Cary Grant Research Articles

Re-Envisioning the Artist Hero Through Two Cole Porter Biopics

Songwriter Cole Porter is unusual in having had two biopics based on his life: Night and Day (1946) starring Cary Grant, and De-Lovely (2004), starring Kevin Kline. The differences in the treatment of the character of Cole Porter between the films are striking, and indicate a change in the way that society envisions its artists, and the very act of creativity. Night and Day was conceived partly as a showcase of Porter's songs, but also as a means of providing inspiration to soldiers returning wounded from World War II, based on Porter's recovery from a traumatic riding accident. It depicts Porter as an everyman following a trajectory of achievement, from having little to great success, which was positioned as easy to emulate. De-Lovely, on the other hand, is about the relationship between Porter and his wife Linda, and the way that his creativity was influenced by his changing relationships with various people. Drawing on the work on biopics of scholars such as G.F.Custen, together with research into the shifting ideas of how creativity operates and is popularly understood, this article uses these biopics as case studies to examine the representation of changing concepts of the artist and the act of creativity through Hollywood film. It also considers how these changing conceptions and representations connect to shifts in American society.

A Short History of Celebrity (review)

Reviewed by: A Short History of Celebrity Aaron Jaffe A Short History of Celebrity. Fred Inglis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. x + 311. $29.95 (cloth). If the word means anything, celebrity gets at something different from fame. Unlike fame, for example, it's difficult to say with any certainty if celebrity is any good. It's hard to get close enough to tell. Celebrity organizes feelings for people we don't know, after all, intimacy with strangers, as Richard Schickel says. Unnerving examples of the known nobodies of modernity, celebrities seem to carry with them a reflexive sense of irritation. There's a need to append disclaimers whenever they're up for consideration: love 'em or hate 'em, they're here to stay. The convulsions of celebrity, borrowing an image from Djuna Barnes, are like "the fluids of the oyster, that must cover [an] itch with a pearl."1 And, it's not an accident that the Hollywood system prefers the term stars. As Colin MacCabe notes, it dresses up "crucial ambiguity" in the concept. Namely, celebrity value is value injected with risk: "Today's celebrity is tomorrow's nobody. Today's nobody is tomorrow's celebrity. Such a notion of change seems fundamentally democratic; celebrity is a fame that everybody can enjoy."2 If one of celebrity's cardinal qualities is that it captures the very ambivalence of its value, the same can't be said for fame. Fame designates an unalloyed good, a test of time, withstood. Fame heralds, celebrity has side-effects and hidden workings. Fame has an opposite—infamy, or bad fame. With celebrity, badness is already on-board—inevitably, inexorably it fades, expires, goes stale. Mel Gibson? Who? One useful distinction between fame and celebrity is that the latter approximates immortality, the old virtue of being forever, while the former aspires to ubiquity, the new value of being everywhere, which all too quickly spills into over-exposure and semiotic overkill. Fred Inglis's Short History of Celebrity is an intelligent, well written, and wide-ranging book, hopping smartly from discussions of Elizabeth I's coronation, Lord Byron, and Sarah Bernhardt, to reflections on Cary Grant, Princess Diana, Oprah Winfrey, and Tiger Woods. Rightly, Inglis argues that celebrity is tangled up with modernity. It's new but not brand new. His account gives it 250+ years in the making, dished out from a long simmering soup-pot of democratic, city-dwelling sentiments for theatrical spectacle, fashion and the romantic cult of personality. Decidedly, this version of The Long Now shifts the explanatory emphasis away from later technical developments. Inglis's account isn't interested (enough) in the role of the rise of photographic image and new forms of professional authority in making celebrities. One might invoke Walter Benjamin here but even Gilbert Seldes knew that something was afoot. Seldes didn't name celebrity per se alongside slapstick and comic strips in The 7 Lively Arts, but its work is tangled in each of the seven—the new vernacular media of modernism—anatomized in his 1924 study. The ways mass-mediated celebrity warps the empire of words and things deserves more attention than Inglis gives it. In effect, celebrity is the ultimate fan fiction. So, it should be no surprise that this short history of celebrity is short on theory (about the engines of celebrity, authorship, and celebrification and its attendant audience structures) and long on celebrity stories. The learned historian himself serves as a vital receiver of celebrity's strong signal, a high fidelity tuner, which—in its rebroadcast of Diana's death, for instance, or Seamus Heaney's sanctification—often resembles an all-too-marveled fan testimony. "[S]tories about celebrities must and should grip us," he avers, "fastidious distaste will not do; these people have things to tell us about the meaning of our lives" (104). Indeed, despite its title, Inglis's book isn't so much a short history of celebrity as it is a short history of celebrities. History-as-celebrity-fanzine is a suggestive gloss on DeMan's literary modernity after literary history. Despite Inglis's assertion of a poet ("Famous Seamus") as a last, consummate example of celebrity...

Wild Things

In an early scene from genre-bender film Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986), protagonist Charles Driggs (JeffDaniels) sits at ease in an upscale family restaurant. He is enjoying a final drink and a piano-andviolin duet playing Bach's Minuet in G Major lightly in the background before rejoining his new companion, Lulu (Melanie Griffith), who has promised to pick up the tab for their meal on her way out. Charlie (as Lulu refers to him) tips his glass pleasantly at a fellow diner, relaxing back into his chair against an enormous window filled with idyllic green countryside. The accompanying classical air unmistakably reflects his comfort and control, the first time since he has embarked on his wild ride with the raucous, domineering Lulu that the soundtrack has so flattered his preferred image of himself. But when Charlie innocently attempts to leave, he learns that Lulu has played a trick on him, telling the restaurant hostess that 'the gentleman will take care of the bill'. Having already exhausted his cash, Charlie cannot pay, leaving him to deal with the menacing proprietor and the still more threatening cook blocking his exit; in the meantime, Lulu sits just outside the entrance at the wheel of her convertible, rocking back and forth to the thumping popular music she is always playing. Lulu goads Charlie to make a fateful choice: will he cut and run to rejoin her, or will he somehow contrive to play the conventionally chivalrous part she has - to his enormous discomfiture - mischievously cast him in?Something Wild works, often with unsettling simultaneity, as an improbable romance, a road trip comedy of small-town American manners, and a foreboding, violent doppelganger thriller. Characteristically, the scene presenting Charlie's dilemma at Mom and Dad's restaurant uses the soundtrack to connect viewers meaningfully to Charlie's experience. The film charts Charlie's transformation from nebbish Wall Street businessman to the unlikely chivalric hero who rescues Lulu in the film's climactic scene by once and for all dispatching Ray (Ray Liotta), her exhusband and Charlie's violent underworld counterpart. Throughout this journey, the soundscape and the primarily diegetic score in particular prove essential; Ray's very debut in the film synchronises carefully with Charlie's full and final embrace of all that Lulu represents, as the improbably odd couple sway together on the dance floor at her high school reunion. As is the case with Cary Grant's David Huxtable in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), the camera consistently treats Charlie as a comic spectacle, a man in usually humbling and only partially successful search of his masculinity. His quest for his manhood pairs him with a woman whose independence and capriciousness repeatedly expose his shortcomings, enchaining him (comically and helplessly) to her will. And Lulu's ability to tantalise and control Charlie so irresistibly arises consistently from the soundscapes in which she immerses him.Another 1986 movie which serves up an unsettlingly comic and violent vision of small-town America uses the songtrack perhaps even more pointedly to simultaneously inspire and stymie its male protagonist in his efforts to play the manly hero. In David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) gets himself into serious trouble by pursuing a dubious interest in the nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who, it turns out, is caught up in a nightmarish abduction plot orchestrated by the brutally unhinged Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). In the deadly course of events which ensues, Jeffrey develops differently intimate relationships with both Dorothy and Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of the local detective, initially confident that he can play the dashing sleuth with both women, but putting himself in deadly peril as events spin out of his control. In the course of Jeffrey's attempts to play the hero, Lynch uses several musical set-pieces - two involving Dorothy's performance of the film's title track at the Slow Club, and another featuring a tour-de-force lip-synch of Roy Orbison's 'In Dreams' - to freeze Jeffrey in a mix of fascination and dread, the wouldbe hero reduced to a helpless spectator caught in the glare of competing emotions. …

Max Ophuls and the Limits of Virtuosity: On the Aesthetics and Ethics of Camera Movement

Less than two years after the screening of the first films in December 1895, the moving camera had already become a prominent feature of cinema. Cameras were placed on moving sidewalks and elevators, on the front of trams, boats, and (especially) trains; they constituted one of the main attractions in early cinema.1 And yet, despite their prominence within the history of cinema, camera movements have remained surprisingly marginal and elusive in critical work. Often discussed within analyses of films and filmmakers, they are rarely the explicit subject of analyses themselves. Part of the difficulty, I suspect, has to do with the sheer variety of things that camera movements do. Most often, they function to establish a sense of space within a continuous temporal duration, all the while generating an expressiveness that works in conjunction with the events or dialogue taking place. The single shot that comprises the embrace between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) is exemplary in this regard, as Hitchcock uses an unbroken and mobile shot

The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System

The Illusion of Continuity:Active Perception and the Classical Editing System Todd Berliner (bio) and Dale J. Cohen (bio) Introduction In the movie the matrix (1999), characters experience a completely virtual world—created by sending electrical signals directly to their spinal cord and brain—that contains the sensations of the "real" world but without a corresponding physical environment. The psychology behind this scenario is essentially accurate. Our experience of the physical world exists in our brains, and a controlled stimulus can cue our brains to experience a world that is virtually physical. Virtual realities can exist because the brain does not experience the physical environment directly. Information in the environment exists in the form of physical energy. Cells in the brain, however, communicate through the release of neurochemicals. Each of our five senses contains "receptor cells" that translate the information in the environment into the neurochemical language that the brain can understand.1 For example, specialized cells on the retina, called photoreceptors, respond to the physical energy of light by releasing neurochemicals, thereby converting the physical energy into the language of the brain. Creating a virtual world involves artificially stimulating the cells that lead to the brain in the same way that receptor cells would. The Matrix scenario is an emblem of the cinematic experience. The sights and sounds presented in the cinema have the potential to stimulate the visual and auditory receptor cells in ways that are similar enough to those experienced in the physical world that, under specified circumstances, many of our perceptual processes2 do not distinguish between stimuli generated by the cinema and those generated by physical environments. When organized according to the principles of classical continuity editing,3 the cinema stimulates a series of cognitive processes4 that construct a coherent model of on-screen space. Indeed, the cognitive processes that generate spatial coherence for classical cinema spectators are, this article shall demonstrate, the very same cognitive processes that generate coherence for spectators in the physical world. This article proposes a new model of how the human perceptual system extracts coherence from discontinuous cinematic images edited according to classical continuity principles. Based on the current understanding of real-world perception, our model of spatial continuity lays out the cognitive basis of classical editing conventions. Drawing on research from both film studies and perceptual psychology, this article explains how classical editing devices exploit and accommodate the cognitive processes people use to perceive the physical world. [End Page 44] The field of film studies has seen a variety of approaches to explaining the predominance of the classical editing system, including psychoanalytic (Mulvey, Silverman, Oudart, Dayan), semiotic and structuralist (Metz, John Carroll), auteurist (Bazin), and ideological approaches (Baudry, Heath, Zavarzadeh), and many theorists combine several different approaches. But none of this research answers the following straightforward question: if you are watching The Philadelphia Story (1940), and you see a shot of C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) at the front of a house, followed by a shot of a front door opening (see Figures 10 and 11), what are the cognitive processes that lead you to perceive the two depicted spaces as connected? Film textbooks, in explaining the continuity system, will note eyeline matches and other narrative and stylistic devices, but identifying continuity devices does not explain how and why the spectator perceives continuity. Our model does. It addresses a key concern of the classical continuity system that no previous scholars have addressed comprehensively: how the fundamental conventions of classical editing accommodate our perceptual and cognitive processes and stimulate the perception of continuity. The principles of Irvin Rock's inferential theory of perception, often termed "constructive perception," supply the foundation of our approach (Indirect, Logic). Simplified, constructive perception holds that perception is essentially a problem-solving process. Here, the perceptual system builds models of the world by proposing and testing hypotheses based on sensory input. Film scholar David Bordwell employs the same principles in his research on space perception in the cinema, particularly in his Narration in the Fiction Film (99–146), and perceptual psychologists Daniel Levin and Daniel Simons ("Perceiving Stability") similarly discuss the role of constructive perception in their research on spatial continuity. Psychologists Julian Hochberg...

The Dance of Suspense: Sound and Silence in North by Northwest

ALFRED HITCHCOCK HAS BEEN FREQUENTLY commended by critics forthe purposeful, intuitive, effective use of music in his films. Recently, significant attention has been given to his use of musicas an integral component of film's narrative structure. This renewed focus is due, in large part, to popular critical success of Jack Sullivan's Music (2006), a book focusing solely on this aspect of director's considerable artistry. Further illumination explication of contributions made by composer Bernard Herrmann to one of most critically acclaimed films, North by Northwest, will encourage additional consideration of subtle intricate role of music in film. In an interview with Steven Watts early in his career, Hitchcock expressed his intrigue with possibilities of using music in ways that were more subtle persuasive than few uses traditionally assigned to music- for example, numbers in film musicals orthe slow, sappy music used for love scenes (242). He recognized psychological potential of music to reveal a character's true feelings when words were not enough, to establish a mood or ambiance for a scene, to anticipate events, to increase excitement. This appreciation for emphasis on film music was, ironically, an outgrowth of his experiences with silent filmmaking. He explained to Watts, One of greatest emotional factors in silent cinema was musical accompaniment (242). His appreciation forthe power of music compelled Hitchcock to employ well-known, serious composers to create scores for his pictures, especially his arrival in America in 1940. Unlike most film directors, Hitchcock was known to work closely with his composers, often providing them with detailed, sometimes witty music notes before scoring even began (Sullivan xvi). The director also made a practice of consulting with his composers during filming made specific suggestions, providing close direction, during actual scoring process. Hitchcock sometimes insisted on certain sounds or types of music for his scores, but he was willing to entertain suggestions from his composers- in case of Psycho (i960), famously acceding to Bernard Herrmann's insistence on scoring showermurder scene, which director had originally intended to be silent. Hitchcock was interested in incorporating upto-date popular music, when appropriate. He eschewed stuffy, culturally snobbish attitude held by some filmmakers studios that all film music must be composed for performed by an orchestra. Also unlike his contemporaries, he expressed his belief in power of silence indicated that presence of music could be used to maximize power of silence. Silence is often very effective, he told Watts in 1933, and its effect is heightened by proper handling of music before after (242). These concepts- primary importance of incorporating scores by contemporary art-music composers as well as judicious use of popular music silence- inform music of North by Northwest (1959), one of greatest comedy-thrillers. North by Northwest was fourth final project with Cary Grant, it emerged as Hitchcock's grand summation of every 'wrong man' thriller (Smith 226). The film was nominated for five Academy Awards but did not win in any of its categories. The score was composed by Bernard Herrmann, who collaborated with Hitchcock on a total of eight films; North by Northwest was fifth Hitchcock-Herrmann project. According to Jack Sullivan, the composer director were both at top of their game at outset of this endeavor (235). The score wasn't Herrmann's only contribution to this particular film, however. During one of their previous collaborations, Herrmann had introduced Hitchcock to his friend Ernest Lehman, a screenwriter whose previous successes included Sabrina (Billy Wilder, 1954) The King I (Walter Lang, 1956). …

Production Values: Fordism and Formalism in North by Northwest

This essay analyzes the aesthetics of capitalist economics at the threshold of the transition from fordist to postfordist modes of production. The essay organizes this analysis around a close reading of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film North by Northwest . At stake is the relation between aesthetic productions which engage the economic base and thematize this engagement. In making this claim, the notion of capital's "axiomatic"--a concept by which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari designate the relative autonomy of the economic base--is employed to examine the way that, from as early as the 1950s, U. S. capitalism's prodigious industries of entertainment and popular culture began to change to ungrounded, flexible, representational economies. An instance of this shift is the emerging pre-eminence of advertising, which the essay finds signaled in the "value" attributed to Cary Grant's Roger O. Thornhill in the farcical spy plot. This value is referred to as "advertising agency," and signals the collapse of such discrete spheres as the economy and state, as well as of production and consumption. Because of its historical position and its content, North by Northwest is a remarkable text for investigating the transformation of twentieth-century economic modes to a dereferentialized form which we continue to inhabit.

Dream Home: Remodeling American Expectations with Model Houses

In the years immediately following World War II, the model home became more than a simple promotional tool. During an era of social transition in which women's roles were in flux, technology and manufacturing were making rapid advances, and returning troops dramatically increased the demand for homes, houses and housing became important topics nationally, and the built environment responded to these conditions. Even with these trends, though, the popularity of model homes at this time is striking. While the model home had served as a promotional purpose for decades, the phenomenon exploded along with the housing boom of the 1940s and 1950s. Model homes became increasingly accessible. Neighborhoods and whole communities such as the Levittowns sprang from the concept. Not only were hundreds of model homes available to visit, they were also extremely visible in printed media, including a wide variety of magazines. Model houses played a significant role in an evolving domestic ideal as Americans' expectations for their houses changed profoundly. American-built landscape changed dramatically during the post World War II era. GI Bill allowed thousands of returning veterans opportunities for home ownership that would have been inconceivable in earlier eras, and their return from war increased already significant demand, which spurred the construction of thousands of new houses around the country. Such unprecedented development offered broad economic opportunities and competition while also allowing increased interest in and discussion of domestic space and its meaning for Americans. This wide-scale focus on the acquisition of domestic space redefined expectations. Domestic appliances that were unusual before the war became de rigueur in this era, raising demand among American consumers. While certainly houses had embodied meaning beyond shelter, houses gained new cultural significance. Spending on household furnishings and appliances increased disproportionately relative to consumer spending in general (May 147). standards of the preceding decade were overtaken by the media, developer-driven expectations, and shifting cultural values. concept of the began to take a more central place in the American psyche. propagation of these exemplary images was widespread. Evidence of the proliferation of the ideal took many forms. Visiting these idealized domestic environments became a leisure activity in its own right. Houses were increasingly depicted as objects to be admired. For instance, two model houses displayed at Minneapolis' Walker Art Center and at a similar exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art exemplified this new attitude toward domestic space. This idea of the resonated in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Similarly, the 1946 book Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House was a bestseller and became a movie blockbuster in 1948 with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy as the hapless homebuilders. At the same time, the term was becoming more prominent in periodicals. Articles such as House Beautiful's The Low-Down on Your Dream from 1945 served to whet the public appetite, suggesting that a custom built home was an accessible route for first-time home buyers (Colean 138). With the proliferation of model houses, the paradigm linking ideal lives with houses was established. Clearly, the prevalence of model homes cannot be explained by economic conditions alone. period in which model houses came to the fore was also defined by shifts in the social status quo. relationship between model houses of the era and women's roles is particularly revealing. In an era of potential dramatic cultural change, model houses suggested an antidote to the social unknown by creating self-contained, seemingly controlled domestic environments. During World War II, women were encouraged to join the workforce. After the war, though, perceptions of working women were more ambivalent as family and domestic life gained social capital. …

The Inside Game

The Inside Game Christopher Knopf (bio) Just east of Beverly Hills, on the north side of Santa Monica Boulevard, was a tailor shop. I say was. Whether it’s still there today, I’ve no idea, but during the ‘fifties and ‘sixties it was a Mecca for screen and TV writers. The tailor was Manny Dwork. And Manny loved writers. So much so the entire second floor of this two-story fading, yellow stucco building was a warren of offices reserved exclusively for writers of screen and TV for rentals hard to find anywhere else in town. Writers would come and go, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, yet forever returning, it seemed; some renowned, others not, but all sharing a bond and collegiality. There was Emmy-winner Phil Sharp (All in the Family); Oscar-nominees Nate Monaster (That Touch of Mink with Cary Grant and Doris Day), Arthur Ross (Brubaker with Robert Redford), and Walter Newman (Cat Ballou with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin, Ace in the Hole with Kirk Douglas, and Man with the Golden Arm with Frank Sinatra). Walter was one of two gurus in my life, Oscar-nominee Millard Kaufman (Bad Day at Black Rock) was the other. And there Walter was in my office door telling me of an assignment he couldn’t take, but was mine if I wanted—he’d sold me to producers. Robert Mitchum playing a simple man who comes to unwanted prominence in the Irish rebellion, etc. Mitchum, at this time in the early ‘sixties, was about as hot as Hollywood offered, shooting one film, a Western, with two more in the can awaiting release. Did I want to write a screenplay for him? After thirteen years of B and C movies, and some admittedly decent television, [End Page 425] I would now be elevated into the rarefied realm of Chayefsky, Trumbo, Wilder and Brackett. This was it! My time had come! I hurriedly broke down the story and met the producer, Raymond Stross, for dinner that night. Stross was every cliché Budd Schulberg ever invented. An Englishman, there were the gaudy clothes, Cuban cigar, the beautiful hooker. Charlie Feldman’s hooker, he proudly told me. There was also the hugely seductive smile, and the enthusiastic bobbing head, and “Yes! Yes!” to everything I told him I wanted to do. Except he wasn’t listening. And he was sweating. Some things in life are pretty clear signs. Like a temperature of 103. Or Raymond Stross sweating. But I was only thirty something, and still pretty green. So I met him, as agreed, on Mitchum’s set at MGM the following day as the morning shooting wrapped for lunch, and Mitchum, looking macho as hell in Levis, hogleg, and Stetson, lunged toward us. And past us. And into his trailer, slamming the door in our faces. Stross beamed. “Isn’t he capital?” And disappeared inside. And just as quickly came out again. Came out doesn’t quite capture it. Was ejaculated seems more the word. Eight o’clock tonight at Mitchum’s office, he told me, still that grin. Mitchum’s office was on the Sunset Strip. Outside it was a hall. There I sat listening to angry voices inside. At nine o’clock the door flew open and Tay Garnett, one very prominent, red-faced director (The Postman Always Rings Twice), stormed past me and out. I was beginning to get a message. But what? At ten o’clock Stross struck his beaming, sweating face out and summoned me inside. A half dozen people were in the room. Stross. And Riva, Mitchum’s statuesque executive secretary who this night had one responsibility: keep Mitchum’s glass filled. There were the three obligatory suits from the William Morris Agency, led by the respected Phil Kellog, all looking like they’d rather be anywhere else. [End Page 426] And there was Mitchum. He hadn’t changed from the set, was still in costume. He sat mid-room in his power chair, slouched on the small of his back, legs stretched out before him, Stetson slanted down completely hiding his face, drink hanging down at his side. He made no move to look...

Rio Bravo (review)

Reviewed by: Rio Bravo Scott Bukatman (bio) Rio Bravo by Robin Wood. British Film Institute2003. $14.95 paper; 96 pages The films of Howard Hawks have generated extraordinary writing over the years: Manny Farber, Robin Wood, Gerald Mast, Peter Wollen, Molly Haskell, Laura Mulvey, David Thomson, and various Cahiers du Cinéma writers have all contributed to this spectacular body of critical writing. What is it about Hawks that inspires such excellence? Perhaps the answer lies, in part, in the way Hawks's films prove resistant to numerous modes of film analysis: there are motifs, but no symbols; performances, but no mythic archetypes (or, rather, they create their own mythic archetypes); physicality, but little découpage; and, from the 1940s onward, little in the way of visual pyrotechnics. They dispense with the grand flourishes of an embodying camera or the rapid velocities of the movement-image. Nothing lurks in the shadows; there are no mysteries to be solved. The best way to get at a Hawks film is, really, to describe it, and to allow the sensibility of the film and its filmmaker to percolate through the prose. There is also the terse economy of the films themselves, which mitigates against critical bloviating. To write of Hawks's films is to be an initiate, an intimate, a member of the clan, part of the group. One need not be an Hitchcockian to write well about Hitchcock, but one does need to be a Hawksian to do a Hawks film any kind of justice. Robin Wood's exemplary analysis of Rio Bravo (1959) for the British Film Institute Film Classics series does full justice to this most "joyful" of films through an extended close reading in perfect sympathy with its object. Rio Bravo is a surprisingly difficult text to teach or write about: while it is easy to enjoy, it is resistant to all post-auteurist film theory. Wood takes a defiantly auteurist stance, which is perhaps not quite as radical as he imagines: film studies has, I think, circled back toward a more generous understanding of the auteur as something other than the structural trope that Peter Wollen once described, as a rather more self-aware individual working within particular institutional parameters (see, [End Page 166] for example, Joe McElhaney's recent The Death of Hollywood Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli).1 But while Wood performs an exemplary auteurist reading that situates Rio Bravo within the Hawksian oeuvre, he is primarily concerned with the specifics of the individual films, and in particular this one: the "realization" matters as much, if not more, than the grandly unifying themes that define Hawks's preoccupations. "The film," he writes, "consists of images within which actors move, gesture, talk, and what is crucial is the precise way in which they do these things, the precise movements, the precise inflections."2 Wood's emphasis is exactly right: there is arguably no other useful way to approach Rio Bravo. Thus, while Rio Bravo is placed as the last film of a trilogy that is preceded by Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and To Have and Have Not (1944), it is more than just a restatement of the thematics of the earlier works. In each of these films, an isolated group of men exists, their actions centered around a combination saloon/office/hotel and concerned with issues of bravery and competence. Into each of these settings, a woman enters who not only proves "good enough" to win the respect and acceptance of the group, but who also breaks down the resistance of the emotionally closed protagonist. But, as Wood notes, "Hawks repeats himself without ever quite repeating himself."3 Thus, "You can't fully understand Rio Bravo unless you have also understood Only Angels Have Wings,"4 because by the time of Rio Bravo, the existential preoccupations of Hawks's world, while indisputably present, are extraordinarily understated. Wood recognizes the ways in which Rio Bravo is a film about aging, community, regard, redemption, interdependence, and family, while hardly seeming to be about anything at all. To appreciate Rio Bravo, as Wood does, is to understand the different sexual presences embodied by Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne...

Making Light of the Dark: Understanding the World of His Girl Friday

Making Light of the Dark:Understanding the World of His Girl Friday James Walters (bio) The Meaning of Worlds In the final sentence of a study of performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Andrew Klevan makes claim for a particular achievement of the film's cast, whereby "they embrace [the plot's] linearity to create other dimensions, seamlessly, so that straightforward narratives become worlds" (102). Although focused closely on the special intricacy of the central performances in Hitchcock's film, Klevan's remark holds further value for the broader study of cinema, referencing the extent to which our horizons for speculation about a film's fictional world can often surpass the somewhat narrower concerns of plot development and, crucially, how such conjecture is profoundly influenced by the complex behavior of people in films. The following discussion expands on these two issues, outlining in precise terms some ways in which the actions and attitudes of characters in Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940) function to construct the tone and nature of the fictional world they inhabit and the extent to which an appreciation of this fundamentally shapes our understanding of Hawks's film. The intricate tenor of His Girl Friday's fictional world motivates its selection. Although undeniably comedic (often described as "screwball"), the film harbors elements that evoke a darker mood more usually associated with the melodramatic, resulting in a blend defined succinctly by Robin Wood as a "disturbing complexity of tone" (70). Although the play between Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) and Walter Burns (Cary Grant) in particular is a source of pleasure and amusement, a more oppressive environment exists around the characters, one that becomes entwined with the somewhat lighter story of their prolonged (re)courtship. This fusion originates, of course, from a series of creative choices that Hawks made in adapting His Girl Friday from the stage play The Front Page by Charles McArthur and Ben Hecht, of which a film had already appeared in 1931, directed by Lewis Milestone. Hawks's famous key decision was to change the gender of reporter Hildy Johnson from male to female (Bogdanovich 57). This transforms the story from one in which a controlling editor schemes to keep hold of his ace male reporter to one in which he wishes to claim back his ex-wife "in other capacities than that of a star reporter" (Wood 66). A central ramification of this alteration is that Hawks's film debates gender politics in a way that Milestone's film never attempts, exploring how a female reporter can exist within the ostensibly male world of newspaper reporting, an interest I return to later in my account of the film. Furthermore, the result of Hawks's decision is a narrative pattern focused far more on the dynamics of the relationship between Walter and Hildy, now male and female, involving a brand of effervescent, sparring dialogue for which Hawks had displayed his particular [End Page 90] comedic genius two years earlier with Bringing Up Baby (1938). In generic terms, this crucial shift blurs the film's status from belonging firmly to a cycle that deals with the ruthlessness and moral ambiguity of the press1 to incorporate traits strongly associated with romantic comedy, or more specifically still, the comedy of remarriage, as Stanley Cavell, in Pursuits of Happiness, has termed films of this kind (a concept discussed more fully in a further section of this article). The integration of these generic elements results in the thematic complexity that forms the basis for critical discussion in this article. Within this structure, the film's organization of space and narrative events results in a compound pattern of the comedic and the melodramatic, so that moments of inventive banter and improvised teasing become inextricably bound to darker instances involving desperate outbursts, near-suicide, and wrongfully ordered execution. Dismissing the uneasy integration of these events as merely symptomatic of screwball-comedy logic unhelpfully averts our attention from the precise nature of the film's narrative composition, providing a convenient but unfulfilling account. A more sustained appreciation of these contrasts, I suggest, is useful in understanding the film's playfulness and its oppressiveness and in explaining...

“A Queer Feeling When I Look at You”

In three classic Hollywood romantic comedies by openly gay director George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, we find constellations of non-traditional performances of gender and sexual orientation. Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940) offer both overt and subtle resistance to monogamous, heteronormative relationship structures through bisexual and other queerly configured romantic triangles. These three films share historical closeness, the pairing of two actors known for their highly gender-typed performances, and relationship triangles centered on a secondary male character that models an alternative gender/sexuality and thereby heightens the bisexual and queer implications of the text.

(G)Aping Women; Or, When A Man Plays The Fetish

(G)Aping Women; Or, When A Man Plays The Fetish Laura Hinton (bio) To gape (intransitive verb): to gaze stupidly or in open-mouthed surprise or wonder. Gape (noun): unfilled space or extent. —Merriam Webster's The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me. —Roland Barthes1 This paper began as a look at my attraction to Cary Grant. But it evolved into an analysis of Lucille Ball's nose. I wanted to ask: what happens when a female spectator looks at a man with desire? When a man plays the fetish, is his presumably heterosexual female spectator "aping" or imitating "man" looking upon his specular image, thus mimicking the cultural male gaze? Does her "ape" therefore reveal the gape in the classic Hollywood text of female desire—or does it reflect a woman's specificity? But I also wanted to ask: What distinguishes a male from a female fetish body, "the body of desire," to quote Christian Metz, whose "presence" stands in for the absence reproduced by the cinematic apparatus and its image?2 In its classic psychoanalytic definition, the fetish is a substitute for the missing maternal phallus, enabling the child to disavow his traumatic sight of "lack."3 Fetishism itself, as Laura Mulvey writes, is that "sequence of events" initiated specifically by male castration anxiety and its disavowal of sexual difference.4 So can a man play the fetish? Contemporary discussions about masculinity's representation in Hollywood suggest that men do, but with a difference.5 To be "a man," the male screen figure must project narcissistic ideality and control, as Steve Neale notes in his study of masculine spectacle. The larger-than-life masculine ideal exudes a confident "intact" ego, which distinguishes [End Page 174] a glamorous male from his female-fetish counterpart, whose tie to "lack" yields "little intrinsic value."6 Marc Vernet writes that "she" is but a "sign of an attempt to represent in the form of an object something that has disappeared or indeed never existed [the female phallus]."7 The female fetish is ever presented through cinematic shots of body fragmentation alternating with those that display her body's over-valuation through female masquerade. Cultural femininity's masquerade preserves the male gazer's disavowal, privileging "belief over knowledge," Metz concludes.8 Yet when a man plays the fetish, his particular "body of desire" complicates the cycle of disavowal and belief. The male figure cannot be articulated through a female-style fragmentation, but rather must reconfirm male narcissism's "construction of an ideal ego," in Neale's words.9 Still, if the male body is rarely subject to castration's "'set of processes' tied to . . . figural lack,"10 the male fetish must necessarily bear his own contradictions, hinting at its glamorous masquerade. So, linked to notions of feminine duplicity, the man who plays the fetish is the ultimate coquette: a narcissistic perfectionist who also undermines the Hollywood masculine ideal by hinting at erotic ambiguity and bisexuality. Through the crisis of cultural masculinity that ensues, the figure of the male fetish mirrors the visual ironies of the female spectator. These ironies I conceptualize as a "gap(e)," the figural "O" as "unfilled space or extent" that marks the impossibility of women's visual desire but also its potential placeholder in the Hollywood entertainment text. The female (g)ape might be dramatized by a woman starring in a film, who stares at the mesmerizing male fetish of her dreams with a wide (g)aping mouth. More ubiquitously, however, the female (g)ape is what women in front of the screen experience, not only in the implicit absence of their desire but in its reminder through the (g)aping look itself. The (g)ape is an ironic figure that encodes the visual conundrum of the female spectator as she peers at her desired object, in this case, a male fetish, which thus projects back the female spectator's own bisexuality and erotic oscillation. While the male fetish may represent bisexual desire, so, too, does the female look. As Mary Ann Doane has explored in her groundbreaking work on female masquerade, the female look is inherently bisexual—women "vamp it up," or cross...

Social Work in the Movies: Another Look

Until recently, no material was available in the literature that examined how and workers are presented on film or the development of these images over the years. Now we have available a pioneering, wide-ranging study by Freeman and Valentine (2004) that finally answers this need. Good as it is, however, the study suffers from a wide-ranging approach and a lack of focus. DEPTH VERSUS BREADTH Freeman and Valentine (2004) broadly investigated the image of in 47 films dating from the late 1930s to 1998, most made in the United States but some from other countries, such as the United Kingdom and, in one case, Hong Kong. Films were selected on the basis of two criteria: (1) the title social is used or (2) a character in the film performs a function that appears to be work. For a theoretical framework, they used an approach developed by feminist theoretician bell hooks called motivated representation (Freeman & Valentine). This study uses a much smaller sample (only U.S. films) and narrower criteria for selection (see the following discussion). For a theoretical framework, this analysis draws on the thought of another feminist theorist, Virginia Novarra, who discusses cultural attitudes toward in Western society, specifically the disjunction between men's and (Novarra, 1980). As will be evident in my conclusion, Novarra's does not contradict that of hooks but provides an additional lens through which filmic representations of as work can be viewed. METHOD Thirteen films were selected for this study. The films were located by searching well-used Internet movie databases (such as www.tvguide.com/movies/database) and using standard film guides (Craddock, 2001; Martin & Porter, 2003) and well-known film history texts (Gabbard & Gabbard, 1999; Haskell, 1987). The following three criteria were used in film selection: (1) the film should prominently feature either a worker or someone performing a activity; (2) the film should be an entertainment film made for a general audience; and (3) the film should be available on video, DVD, or both. Only U.S. films were considered as the study's focus was the image of in U.S. popular media. THE FILMS Because this study was completed before the publication of Freeman and Valentine's (2004) work, three of the films examined for this article were also discussed by Freeman and Valentine (A Thousand Clowns, Chains of Gold, and Utilities) and are not reviewed. Two films identified as suitable were unavailable for review and were omitted (Past Midnight and Losing Isaiah) but are discussed by Freeman and Valentine. Listed chronologically, the remaining films are as follows: * Ann Vickers (1933)--Based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis, the film portrays the trials and personal struggles of worker Ann Vickers (played by Irene Dunne, one of the most popular actresses of the 1930s and 1940s) as she endures personal tragedy and bureaucratic harassment in her attempts to administer and reform a women's prison. * Blossoms in the Dust (1941)--Greer Garson, one of the most popular actresses of the 1940s, was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as Edna Gladney, founder of the Texas Children's Home and Aid Society of Ft. Worth, Texas, in the early 1900s and champion of many causes long associated with work, such as child welfare, child protection, proper housing for children, and adoption. * The Bishop's Wife (1947)--Cary Grant plays an angel who comes to earth to assist a struggling bishop with his parish plans and duties. In the course of his work, Grant befriends and helps the bishop, his wife, and her young daughter adjust to difficulties in their relationships. When questioned about who he is, he identifies himself as a social service worker. …

My Young Aunts Have Lunch with Cary Grant, and: Capture the Flag, and: Flood

My Young Aunts Have Lunch with Cary Grant Looking exactly as he always looks, except for the open-necked shirt, Grant pauses in mid-spoonful of iced fruit cocktail in silver dish to ask Priscilla a question. Her beautiful profile looks exactly, or almost, the same today. The year is 1947. She is twenty, wears a gardenia in her dark hair. The businessman beside her, with the natty breastpocket handkerchief, has probably arranged all this. A client of my grandfather? Behind them, at duller tables, everyone's watching the photographer, or the back of the movie star's head. Anne Marie, my younger aunt, disappears at the photograph's edge. That's all right. In about three days she'll have her own Western adventure: getting clawed on the arm when she offers a sandwich to a grizzly in Yellowstone Park. [End Page 127] Capture the Flag I don't remember the game ever ending. Just the grey morning the day camp met in the barn, chose up teams, and we became scouts, spies, generals, foot soldiers. Don't remember either side keeping that rag of red calico, just leisurely hours of shouts, hand signals, dashes across tarry beach roads and the odd safety I felt being alone for a few minutes, not shy for a change or scared, as a newcomer, just crouched on damp pine needles at my hidden post, breathing hard, listening. [End Page 128] Flood On the morning of New Year's Eve I walked halfway up Winter Street in Boston before I noticed the flood from a burst water main that was pouring down the street from the corner of Park and Tremont. I'd just been to the new Immigration Museum on Milk Street, which I hadn't liked much, because wherever your feet step in the main hall it sets off a chattering in fake Irish or fake-a Italian from a dummy sitting on a steamer trunk, or beside a birdcage. A woman's voice at the back of the hall told over and over how her ancestors were brought here in chains, in the hold of a ship. But her voice crowded in with all of the other voices, so you couldn't really grasp what she was saying. Which was a problem, I decided, as I walked through the gray-brown waters that ran down Winter Street and up over the curb. All kinds of people: shoppers, teenagers, street vendors, store clerks at opened doors, were wondering at the water. But I was disliking, also, that three-screen, multimedia film they showed, with corny Ben Franklin pushing up his spectacles and acting as guide. When I left through the main hall I'd set off all the voices again, so I hurried outside, where I heard sirens but paid no attention, until here I am on Winter Street, sloshing through strange, rising waters – to the edge of my boots, to my ankles, then higher. The full flood water, of which Winter Street was only a tributary, was hurtling down Tremont past the Common. Up ahead I saw fire engines, police cars, people gathered to watch. Everyone seemed kind of on holiday, or beginning the New Year already. The subway was shut down. We couldn't go much of anywhere else. So I watched a while, with the crowd.

It's only a movie: Alfred Hitchcock: a personal biography

Alfred Hitchcock never wrote an autobiography and IT'S ONLY A MOVIE is as close to one as we will ever have. Drawn from years of interviews with Hitchcock his friends and the actors who worked with him on such classics as THE BIRDS, PSYCHO and REAR VIEW WINDOW, Charlotte Chandler has created a rich, complex, affectionate and honest picture of the man and his milieu. Chandler interviewed many of the stars who appeared in his films, among them Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, James Stewart, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Michael Redgrave, Sir John Gielgud, Tippi Hedren, James Mason, Kim Novak, Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh. IT'S ONLY A MOVIE is a rich, affectionate and honest look at the life of the master of suspense who made cinematic history.

Comments for the Czarina, and: Some Human Incident

Comments for the Czarina That night even the moon was living in a puddle, a milky, watered down version of nightscape, flapping its wings on the margins of murk. Someone somewhere was speaking of Cary Grant in a restaurant dressed in voodoo lilies: Vietnamien to L'Orangerie. "Well," said our river-pirate currently writing a survival guide to small engines, "It won't always be like buckshot dropping in a bucket." Meanwhile, a ways back in the same line a man was facing a long commute in colloquial Bulgarian, this rocket scientist with a Wall Street Focus to whom someone was whispering, "Excuse me, do you know the way to the rickshaw dealership?" then five minutes of weather and the melody of maritime tragedy on the radio as the clever-jack-chronicler, [End Page 150] who believes there is no one thing to which everything corresponds, cried out in his sleep, "forbici, forbici, forbici." Some Human Incident After the baby we knew more, knew Better, saw Kafka in the grillwork. An end to the Cockleshell days, madeleines, pearlstones, Duded up nights on the town. Hello Un – Easy, dream barriers, briars in the cornstarch. Foxholes appeared in the garden. Genies went jitterbug, even the Hawthorn was frantic. 70% of our town was Inflammable, the rest ready as tinder. Just as the bloomfield was about to blow, Ketchup catching on as a vegetable, the baby Left, struck out for paradise on his own, with Teddy Mounted in a bag on a stick. Next, please, we shouted after him but felt empty. Oh, the desserts were just: a hollow Palazzo, eggshells on the loudspeaker, Queer baby ghosts that hovered at the periphery. Right was wrong ever after. Still, we thought he might come back To us. We kept his room going, Underscored his name on the mailbox. Virtually every night we ate his favorite foods – [End Page 151] Wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut. Eventually X replaced Y. We became him. We were where he got to. You wouldn't understand. We don't. There's Zip in the literature and we've looked it up.

Whan That Aprill

VVtoanJliaLApiilJ Charles Havert Noah has promised to help bury the Olcotts first thing in the morning . As he waits in the kitchen for Arthur, he watches Alice at the sink. She pours a brown paper bag of strawberries into a copper colander . One by one, she picks at the pyramid of strawberries—odd shaped, tumorous—prizing out the leafy tops with the point of a paring knife. She slices each berry down the middle and sets the halves to soak in a bowl of brandy. The empty bag lies tipped on its side, blotted with juice, full of sunlight. Last night Mark brought the strawberries, along with the news about Ben and Claire Olcott. Their children, Jake and Julia, were spending the night with Mark's family, and he'd dropped by the Olcotts' to fetch Jake's teddy bear. Ben's note was taped to the front door. Mark found the bag of strawberries on the kitchen table and their bodies in the bedroom. Then he recruited a burial crew from what remained of the neighborhood. Once Mark had left, Alice told Noah that they needed to talk, that she had something to tell him, something about Ben. She told him that she'd slept with Ben seven times, five in Ben's bed and twice in their own. The affair, though she didn't like to call it that, had begun with the troubles—after the refinery bombings and the first quarantines—and ended four months ago, in April. It hadn't been love, she said; it was just for fun, a distraction. They hadn't been lovers so much as playmates , and though they hadn't played often, they had played, and now she wanted Noah to know. The details poured out of her in a Pentecostal rush, and though he knew he ought to hate them—hate seemed in order—he couldn't hate her or a rival so newly dead. Just the other day he'd seen Ben, redfaced , drenched in sweat, pushing a lawn mower across his front yard. Nobody mowed lawns anymore. The two struck him as such an unlikely coupling. Ben was so small, so neat and contained, whereas Alice was drawn to a larger scale, big-boned and long-waisted, expan17 Ecotone: reimagining place sive. When he tried to imagine the two of them at play, he pictured a tiny Ben clambering over the landscape ofAlice's body, like Cary Grant scaling the face of Mount Rushmore. "I love you," Alice said, once she'd reached the end of her confession . "What?" "I love you, Noah. I've always loved you. I always will love you." "Why?" "I love you because you're an honorable person," she said. "You're the most honorable person I've ever known." Just then he wanted to slap her—never before had he raised a hand to her—but she grasped his hand and held it to her cheek, and when she let go, he kept it there. "Love is loaves and fishes," she said. "What?" "Love." She took his face roughly in her hands. "This is important, Noah. Are you listening to me?" "I'm listening." "Love is not of this world. Love is not finite. Love is—" Her hands flew away, scooping the air. "Loaves and fishes. Do you understand me, Noah? Do you?" "What do you want me to say?" "I want you to say what's in your heart. I want you to say that you forgive me." "Then I forgive you." "I want you to say what's in your heart. I want you to really mean it." "But I do mean it," he said. "Forgiveness is in my heart." He understood her need to unburden herself in these last days, to cast off the ballast of her sins, to travel light into the next stage; and she did appear visibly lightened, full of light, and drunk on love, love, love. Caught up in a fever of confession, she seemed hungry for more sins to share, and when she asked him if he had anything to tell her, anything to confess, all he could come up with was his fleeting...

Lots Wife, Cary Grant, and the American Dream

This paper explores two dimensions of experience common to all immigrants, whether they have chosen to emigrate or external circumstances have forced the choice on them: the loss of contextual continuity and the consequences of being an outsider in the new culture. Drawing on the contemporary literature on multiple discontinuous self-states, it is proposed that for many immigrants dissociated aspects of self-experience symbolize their original culture. Whether these dissociated states are idealized and felt to be unattainable in the new culture, or denigrated and warded off in a bid to make new connections, if they are not made conscious, examined, mourned over, and reintegrated, the immigrant will experience herself like Lot's wife, turned into a pillar of salt, her gaze fixed forever on the lost world. Or alternatively, in cutting herself off from a despised world from which she fled, she will also cut herself off from valuable aspects of self-experience inadvertently discarded in the act of immigration. Extensive case material is used to demonstrate the conclusion that being an immigrant is not about assimilation, but about a process of mutual accommodation between self-states that hold different passports.

The Second Floor

Jlappy Birthday, or Grant? the woman asked from behind the counter, holding up the stamps as if they were jewels he might want to examine. If I say Grant, will you think poorly of me? he said. Excuse me? she said. The Snowman, he said, to say something. Give me ten snowmen. He had always been jealous of anyway, and hardly needed the reminder. While he was waiting for his change the rotund, red-faced woman in the line beside him was presented with the same choice by her postal clerk. She hesitated a second, blushed, then said Cary Grant in an illicit sounding half-whisper. Outside a strong wind was blowing in the blue sky. When he was a kid, not much younger than Abby, he supposed, he used to think the wind controlled the color of the sky. There were blue winds, and gray winds, and multi-colored winds that produced the colors of sunsets and rainbows. Of course, since the wind does move the clouds it wasn't a completely false notion, he thought, the moral being it's as difficult to be completely wrong about something as it is to be completely right. He'd actually tried to talk about this to Abby once, but she couldn't really grasp it or else wasn't interested. Abby and he had had three conversations so far, four if he counted the first one when they met in the park. He'd always needed someone to talk to-a simple enough need, one would think, but in practice surprisingly complicated. park where he'd met her and where he'd gone today with the expectation of meeting her again, was in a lowerclass part of Philadelphia. There were some swings (half of them broken), a dented, graffiti-laden slide, a metal jungle gym, and a dirt path that led to a pond. Unfortunately, the pond had largely dried up, and its banks and what was left of its water were heavily littered. It was by