906
Show Boat, 789–90, 883, 1013 Silverheels, Jay, 1020
Showdown (Flynn), 650 Silverman, Kaja, 943
Showgirls, 1080 Silverstone, Alicia, 103, 681
Show People, 835 Silver Streak, 885
Showtime, 1108 Simmons, William J., 45
Shrek series, 441–44, 896 Simon, Carly, 764
Shreve, Anita, 575 Simon, Danny, 551
Shub, Esther, 640 Simon, Neil, 560, 739, 1060
Shue, Elizabeth, 287 Simon, Paul, 217, 762
Shurlock, Geoffrey, 971 Simon the Cyrenian, 789
Shuster, Joe, 480 Sinatra, Frank, 324–26, 451, 657, 759, 785,
Shyamalan, M. Night, 452, 453, 666 803–5, 816, 1014
Shyer, Charles, 1062 Since You Went Away, 607, 741, 1132
Sicko, 417, 751, 929 Sin City, 1022–23
Sidibe, Gabourey, 887 Sinclair, Madge, 306
Sidney, Sylvia, 558, 712 Sinclair, Upton, 1028
Siegel, Don, 130–31, 263–64, 512, 772, Singapore Sue, 670
848, 963, 1128 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 813, 990
Siegel, Jerry, 480 Singer, Joey Hope, 162
Sign of the Cross, 889, 890, 891 The Singing Fool, 1013
The Sign of the Cross, 619, 905 Singin’ in the Rain, 446–48, 478, 1014
Sign of the Pagan, 892 Singles, 448–49
Signs, 666 The Single Standard, 663
The Silence of the Lambs, 384, 444–46, Singleton, John, 65–66, 805–7, 886, 964
655, 801 Sinners’ Holiday, 587
Silent films The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, 819
Battleship Potemkin, 27–29 Sinofsky, Bruce, 244
The Birth of a Nation, 41–46 Siodmak, Robert, 953, 954
City Lights, 97–99 Sirk, Douglas, 752, 884, 898
ethnic/immigrant culture in, 935–36 Siskel & Ebert, 636–37
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 829 Siskel, Gene, 636–37, 948

1207
Index

Sisters, 1049 Smith, Kurtwood, 119

Sisto, Jeremy, 103 Smith, Lory, 1098
Sitney, P. Adams, 624 Smith, Robyn, 562
Situation Normal, 746 Smith, Roger B., 417, 750
Six Degrees of Separation, 4 Smith, Roger Guenveur, 720
Sixteen Candles, 66–68, 169, 450–52, 923 Smith, Will, 3–5, 254, 887
The Sixth Sense, 452–54 Smoke, 938
Sizemore, Tom, 421–22 Smoke Signals, 1020, 1021
Skaaren, Warren, 26 Smokey and the Bandit, 879
Skal, David J., 194, 418 Snipes, Wesley, 571, 719, 887
Skerritt, Tom, 335, 448, 501 Snow, C. P., 1065
The Skin of Our Teeth, 701 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 91–92,
Sklar, Zachary, 280 456–58, 627, 895, 1009
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, 1067 Social movements, 1086–91. See also
Skye, Ione, 1061 Political films
Skywalker Sound, 725–26 Social Sex Attitudes in Adolescence, 922
Slap Shot, 550, 688, 760, 1094 Soderbergh, Steven, 151, 431, 505–6, 579,
Slasher films. See also Horror films 1099
Friday the 13th, 186–87, 1085 Soft Cinema, 1023
Halloween, 231–33, 1085 Solax Company, 1130
overview, 1084–85 Soldier Blue, 1019
Peeping Tom, 1085 Soldier of Fortune, 662
Psycho, 402–3, 1084–85 A Soldier’s Play, 841
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1085 Solomon and Sheba, 837, 889, 906
Slattery, John, 179 Somebody Up There Likes Me, 759
Slaughterhouse Five, 550, 688 Some Like It Hot, 749, 859, 860–61, 1013,
Sledge, Percy, 113 1014, 1049, 1053, 1059
Sleeper, 553, 706, 1061 Someone to Watch over Me, 800
Sleepless in Seattle, 454–56, Something’s Gotta Give, 707, 768, 1062
643, 1061 Something’s Got To Give, 749
Sleepy Hollow, 586 Sometimes a Great Notion, 760
The Slender Thread, 782 Sondheim, Stephen, 524, 764
Sloane, Everett, 94 Song of the South, 627
The Slugger’s Wife, 560 Son of the Sheik, 830
Slumdog Millionaire, 1011 The Sons of Katie Elder, 848
Smalley, Phillip, 850 Sontag, Susan, 948
Small, Neva, 174 Sophie’s Choice, 1134
Small Time Crooks, 739 The Sopranos, 578
Smallville, 481 Sorcerer, 659
Smith, Albert, 1114 Sorkin, Aaron, 171, 766
Smith, C. Aubrey, 1076 Sorry, Wrong Number, 388, 953
Smith, Charles Henry, 195 Sorvino, Paul, 214
Smith, Charles Martin, 12 So This Is Love?, 268
Smith, Ebbe Roe, 163 Sounder, 885
Smith, Gavin, 108, 110 Sound in film, 1091–93. See also
Smith, Gladys Louise. See Pickford, Mary Music in films
Smith, Jack, 843 The Sound of Music, 400, 458–59, 868, 1015

1208
 Index

Sousley, Franklin, 178–79 The Bad News Bears, 1094

Southern, Terry, 149, 695 Bull Durham, 612, 1094
South Park, 895 Caddyshack, 1094
Soylent Green, 1068, 1074, 1090 Field of Dreams, 612
Spaceballs, 473, 584 Fight Club, 1094
Spacek, Holly, 23 Hoosiers, 1094
Spacek, Sissy, 706 The Hurricane, 1094
Spacey, Kevin, 291 The Hustler, 1094
Spader, James, 109, 431 Invincible, 1095
Spartacus, 707–8, 888, 890, 891, Jerry Maguire, 1094
892, 893, 1030 The Karate Kid, 287–88
Speaking Parts, 431 Love and Basketball, 1094
Special effects, 742–43, 800. See also Million Dollar Baby, 351–52
Technology in filmmaking overview, 1094–96
A Special Kind of Love, 1049 The Pride of the Yankees, 399–400
The Specials, 1104 Raging Bull, 1094
Speck, Will, 1063 Remember the Titans, 1094
Spector, Phil, 149 Requiem for a Heavyweight, 1094
Speed, 695 Rocky, 1094
Speedy, 724 The Rookie, 1094
Spellbound, 226, 567, 690 Rudy, 1095
Sphere, 1067 Slap Shot, 1094
Spiderman, 265, 1100–1104 The Wrestler, 1094
Spielberg, Steven Springsteen, Bruce, 382, 578
Band of Brothers, 1121 Spy Kids trilogy, 978
biography, 807–10 The Spy Who Loved Me, 52–54
E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, 145–47 The Squaw Man, 619
Indiana Jones, 254–58, 1043 Stagecoach, 341, 461–64, 653, 847, 849,
Jaws, 6, 275–77 1018, 1029, 1124
Jurassic Park, 284–86, 487 Stage Door, 683
Kasdan and, 699 Stahl, John, 955
Lewis and, 722 Stahl, Nick, 488
Lucas and, 726, 880 Stairway to Heaven, 270
Saving Private Ryan, 421–23, 1119–20 Stalag 17, 224, 422, 785, 860, 1118
Schindler’s List, 425–27, 917 Stallings, Laurence, 37–38
The Searchers, 428 Stallone, Sylvester, 880, 1112
Spillane, Mickey, 954 Stand and Deliver, 297
The Spirit, 1101 Stand By Me, 1009
Spite Marriage, 704 Stander, Lionel, 973
Spitfire, 683 Stand Up and Fight, 461
Splendor in the Grass, 460–61, 563 Stanford, Leland, 756
Splet, Alan, 732 Stanislavsky, Constantine, 701, 1001
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, 473 Stanley, George, 873
The Spook Who Sat by the Door, 884 Stanley, Richard, 658
Sports films Stanton, Andrew, 176, 503
Ali, 3–5, 1094 Stanwyck, Barbara, 134–35, 396, 713, 815,
Angels in the Outfield, 1094 859, 953, 1059, 1131, 1133

1209
Index

Stapleton, Maureen, 260 A Place in the Sun, 389–90

Starcrash, 470 Shane, 435–37, 1125
Stardust Memories, 19, 261, 327, 551 Sturges and, 815–16
Stargate, 252, 1070 Stevenson, Robert, 334
A Star Is Born, 577, 614, 615, 813, 1014 Stewart, Donald Ogden, 385
Starkweather, Charles, 23 Stewart, Douglas Day, 373
Starman, 147, 596, 1073–74 Stewart, James
Starsky and Hutch, 735 Broken Arrow, 1019
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 464, 470 Hitchcock and, 691–92
Star Trek series, 464–68, 1073 It’s a Wonderful Life, 270–72, 389
Star Trek Voyager, 1072 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
The Star Wars Holiday Special, 473 331–32
Star Wars series Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 360–61,
action-adventure films, 880 1027
disabilities in, 1049 The Philadelphia Story, 385–86
Lucas and, 725–26 Rear Window, 1006
music in, 863, 1007 romantic comedies, 1056–58
overview, 468–74 The Stratton Story, 400
product tie-ins, 1034 studio system, 1076
revenues, 145 Vertigo, 515–16
science fiction films, 1074 western films, 1126–27
Star Trek and, 465 Winchester ’ 73, 532–33
The State of Things, 856 Stewart, Michael, 132
Statham, Jason, 881 Stiers, David Ogden, 636
Steadicam, 918–19 Stiller, Ben, 923
Steamboat Bill, Jr., 703 Stiller, Mauritz, 663
Steamboat Round the Bend, 652 The Sting, 687, 760
The Steel Helmet, 937 Stir Crazy, 778, 885
Steel Magnolias, 1135 St. Jacques, Raymond, 434
Stefano, Joseph, 402 The St. James Film Director’s Encyclopedia
Steiger, Rod, 250, 581, 990 (Sarris), 791
Steig, William, 442 Stoker, Bram, 754
Steinbeck, John, 147, 217–19, 702, Stolen Kisses, 181
1029 Stoler, Shirley, 123
Steiner, Max, 1006 Stoltz, Eric, 449
Stein, Joseph, 174 Stone, Andrew L., 883
Stella Dallas, 836 Stone, Oliver
Stella Maris, 776 Any Given Sunday, 770
St. Elsewhere, 841–42 biography, 810–12
Steps in Time (Astaire), 561 JFK, 280–82
Stern, Philip Van Doren, 270 Malick and, 24
Stevens, Cat, 233 Nixon, 369–70
Stevens, George Platoon, 393–95, 708
biblical epics, 903, 907 political films, 360
Giant, 198 Tarantino and, 821
Gunga Din, 1042 war films, 1029
Hepburn and, 684, 1058 Stone, Philip, 440

1210
 Index

The Stooge, 722 Sturges, Preston, 476–77, 817–20, 1059

Stop motion, 895 The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, 611
Stormare, Peter, 163 Submarine, 593
Storm Center, 976 Such Good Friends, 739
Stormy Weather, 883 Sudden Impact, 634, 879
The Story of a Three-Day Pass, 831 Suddenly Last Summer, 87–88, 99, 684
The Story of Dorothy Stanfield, 744–45 The Sugarland Express, 808
The Story of G.I. Joe, 746, 937, 1118 Suicide, 1047
The Story of Ruth, 906 Sullivan’s Travels, 476–78, 819
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 911 Sully, Anna Beth, 645
Strange Bedfellows, 1060 Sully, Robert, 344
The Strange Case of Lizzie Borden, 580 Summer City, 665
Strange Days, 575 Summer in the City, 856
Strangers on a Train, 691 Summer of Sam, 720
The Stranger’s Return, 836 The Sun Also Rises, 650
Strank, Mike, 178–79 Sundance Film Festival, 1098–99
Strasberg, Lee, 580, 701, 769, 1001–2 Sunday Night at the Movies, 1108
Strathairn, David, 1030 Sunrise, 755
Stratton, Dorothy, 577 Sunset Boulevard, 478–79, 859, 860
The Stratton Story, 400, 1051 Sunshine and Shadow (Pickford), 777
Strauss, Johann, 510 Super Fly, 435, 878, 885, 1008, 1009
Strauss, Richard, 509 Superhero films, 480–81, 1099–1105
Straw Dogs, 773 Superman, 629, 1100–1105
Streamers, 556 Superman and the Mole Men, 480
Streep, Meryl, 123, 325, 634, 643, 763, 764, Superman series, 464, 465, 470, 480–81,
765, 783, 1134 1100–1105
A Streetcar Named Desire, 460–61, 474–61, Super Mario Brothers, 695
497, 581, 701 Surtees, Robert, 918
Street Scene, 836 Survivor, 929
Street Scenes, 796 Susan Lennox, 663
Streisand, Barbra, 521–22, 577, 761, Suspicion, 670, 690
812–14, 866, 989, 990, Sutherland, Donald, 335–36, 377, 555
1059, 1136 Sutherland, Kiefer, 173
Strictly Business, 571 Swank, Hilary, 351
Strike, 29, 640, 946–47 Swanson, Gloria, 478–79, 830, 839, 860
Strip Search, 728 Swayze, Patrick, 128–29, 574
Strode, Woody, 332, 888 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet
Stroker Ace, 879 Street, 586
Stromboli, 567 Sweet and Lowdown, 552
The Strong Man, 592 Sweet Bird of Youth, 759
Stuart, Jeb, 126 Sweet, Blanche, 673
The Student of Prague, 965 Sweetie, 590
Studio system, 1096–98 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song, 831, 832,
Studi, Wes, 1020, 1021 878, 884
A Study in Choreography for Camera, 625 Swing Shift, 1134
Sturges, John, 224–25, 318–20, Swing Time, 562
530, 814–17 The Switch, 1063

1211
Index

Sylbert, Richard, 530 Teasing the Gardener, 730

Sylvia Scarlett, 614, 670, 683 Technicolor Corporation, 920
Synecdoche, New York, 1078 Technology in filmmaking, 235–40,
Szpilman, Wladyslaw, 781 309–11, 1022–23
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 978
Tabu, 755 Television, 1107–9
Taco Bell, 1034 Temple, Shirley, 741, 868, 883, 1014
Tahir, Fahrin, 266 The Temptress, 663
Take Her, She’s Mine, 643 The Ten Commandments, 619, 685, 889,
Takei, George, 465 904, 905, 906, 989, 1040
Take the Money and Run, 1061 Ten Days That Shook the World, 640
The Taking of Pelham, 843 Tender Comrade, 1132
The Talented Mr. Ripley, 783 Tennant, Andy, 1063
Tales from the Crypt, 630 The Tenth Man, 603
Tales of Manhattan, 790 10,000 B.C., 252
The Talk of the Town, 670 Tequila Sunrise, 666, 825
The Tall Men, 662 The Terminator series, 6, 485–89, 880, 978,
Talmadge, Constance, 262 1074, 1135
Talmadge, Norma, 1084 Terms of Endearment, 768
Tamblyn, Russ, 524 The Terror, 767
Tan, Amy, 938 Terror from the Year 5000, 549
Tandy, Jessica, 139, 476 The Terror of Tiny Town, 1050
Taradash, Daniel, 976 The Terrors of War, 1114
Tarantino, Quentin, 266, 382, 404–5, 672, Tesich, Steve, 68
821–22, 900, 958, 964, 1099 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 781
Tarantula, 633, 1069 The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 711
Target, 775 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1085
Targets, 576–77 Texasville, 578
Tarkington, Booth, 317–18, 854 Thalberg, Irving, 737, 875, 1076
Tarrow, Sidney, 1086 That Certain Thing, 268
Tartuffe, 754 That Thing You Do, 1014
Tarzan the Ape Man, 877 That Touch of Mink, 670, 1060
Tashlin, Frank, 898 Them!, 1069, 1073
Tate, Larenz, 111 There’s No Business Like Show Business, 748
Tate, Sharon, 90, 780, 824 There’s One Born Every Minute, 822
Tatum, W. Barnes, 382 There’s Something about Mary, 1050
Taxi Driver, 483–85, 622, 654, 655, 795, They All Laughed, 577, 578
797, 937 They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!, 252
Taylor, Dub, 61 They Died with Their Boots On,
Taylor, Elizabeth, 87–88, 99–101, 198, 649, 1018
389–90, 528–30, 759, 762, 822–23, They Live, 596
1133 They Live by Night, 787, 1049
Taylor, Frederick, 328 They Made Me a Criminal, 569
Taylor, Robert, 973 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, 782
Taymor, Julie, 305 The Thief of Bagdad, 646, 877
Teacher’s Pet, 662 Thieves Like Us, 335, 555, 787
Tearing Down the Spanish Flag, 1114 The Thin Blue Line, 929

1212
 Index

The Thing, 254, 596, 1069 Till the End of Time, 1045
The Thing from Another World, 146, 677 Tilly, Charles, 1086
The Thin Man, 267, 1052 Tilly, Meg, 33, 699
The Thin Red Line, 23–24, 919, 1120 Tim, 665
The Third Man, 491–93, 855 Timberlake, Justin, 443
Thirteen Days in October, 613 The Time Machine, 1074
Thirty-Day Princess, 670 Tin Cup, 612
The 39 Steps, 689 The Tin Star, 428
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, 1118 Tiny Toon Adventures, 809
This Island Earth, 1069, 1074 Tiomkin, Dimitri, 1011
This Is My Life, 643 Tissues, 589
This Is Spinal Tap, 519 Titanic, 145, 486, 494–97, 997,
Thomas, Henry, 145 999–1000
Thomas, Jameson, 268 Titicut Follies, 916
Thomas, Jonathan Taylor, 305, 306 TNT, 658
Thomas, J. Parnell, 975 To Catch a Thief, 670, 692, 1060
Thompson, Emma, 764–65, 1031 Todd, Michael, 100
Thompson, Kristin, 980 To Have and Have Not, 677, 679
Thomson, David, 428 To Hell and Back, 1118
Thomson, Kenneth, 1076 To Kill a Mockingbird, 497–99
Thornton, Billy Bob, 572, 887 Tokyo Ga, 856
Thoroughly Modern Millie, 1013 Toland, Gregg, 31, 96, 854, 865,
Thorp, Roderick, 126 918, 953
The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, 714 To Live and Die in L.A., 659
The Three Ages, 704 Tolkien, J. R. R., 309
3D animation, 896 Toll, John, 919
300, 890–91, 1023 The Toll of the Sea, 920
300 Spartans, 889, 890, 891 The Tomb of Ligeia, 824
Three Kings, 493–94, 1121 Tombstone Territory, 772
The Three Little Pigs, 458, 627 Tomlin, Lily, 1134
The Three Musketeers, 646, 877 Tomorrow Never Dies, 54
Three on a Couch, 722 Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers:
Three Pickup Men for Herrick and Running Down the Dream, 578
Sunlight, 831 The Tonight Show, 551
3:10 to Yuma, 1007 Too Hot to Handle, 662
3 Women, 335, 556 Too Late Blues, 598
Thunderball, 53 Toole, F. X., 351
Thunderbirds, 1118 Too Much Too Soon, 650
Thunderbolt, 815, 865 Tootsie, 782–83
Thunderheart, 1020, 1044 Topaz, 693
Thurman, Uma, 193, 404, 1135 Top Chef, 929
THX 1138, 12, 609, 725 Top Gun, 499–501
A Ticket to Tomahawk, 748 Topol, 174–75
Tidy, Frank, 800 Tora! Tora! Tora!, 555, 1118
Tidyman, Ernest, 185 Torn Curtain, 693
Tierney, Gene, 712 Torn, Rip, 370
The Tiger of Eschnapur, 714 The Torrent, 663

1213
Index

Torrid Zone, 588 The Tree in a Test Tube, 716

Tortilla Flat, 648 Trent’s Last Case, 679
To Sir, With Love, 250, 778 Treut, Monika, 580
The Total Film-Maker (Lewis), 722 Trevor, Claire, 462, 1124
Total Recall, 46 The Trial, 855
To the Shores of Hell, 1111, 1119 Tribeca Films, 623
Touch of Evil, 501–2, 855, 919, 1049 The Trip, 611
Touch of Pink, 88 A Trip to the Moon, 742, 1072
Tourneur, Jacques, 954, 968–69 TriStar Pictures, 66, 382
Tousey, Sheila, 1021 Tron, 1073
Town and Country, 566 Tropic Thunder, 266
Towne, Robert, 89, 559, 823–26, 952, The Trouble with Angels, 731
1060, 1079 The Trouble with Harry, 692
The Toxic Avenger, 1101 Truckline Café, 581
Toys in the Attic, 687 True-Frost, Jim, 448
Toy Story, 175, 503–4, 896, 1009 The True Glory, 602
Toy Story 2, 504 True Grit, 848, 1008, 1127
Trackdown, 772 True Heart Susie, 674
Tracy, Spencer True Romance, 821
Boys Town, 17, 1038 Truffaut, François. See also Auteur
Fleming and, 647 theory; French New Wave
Fury, 712 auteur theory, 791, 897–98
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 228, 250 biography, 826–28
A Guy Named Joe, 270 Bonnie and Clyde, 55–56
Hepburn and, 385, 615, 684 Breathless, 70
Judgment at Nuremberg, 282 Fahrenheit 451, 159–60
The Power and the Glory, 818 The 400 Blows, 180–81
romantic comedies, 1058–60 French “cinema of quality,” 947
Taylor and, 822 French New Wave, 774, 956–58
Woman of the Year, 538–39 Welles and, 855
Trading Places, 886 Trumbo, Dalton, 188, 973, 975,
Traffic, 505–6 976, 1030
Traffic in Souls, 1083 Trump, Donald, 929
The Train, 656–57 Truth and Illusion, 837
Training Day, 842, 843, 886 Tucker, Chris, 879
The Tramp, 600 Tucker: The Man and His Dream, 609
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, 592 Tunisian Victory, 594
Transamerica, 1021 Turan, Kenneth, 74
Transformers, 809 Turner, Kathleen, 699, 844
The Transporter, 881 Turner, Lana, 395, 396, 816, 1133
Travers, Henry, 272 Turner, Ted, 86, 109
Travers, P. L., 333 The Turn of the Screw, 568
Travolta, John, 220, 404–5, 681, Turturro, John, 132
764, 821, 1030 TV Nation, 750
Treasure Island, 627, 647 12 Angry Men, 659, 727
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 697 Twelve O’Clock High, 1118
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 701, 787 Twentieth Century, 267, 900, 1052

1214
 Index

Twentieth Century-Fox Under Capricorn, 567

Cleopatra, 99–100 Under Siege, 880
Corman and, 611 Under Your Spell, 784
Gable and, 662 Unfaithfully Yours, 819
Hitchcock and, 690 Unforgiven, 177, 341, 511–14, 635, 1128
Independence Day, 253 The Unforgiven, 668
Monroe and, 748 Ungar, Deborah, 109
Patton, 608 The Unholy Three, 1049
Preminger and, 784–85 Union Pacific, 461, 1018
The Sound of Music, 458–59 United Artists
studio system, 1097 Chaplin and, 99, 601
Sturges and, 819 Fairbanks and, 645–46
Zanuck and, 868 Fleming and, 647
25th Hour, 720 Hitchcock and, 690
24, 696, 1087 Hollywood blacklist, 971
20,000 Leagues under the Sea, 1072 independent films, 977
Twilight, 1136 James Bond films, 51–52, 209
The Twilight Zone, 391, 731 Pickford and, 775–77
Twilight Zone: The Movie, 145 product tie-ins, 1034
Twinky, 629 silent era, 1083
Twin Peaks, 707, 732 studio system, 1097
Twins, 488 Sturges and, 815–16
Twister, 1067, 1068 Valentino and, 830
Two Down and One to Go, 594 women in film, 1131
Two-Faced Woman, 663 United States v. Paramount
2 Fast 2 Furious, 805 (1949), 1097
Two Friends, 590 Universal Soldier, 252, 880
The Two Jakes, 825 Universal Studios
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, 606, 607 Bogdanovich and, 578, 633
Two Mules for Sister Sara, 511 Eastwood and, 690
Two Over Easy, 1048 Lloyd and, 724
2001: A Space Odyssey, 145, 146, 469, monster films, 182–83
508–10, 708, 1007, 1070, 1073 silent era, 1083
2010, 1068, 1070 Spielberg and, 808
2012, 252 studio system, 1097
Two Wise Wives, 851 von Stroheim and, 838
Tyler, Parker, 624 Wayne and, 847
Tyner, Charles, 233 Welles and, 855
Tyson, Cicely, 885 Wyler and, 864
Universum Film Studios, 966
U-571, 488, 1120 The Unknown, 1049
Uhry, Alfred, 139 Un long dimanche de fiançailles, 655
Ulmer, Edgar G., 953 An Unmarried Woman, 1134
Umberto D, 982 An Unseen Enemy, 667
Unaccustomed as We Are, 716 Unstrung Heroes, 707
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 911 The Untouchables, 29, 612, 621
Uncommon Valor, 1112–13 Up Close and Personal, 1060

1215
Index

Up series, 244, 504 Victor Victoria, 1015

The Upside of Anger, 612 Vidal, Gore, 193, 360, 602, 608
Up the River, 1050 Videodrome, 108, 431
Uptown Saturday Night, 778, 885 Vidor, King, 37–38, 835–37, 883, 996,
Uris, Leon, 989 1115–16, 1132
Ustinov, Peter, 891 Viet ‘67, 796
U Turn, 811 Vietnam! Vietnam!, 654
Vietnam War
Vagabond, 833, 834 Apocalypse Now, 19–22, 1111
The Vagabond Baron, 663 Born on the Fourth of July, 810, 1046
The Valdez Horses, 816 Casualties of War, 1112
Valdez, Luis, 938 Cease Fire, 1112
Valens, Richie, 938 China Gate, 1111
Valenti, Jack, 761 Coming Home, 1046, 1111
Valentine’s Day, 1062 Cutter’s Way, 1046
Valentino, Rudolph, 752, 829–829, 935, The Deer Hunter, 120–24, 1111
1004, 1084 The Exorcist, 153–54
Vampires, 596 Flags of Our Fathers, 1121
Van Cleef, Lee, 1123 Forrest Gump, 1046
Van Damme, Jean-Claude, 880 Full Metal Jacket, 189–91, 708, 1112
Van Dyke, Dick, 334, 716 The Green Berets, 1111, 1119
Van Dyke, W. S., 267, 1052 Heaven and Earth, 810, 1112
Van Fleet, Jo, 148 The Killing Fields, 288–90, 1112
Vanishing Point, 879 Letters from Iwo Jima, 1121
Van Peebles, Melvin, 434, 831–33, 878, Marine Battleground, 1111, 1119
884, 964 Missing in Action series, 1112–13
Van Sant, Gus, 403, 923 Platoon, 393–95, 810
Van Sloan, Edward, 182 Rambo I and II, 1112–13
Varda, Agnès, 833–35, 947, 957, 958 Scent of a Woman, 1046
Variety Arts Studio, 598 To the Shores of Hell, 1111, 1119
Variety Lights, 982 Uncommon Valor, 1112–13
Vaughn, Robert, 319, 816 Universal Soldier, 880
Veidt, Conrad, 753 We Were Soldiers, 666, 1121
Velez, Lupe, 1132 A Yank in Vietnam, 1111, 1119
Vera-Ellen, 527, 1014 A View from the Bridge, 727
Verbinski, Gore, 1062 A View to a Kill, 52–54
The Verdict, 508, 727, 760 Vigo, Jean, 792, 956
Verhoeven, Paul, 515, 659 The Vikings, 920
Vernac, Denise, 839 Vilar, Jean, 833
Vernon, Frances Willard, 587 Village Voice, 791, 810
Vertigo, 515–17, 692 Villa Rides, 772
Vertov, Dziga, 915 Vincent, 585
The Very Eye of Night, 625 Vincent, Frank, 214
Veterans, 1045–46 Vinterberg, Thomas, 958
V for Vendetta, 1031, 1101 The Virginian, 240, 619, 647, 731, 1123
Vickers, Martha, 39 Visconti, Luchino, 395, 982
Vicky Cristina Barcelona, 551, 553 The Visitor, 939

1216
 Index

Vitaphone, 867, 1081, 1092 Wallis, Hal, 816

Viva Zapata, 581 Wall Street, 811
Voight, Jon, 124, 125, 349, 560 Walsh, Fran, 309
von Garnier, Katja, 1086 Walsh, J. T., 173
von Harbou, Thea, 346, 711, 714 Walsh, Maurice, 407
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., 688 Walsh, Raoul, 846, 900, 925, 962, 1018
von Stampfer, Simon, 894–95 Walston, Ray, 166
von Stein, Lorenz, 1086 Walt Disney Company, 809
von Sternberg, Joseph, 752, 792 Walthall, Henry B., 43, 998
von Stroheim, Erich, 479, 792, 837–40 The Wanderers, 14
von Sydow, Max, 907 Wang, Wayne, 938
von Trapp, Georg Ritter, 458 War and Peace, 837
von Trier, Lars, 958 War Comes to America, 1117
von Wagenen, Sterling, 1098 Ward, David S., 643
Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Warden, Jack, 506
Women, 576 Ward, Lyman, 169
War films. See also Political films
W, 811 Air Force, 1117
Wachowski, Andy, 338 All Quiet on the Western Front, 8–10,
Wachowski, Larry, 338 1028, 1116
Wadleigh, Michael, 794 The Americanization of Emily, 1111
Wages of Fear, 659 Apocalypse Now, 20–22, 1029, 1111
Wagner, Sidney, 396 Back to Bataan, 1118
Wagonmaster, 1048 Band of Brothers, 809
Wagon Train, 808 Bataan, 1118
Wag the Dog, 360, 623, 1031 Battle Cry, 1118
Waiting for Guffman, 519–21 The Battle Cry of Peace, 1115
Wait Until Dark, 1050 Battleground, 1118
Wake Island, 422, 1118 Battle Hymn, 1119
Waldron, Charles, 39 The Battle of Britain, 1117
Walk, Don’t Run, 670 The Battle of China, 1117
Walken, Christopher, 123, 405 The Battle of Russia, 1117
Walker, Joseph, 593 The Battle of Santiago Bay, 1114
Walker, Robert, 691 The Battle of the Bulge, 1118
Walker, Virginia, 1055 Battle Stations, 1118
The Walking Hills, 815 Be Neutral, 1114
The Walking Stick, 1050 Best Years of Our Lives, 30–31
A Walk in the Sun, 1118 The Best Years of Our Lives, 1045–46
Walk on the Wild Side, 88, 460 The Big Parade, 37–38, 1115
Walk the Line, 1005 The Big Red One, 1112
Wallace and Gromit, 895 The Birth of a Nation, 1115
Wallace, Dee, 146 Black Hawk Down, 1121
Wallace, Earl W., 534 Born on the Fourth of July, 810,
Wallace, George, 483 1029, 1046
Wallace, Pamela, 534 The Bridge on the River Kwai,
Wallach, Eli, 318, 816 71–73
Wall-E, 504, 1007 A Bridge Too Far, 1111–12

1217
Index

Bright Victory, 1045–46 Marine Battleground, 1111, 1119

The Caine Mutiny, 1118 M*A*S*H*, 335–37, 1029
Casablanca, 84–87 Memphis Belle, 1112
Casualties of War, 1112 The Men, 1045
Catch 22, 1111 Midway, 1111
Cease Fire, 1112 Missing in Action series, 880, 1112–13
China Gate, 1111 The Naked and the Dead, 1118
Coming Home, 1046, 1111 The Nazis Strike, 1117
Cutter’s Way, 1046 Never So Few, 816
D-Day, the Sixth of June, 1118 Objective Burma, 1118
The Deer Hunter, 120–24, 1029, 1111 Okinawa, 1118
Destination Tokyo, 1118 One Minute to Zero, 1119
Divide and Conquer, 1117 Operation Pacific, 1118
Dr. Strangelove, 136–39 overview, 1111–22
The Eagle Has Landed, 817 The Pacific, 1121
Fail-Safe, 160–62 Pearl Harbor, 1121
Fat Man and Little Boy, 1112 The Philadelphia Experiment, 1112
A Few Good Men, 171–73 Platoon, 393–95, 810, 1029
Fighter Squadron, 1118 Pork Chop Hill, 1119
Fixed Bayonets, 1119 Prelude to War, 1117
Flags of Our Fathers, 177–80, 809, 1121 Pride of the Marines, 1045
Flying Leathernecks, 1118 The Prussian Cur, 1115
Flying Tigers, 1118 Rambo I and II, 1112–13
Force of Arms, 1118 Retreat, Hell!, 1119
Forrest Gump, 1046 The Sands of Iwo Jima, 1118
Full Metal Jacket, 189–91, 1029, 1112 Saving Private Ryan, 421–23, 809,
Glory, 201–3 1119–20
Good Guys Wear Black, 880 Scent of a Woman, 1046
The Great Escape, 224–26, 1118 Schindler’s List, 425–27
The Green Berets, 1111, 1119 Sergeant York, 1116
Hearts of the World, 1028, 1115 To the Shores of Hell, 1111, 1119
Heaven and Earth, 810, 1029, 1112 Stalag 17, 1118
To Hell and Back, 1118 The Story of G.I. Joe, 937, 1118
Hellcats of the Navy, 1118 Tearing Down the Spanish Flag, 1114
Hell in the Pacific, 1118 The Terrors of War, 1114
Hell Is for Heroes, 1118 The Thin Red Line, 1120
From Here to Eternity, 1118 Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, 1118
The Hun Within, 1115 Three Kings, 493–94, 1121
The Hurt Locker, 1121 Thunderbirds, 1118
Jarhead, 1121 Till the End of Time, 1045
The Kaiser, 1115 Top Gun, 499–501
The Killing Fields, 288–90, 1112 Tora! Tora! Tora!, 1118
The Last Days of Patton, 1112 Twelve O’Clock High, 1118
Letters from Iwo Jima, 302–5, 809, 1121 U-571, 1120
The Longest Day, 1118 Uncommon Valor, 1112–13
The Manchurian Candidate, 324–26, Under Siege, 880
1119 Universal Soldier, 880

1218
 Index

Wake Island, 1118 Washington, Booker T., 45

A Walk in the Sun, 1118 Washington, Denzel, 201–2, 320–22, 325,
War Comes to America, 1117 383–84, 655, 719–21, 802,
War Is Hell, 1114 841–43, 886
We Were Soldiers, 666, 1121 Washington, Fredi, 883
Why We Fight, 1112, 1117 Wasserman, Lew, 782
A Yank in Vietnam, 1111, 1119 Watanabe, Gedde, 451
War Games, 1074 Watchmen, 1100–1105, 1101
Warhol, Andy, 843 Watch on the Rhine, 1011
War Hunt, 782 The Water Diary, 591
War Is Hell, 1114 Watermelon Man, 831–32, 884
Warner Bros. Waters, John, 843–45
action-adventure films, 878 Waterson, Sam, 288
Allen and, 550 Waterston, James, 119
Cagney and, 587–88 Waterworld, 613, 695
Casablanca, 569 Watson, Emma, 238
Curtiz and, 616–17 Waxman, Franz, 863
Flynn and, 649 Way Down East, 668, 674
gangster films, 962 Wayne, John
Harry Potter series, 235 auteur theory, 900
Hopper and, 694 biography, 845–50
Huston and, 697 Clift and, 390
The Jazz Singer, 986 Cowboys, 863
Kazan and, 476 Ford and, 652–53
The Left Handed Gun, 298 Hawks and, 679–80
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 341–43 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
The Music Man, 362 331–32
Pollack and, 782 movie stars, 1004
Ray and, 787 Native Americans and, 307, 1019
Schoonmaker and, 794 The Quiet Man, 407
sound in film, 1081, 1092 Rio Bravo, 411–13
Spielberg and, 809 The Searchers, 300, 427
studio system, 1096, 1097 Stagecoach, 462–63, 1029
Wayne and, 846–47 Sturges and, 817
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 528 war films, 1111
Wyler and, 865 western films, 1124–27, 1125,
Zanuck and, 867 1126, 1127
Warner, H. B., 906 Way of the Dragon, 878
Warner, Jack, 616, 973, 975, 987 The Way We Were, 521–23, 782–83, 813,
War of the Worlds, 93, 254, 852–53, 814, 976
1040, 1072 Weaver, Sigourney, 5–6, 539–40, 763,
Warren Commission, 281–82 800, 1135
Warren, Earl, 131 Weaving, Hugo, 338, 339
Warren, Robert Penn, 10 Webb, Charles, 215, 762
The Warrior’s Husband, 683 Weber, Francis, 764
Warshow, Robert, 947 Weber, Lois, 850–52, 1130
War Widow, 731 Weber, Steven, 440

1219
Index

Webster, Ferris, 657 A Fistful of Dollars, 1128

The Wedding Banquet, 717, 938 Fort Apache, 653, 1124–25
The Wedding March, 839 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1123
The Wedding Night, 836 The Great Train Robbery, 226–27, 1122
The Wedding Party, 621 The Gunfight at Dodge City, 1048
Wedding Present, 670 Hang ’Em High, 1128
Wee Willie Winkie, 1042 Heaven’s Gate, 240–41, 1128
Wegener, Paul, 965 High Noon, 241–43, 1125
The Weight of Water, 575 The Hopalong Cassidy Show, 1126
Weird Science, 169 Hud, 1127
Weir, Peter, 118–20, 534–35, 665 Joe Kidd, 1128
Weissmuller, Johnny, 877 The Left Handed Gun, 298–300
Welcome Danger, 724 Little Big Man, 307–8
Welles, Orson The Magnificent Seven, 318–20
auteur theory, 899 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
biography, 852–56 331–33
Bogdanovich and, 576 McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 341–43
cinematography, 918, 919 The Misfits, 1127
Citizen Kane, 92–97, 247, 953, 1029 My Darling Clementine, 364–66
Farber on, 947 The Naked Spur, 1126–27
Ford and, 659 overview, 1122–29
French New Wave, 956 The Painted Desert, 661
Huston and, 697 Pale Rider, 1128
The Magnificent Ambersons, 317–18 Ride the High Country, 1127
Polanski and, 779 Rio Bravo, 411–13
Sarris on, 792 Rio Grande, 653, 1124–25
The Third Man, 491 The Searchers, 427–29, 653, 1126
Touch of Evil, 501–2 Shane, 435–37, 1125–26
Wise and, 549 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 653, 1124–25
Wellman, William, 424, 961 Stagecoach, 461–64, 653, 1124
Wells, H. G., 93, 1040 True Grit, 1048, 1127
Wenders, Wim, 856–58 Unforgiven, 511–14, 1128
We’re No Angels, 622 The Virginian, 1123
Were the World Mine, 1013 The Wild Bunch, 530–32, 1127
Werker, Alfred L., 884 Winchester ’73, 532–33
Werner, Oskar, 159 Western Union, 712
West, Adam, 26 West, Mae, 670, 1054, 1131
West, Cornell, 338 West of Zanzibar, 1049
Western Book Supply Company, 744 West Side Story, 524–25, 937,
The Westerner, 772 1013, 1015
Western films. See also Native Americans Westward Ho, 847
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, We Were Soldiers, 1121
76–79, 1127 Wexler, Haskell, 530, 762, 919
Cheyenne Autumn, 653 Wexler, Norman, 429
Cowboys, 863 Whale, James, 182–83
Dances with Wolves, 115–17, 1128 The Whales of August, 668
The Deadly Trackers, 1048 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1050

1220
 Index

What Is to Be Done, 1028 Widmark, Richard, 816

What Planet Are You From?, 765 Wiene, Robert, 954, 965
What Price Hollywood?, 614 Wigand, Jeffrey, 258–59
What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Wilcox, Collin, 498
Like This?, 796 The Wild Angels, 576, 611, 978
What’s New Pussycat?, 551 Wild at Heart, 732
What’s Up, Doc?, 577, 813, 1059 The Wild Bunch, 149, 331, 422, 530–32,
What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, 1061 772–73, 1127
What Women Want, 666, 1062 The Wild Child, 827
What Would You Do?, 1047 Wilde, Cornel, 963
Whedon, Joss, 266 Wilder, Billy
When Clouds Go By, 647 auteur theory, 899
When Harry Met Sally, 525–27, 643, 1060 biography, 858–62
When the Chickens Come Home to Roost, 841 Double Indemnity, 134–36, 395, 713
When the Levees Broke, 720, 886 German expressionism, 954
When Worlds Collide, 1070, 1073, 1075 One, Two, Three, 588
Where Are My Children?, 850, 1046 Oscar nominations, 1080
Where’s Mary?, 1047 romantic comedies, 1059, 1060
Which Way to the Front?, 723 Some Like It Hot, 1053
While the City Sleeps, 714 Stalag 17, 224, 785
Whitaker, Forest, 112, 887 Sturges and, 817
White Christmas, 527–28, 1014 Sunset Blvd., 478–79
The White Cliffs of Dover, 822 Wilder, Gene, 61, 401, 583, 885
White, Edward D., 44 Wilder, Samuel. See Wilder, Billy
White Heat, 424, 851, 962 Wilder, Thornton, 701
White Lightning, 879 The Wild One, 524, 573, 582
White, Pearl, 1130 Wild Orchids, 663
White, Ryan, 384 The Wild Party, 557
The White Sheik, 982 Wiles, Gordon, 953
The White Sister, 668 Will and Grace, 74
White Squall, 801 Willard, Fred, 520
White Zombie, 1043 William Fox Studios, 845
Whitman, Charles, 577 William Morris Agency, 551
Whitney, Grace Lee, 465 Williams, Billy Dee, 469, 885
Whittet, Matthew, 1012 Williams, Cindy, 12, 13, 105
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 809 Williams, Esther, 570
The Whole Town’s Talking, 652 Williams, JoBeth, 699
Whoopee, 569 Williams, John, 275, 425, 480,
Whorf, Richard, 543 862–64, 1007
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 82, 528–30, Williams, Karen, 33–34
611, 761–62, 823, 919 Williams, Michelle, 74
Whose Life Is It, Anyway?, 1047 Williamson, Fred, 885
Who’s That Knocking at My Door, 636, 794, Williams, Robin, 119, 297, 764
796 Williams, Tennessee
Why We Fight, 268, 273, 594, 928, Beatty and, 564
1112, 1117 Brando and, 581
Wicked, 538 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 87

1221
Index

The Glass Menagerie, 760 The Witches of Eastwick, 768

Kazan and, 701 With a Song in My Heart, 1051
Period of Adjustment, 687 Withers, Grant, 364
screenwriters, 1079 Within Our Gates, 744
A Streetcar Named Desire, 474–76 Without Limits, 825
Suddenly Last Summer, 684 Without Love, 684, 1059
Williams, Tony, 420 With Six You Get Eggroll, 1008
Willingham, Calder, 762 With the Enemy’s Help, 776
Willis, Bruce, 126–27, 405, 452–53, 571, Witness, 534–35
681, 821, 1022, 1059 Witte, Jackie, 759
Willis, Gordon, 260 The Wiz, 550, 728
Willow, 726 The Wizard of Oz, 535–38, 647–48, 836,
Willson, Meredith, 362–63 1009, 1014
Wilma, 841 Wolf, 764
Wilson, 1029 Wolfe, Ian, 409
Wilson, Mara, 354 Wolfe, Traci, 301
Wilson, Michael, 391 Wollen, Peter, 752, 996
Wilson, Michael G., 53 Woloch, Nancy, 539
Wilson, Nancy, 449 A Woman Called Golda, 568
Wilson, Richard, 963 Woman in the Window, 713
Wilson, Scott, 250 A Woman of Affairs, 663
Wilson, Sloan, 328–29 Woman of the Year, 385, 538–39,
Wilson, Woodrow, 44, 647, 674, 924, 1027, 684, 1058
1114–15 A Woman Rebels, 683
Winchester ’73, 532–33 Woman’s Burden, 851
The Wind, 668 A Woman Under the Influence,
The Winds from Nowhere, 744 599, 1134
Windtalkers, 1021 The Women, 614, 615
Winfield, Paul, 885 Women in film. See also Social movements
Winfrey, Oprah, 572 About Sarah, 1048
Winger, Debra, 373–74, 1060 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,
Wings, 875 1130, 1134
Wings of Desire, 856 Alien, 1135
Winkler, Irwin, 188 All about Eve, 7–8
Winning, 759 All That Heaven Allows, 1133
Winslet, Kate, 495, 591 An Unmarried Woman, 1134
Winters, Shelley, 389 The Arizona Cat Claw, 1048
Wintonick, Peter, 329–31 Baby Boom, 1135
Winwood, Estelle, 401 Blackboard Jungle, 1048
Wiseguy, 798 The China Syndrome, 1134
Wiseman, Frederick, 916, 928 Clueless, 1136
Wiseman, Joseph, 581 The Color Purple, 1135
Wise, Robert, 458, 524–25, 549 The Devil Wears Prada, 1136
Wisher, William, 487 Diary of a Mad Housewife, 1134
Wister, Owen, 240, 647 Double Indemnity, 1133
Wit, 765 Duel in the Sun, 1132
Witches Cradle, 625 Erin Brockovich, 151–53

1222
 Index

Fanchon the Cricket, 1048 Women’s Film Festival, 941

Fatal Attraction, 167–69, 1135 Women’s movement, 1086–88
Foolish Wives, 1048 Wonder Boys, 550
A Fool There Was, 1129 Wong, Anna May, 1132
Fried Green Tomatoes, 1135 Wong, B. D., 284
Gigot, 1048 Wong Kar-Wai, 958
Gone with the Wind, 1132 Wood, Andy, 449
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, 1048 Wood, Elijah, 309
Happy Face Murders, 1048 Wood, John S., 975
The Hazards of Helen, 1130 Wood, Matthew, 471
The Hustler of Muscle Beach, 1048 Wood, Natalie, 353, 409–10, 460–61, 524,
It, 1131 563, 788, 1134
Julie & Julia, 1136 Wood, Peggy, 459
Kramer vs. Kramer, 1134 Wood, Sam, 399–400
The Lady from Shanghai, 1133 Woods, Frank E., 946
Legally Blonde, 1136 Woodstock, 794
Thelma and Louise, 489–91, 1135 Woodward, Bob, 1028, 1030
Lost in Yonkers, 1048 Woodward, Joanne, 759–61
Mildred Pierce, 1133 Woolf, Edgar Allan, 536
Network, 1134 Woolrich, Cornell, 954
New Moon, 1136 Woolvett, Jaimz, 511
Nine to Five, 1134 Words and Music, 846
Norma Rae, 1134 Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, 730
Out of the Past, 1133 Working Girl, 352, 539–539, 763–64, 1135
overview, 1129–37 Working Girls, 579
The Perils of Pauline, 1130 The World According to Garp, 688
The Piano, 386–88 The World Is Not Enough, 54
Places in the Heart, 1134 The World of Henry Orient, 687
The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1133 World War I, 8–10
Private Benjamin, 1134 All Quiet on the Western Front, 1028
Scream, 1136 The Battle Cry of Peace, 1115
Sex and the City, 1136 Be Neutral, 1114
Sex, Lies and Videotape, 431–32 The Big Parade, 37–38
The Silence of the Lambs, 444–46 The Birth of a Nation, 1115
Silkwood, 1134 Committee on Public Information,
Since You Went Away, 1132 924–26
Sophie’s Choice, 1134 Gallipoli, 665
Steel Magnolias, 1135 The Hun Within, 1115
Swing Shift, 1134 The Kaiser, 1115
Tender Comrade, 1132 The Prussian Cur, 1115
The Terminator series, 1135 The Terrors of War, 1114
Titanic, 494–97 War Is Hell, 1114
Twilight, 1136 World War II
Woman of the Year, 538–39 Air Force, 1117
A Woman Under the Influence, 1134 The Americanization of Emily, 1111
Working Girl, 539–41, 1135 Back to Bataan, 1118
Women’s Army Corps, 557 Band of Brothers, 1121

1223
Index

Bataan, 1118 Pearl Harbor, 1121

Battle Cry, 1118 The Philadelphia Experiment, 1112
Battleground, 1118 Pride of the Marines, 1045
The Battle of the Bulge, 1118 The Producers, 400–402
Battle Stations, 1118 The Sands of Iwo Jima, 1118
The Best Years of Our Lives, 1045–46 Saving Private Ryan, 421–23, 1119–20
The Big Red One, 1112 Schindler’s List, 425–27
A Bridge Too Far, 1111–12 The Sound of Music, 459
Bright Victory, 1045–46 Stalag 17, 1118
The Caine Mutiny, 1118 The Story of G.I. Joe, 1118
Catch 22, 1111 The Thin Red Line, 1120
D-Day, the Sixth of June, 1118 Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, 1118
Destination Tokyo, 1118 Thunderbirds, 1118
documentary films, 594, 928 Till the End of Time, 1045
The Eagle Has Landed, 817 Tora! Tora! Tora!, 1118
ethnic/immigrant culture and, 936–37 Twelve O’Clock High, 1118
Fat Man and Little Boy, 1112 U-571, 1120
Fighter Squadron, 1118 Wake Island, 1118
film noir and, 952–53 A Walk in the Sun, 1118
Flags of Our Fathers, 177–80 Why We Fight, 1112
Flying Leathernecks, 1118 Woman of the Year, 538–39
Flying Tigers, 1118 women in film, 1132–33
Force of Arms, 1118 Yankee Doodle Dandy, 543–45
The Great Dictator, 222–23 Worth, Marvin, 321
The Great Escape, 224–26, 1118 Wouk, Herman, 989
Hangmen Also Die!, 713 The Wrestler, 1094
To Hell and Back, 1118 Wright, Jenny, 574
Hellcats of the Navy, 1118 Wright, Teresa, 30, 399
Hell in the Pacific, 1118 The Wrong Man, 1008
Hell Is for Heroes, 1118 Wrong Move, 856
From Here to Eternity, 1118 WUSA, 759, 760
Italian neorealism and, 981–83 Wuthering Heights, 865, 918
Judgment at Nuremberg, 282–84 Wyatt Earp, 700
The Last Days of Patton, 1112 Wyler, William, 30–31, 246, 685, 815,
The Longest Day, 1118 864–66, 903, 918
Man Hunt, 712 Wyman, Jane, 999, 1133
Memphis Belle, 1112 Wymore, Patrice, 649
The Men, 1045 Wynter, Dana, 263
Midway, 1111
Ministry of Fear, 713 X-Men, 265, 571, 572, 630, 1100–1104
Mrs. Miniver, 865
The Naked and the Dead, 1118 Yablans, Irwin, 231
Never So Few, 816 Yankee Doodle Dandy, 543–45, 587, 588,
Objective Burma, 1118 616, 1014
Okinawa, 1118 A Yank in Vietnam, 1111, 1119
Operation Pacific, 1118 The Yarn Princess, 1049
The Pacific, 1121 Yates, David, 236

1224
 Index

Yates, Herbert, 407 Young, Robert, 712

The Year of Living Dangerously, 665 The Young Savages, 656, 1048
Year of the Dragon, 810 Young, Sean, 579
Year of the Gun, 657 The Young Stranger, 656
Yellow, 939 Young, Terence, 52
Yentl, 813, 990 You Only Live Once, 712
Yezierska, Anzia, 985 You Only Live Twice, 52, 53, 1050
Yolanda and the Thief, 15 You’re a Big Boy Now, 608
You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet (Sarris), 791 Your Show of Shows, 583
You Are There, 656 Youth without Youth, 609
You Can’t Take It with You, 594 You’ve Got Mail, 455, 643, 1061
Young, Clara Kimball, 1131 Yowlachie, Chief, 1020
Young Communist League, 521–22
Young Deer, James, 1018 Zabka, William, 287
Younger, Walter Lee, 777 Zaillian, Steven, 10, 1080
Young Frankenstein, 584, 1065, 1067 Zane, Billy, 496
Young, Gig, 88 Zanuck, Darryl, 7, 100, 217–19,
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, 258 246, 784, 867–69
Young Mr. Lincoln, 461, 652 Zay, Jean, 913
The Young Racers, 608 Z Cars, 799

1225
This page intentionally left blank
 ABOUT THE EDITOR

PHILIP C. DIMARE is a lecturer in the departments of Humanities and History at

California State University, Sacramento. He has published numerous articles and book
chapters on Religious Studies, Multicultural Studies, and American History. He is the
General Editor for the forthcoming ABC-CLIO offerings Encyclopedia of Religion
and Politics in America and Ethnic America on Film: The Complete Resource, and is com-
pleting work on a two-volume U.S. history text, American Visions: A History of the
American People. He is also working on a new book, Cinemas of Turmoil: American
Myth-Making and Hollywood Genre Films.

1227
This page intentionally left blank
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Abbott, Alan C., Indiana University Southeast

Adams, Michael, City University of New York, Graduate Center
Aldred, B. Grantham, Flashpoint Academy
Amanatullah, Ihsan, San Francisco State University
Arnett, Robert, Old Dominion University
Bach, Vicky, Independent Scholar
Baltz, Laëtitia, Bordeaux Institute of Political Studies
Bausch, Katharine, York University
Beeler, Karin, University of Northern British Columbia
Bettinson, Gary, Lancaster University
Bischoff, Sarah, Rice University
Bouchard, Jen Westmoreland, Normandale Community College
Brandon, James M., Hillsdale College
Brégent-Heald, Dominique, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Buckaloo, Derek N., Coe College
Burke, Anna, University of Houston
Cadwallader, Robin L., Saint Francis University of Pennsylvania
Calhoun, Lucas, Independent Scholar
Camardella, Michele, Independent Scholar
Capuzza, Jamie, Mount Union College
Cooledge, Dean R., University of Maryland Eastern Shore
Coons, Lorraine, Chestnut Hill College
Corzine, Nathan M., Purdue University
Coulter, Michael L., Grove City College
Cowgill, Robert, Augsburg College
Cristian, Réka M., University of Szeged
Curran, Daniel, Independent Scholar
Dean, Adam, Lynchburg College
Delmont, James, University of Nebraska at Omaha

1229
List of Contributors

Donelan, Carol, Carleton College

Dragon, Zoltán, University of Szeged
Duren, Brad L., Oklahoma Panhandle State University
Eaklor, Vicki L., Alfred University
Ertuna-Howison, Irmak, Independent Scholar
Faubion, Michael, University of Texas-Pan American
Fridirici, Katherine Ann, Saint Joseph’s University
Gaia, Susan de, Independent Scholar
Gaines, Mikal, The College of William and Mary
Gallogly, Caitlin, Independent Scholar
Gauthier, Jennifer L., Randolph College
Geller, Theresa L., Grinnell College
Georgas, Helen, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Graham, Sean, University of Ottawa
Guest, Elise, University of Ottawa
Hagen, W. M., Oklahoma Baptist University
Hajdik, Anna Thompson, University of Texas at Austin
Hall, Richard A., Columbus State University
Hanel, Rachael, Minnesota State University, Mankato
Harris, Amy M., Purdue University
Hartsock, Ralph, University of North Texas
Heiney, Bernadette Zbicki, Lock Haven University
Heiney, James, Lock Haven University
Hollyfield, Jerod Ra’Del, Louisiana State University
Holst, Erika, Curator, Springfield Art Association
Howard, Ella, Armstrong Atlantic State University
Howe, Tonya, Marymount University, Arlington
Hughes, Richard L., Illinois State University
Jennings, Arbolina L. Texas Southern University
Johnson, Charles, Valdosta State University
Johnson, Marilynn S., Boston College
Keenan, Richard C., University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Professor Emeritus
Kennedy-Shaffer, Alan, Independent Scholar
Keramitas, Dimitri, European Business School
Kern, Kevin F., University of Akron
Kirkby, Ryan J., University of Waterloo
Kte’pi, Bill, Independent Scholar
Kvet, Bryan, Kent State University
Lair, Meredith H., George Mason University
Leib, Karl, Christian Brothers University
Lemberg, Diana, Yale University
Lilla, Rick, Lock Haven University
Locke, Joseph, Rice University
Longmore, Paul K., San Francisco State University

1230
 List of Contributors

Lyons-Hunt, Jennifer, Austin Community College

MacLeod Jr., Douglas C., Fulton Montgomery Community College
MacPhail, Kelly, Université de Montréal
Maffitt, Kenneth F., Kennesaw State University
Malick, Robert W., Harrisburg Area Community College
Martin, Carey, Liberty University
McGee, J. Bruce, California State University, Sacramento
Miller, Cynthia J., Emerson College
Mokdad, Linda, University of Iowa
Morrison, Jennifer K., Oklahoma State University
Muchnick, Barry Ross, Yale University
Mullin, John M., McMaster University
Murguia, Salvador, Miyazaki International College
Neumann, Caryn E., University of Ohio
Nordfjörd, Björn, University of Iceland
Nutter, Kathleen Banks, Stony Brook University
O’Neill, Benjamin, Independent Scholar
Parham, Claire Puccia, Siena College
Parker, Chad H., University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Paul, Andrew, University of Minnesota
Payne, Rodger M., University of North Carolina, Asheville
Pelkey, Stanley C., II, Western Michigan University
Petrovic, Paul D., Northern Illinois University
Petrovic, Sarah N., Northern Illinois University
Picarelli, Enrica, University of Naples, “L’Orientale”
Platzner, Robert, California State University, Sacramento
Poole, W. Scott, College of Charleston
Popowski, Mark D., Collin College
Poxon, Judith, Sacramento City College
Puckett, Caleb, Emporia State University
Redding, Kimberly A., Carroll University
Ribitsch, Daniela, Lycoming College
Rippy, Marguerite, Marymount University, Arlington
Ritzenhoff, Karen A., Central Connecticut State University
Roberts, Van, Mississippi University for Women
Robinson, Michael G., Lynchburg College
Robinson, Robert C., University of Georgia
Rohrer, James, University of Nebraska-Kearney
Rolls, Albert, Touro College
Roman, James, CUNY, Hunter College
Sarlin, Eric L., Independent Scholar
Saucier, Jeremy K., St. Bonaventure University
Sawyer, Gloria, Chicago State University
Sayres, Laurie Chin, University of Northern Colorado

1231
List of Contributors

Schaub, Joseph Christopher, College of Notre Dame of Maryland

Schlotterbeck, Jesse, University of Iowa
Sewell, Matthew, Minnesota State University, Mankato
Shanadi, Govind, University of Mount Union
Sheidlower, Scott, York College/CUNY
Shonk, Kenneth, University of Wisconsin-Superior
Sim, Gerald S., Florida Atlantic University
Simonton, Katie, Santa Clara University
Sinha, Babli, Kalamazoo College
Smith, Tom, University of Edinburgh
Stevens, Kyle, University of Pittsburgh
Stone, Christopher D., University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc
Tibbetts, John C., University of Kansas
Tumpek-Kjellmark, Katharina, Grand View University
Van Riper, A. Bowdoin, Southern Polytechnic State University
Varias, Alexander, Villanova University
Varley, Molly K. B., University of Montana, Missoula
Vella, Tinamarie, City University of New York
Vezzola, Mark, San Diego Mesa College
Walker, Elsie, Salisbury University
Weiner, Robert G., Texas Tech University
Williams, Hettie, Monmouth University
Williams, Victoria, Independent Scholar
Wisniewski, K. A., Cecil College
Woodard, Jennie, University of Maine
Wynne, Ben, Gainesville State College
York, Helen M., University of Maine
Youmans, Joyce M., Independent Scholar

1232