Veronica Pravadelli, Classic Hollywood: Lifestyles and Film Styles of American Cinema 1930–1960

Abstract

This book by Veronica Pravadelli is an impressive undertaking, which effectively confronts critical approaches to classical Hollywood. Its core aim – ‘to historicize classical American cinema’s modes of representation’ (p. 5) – most directly challenges David Bordwell et al.’s essential theory of a classical form and style that consistently framed an era spanning six decades to 1960. Pravadelli audaciously tackles the limitations of this foundational position, exploring through a myriad theoretical approaches the shifting contexts of social norms, attitudes and definitions of identity that, she argues, play out in cinematic forms that are often the antithesis of classicism. The chapters providing the most convincing support for Pravadelli’s assertion are those that explore 1930s Hollywood cinema, in which she argues that the decade can be defined by a first half acutely tied to notions of spectacle founded in early cinema, and a second wherein the formalities of classicism take shape. Here, and throughout the book, the breadth and precision of the author’s arguments are consistently impressive as she draws them through historical context and close analysis of form, structure and style, making clear how the latter is born directly out of shifting cultural attitudes and social norms. Considering both the treatment of women as visual spectacle and the focus on female narratives in early 1930s cinema alongside the USA’s experience of modernity, she argues for a necessarily gendered reading of spectacle quite specific to this historical moment. Examining the opening imagery in George Cukor’s 1932 film What Price Hollywood? (a tale of film stardom predating his 1937 A Star is Born), which combines images of the lead character’s body with fan magazine photos and the character’s mirroring makeup routine, Pravadelli explains how the stylistic device of the ‘urban dissolve’ aims to position this budding star as a representative of dynamic, modern, urban womanhood and the cultural significance of Hollywood and its fandom. The precision of her analysis clearly outlines how stylistic devices, historical attitudes towards gender and the city, and the blossoming relationship between cinema and audience combine to demand highly specific readings of the position of spectacle during this period.