Action Films Research Articles

Robert Donat: reflections on stage and screen acting in 1930s Britain

This article explores the cross-fertilization of screen and stage acting practice in Britain in the 1930s, drawn from work on the archival papers of the theatre and film actor Robert Donat (1905–1958).

An empirical analysis of political activity in Hollywood

Film plays an important role in the American political system, and forms an important branch of the mass media. I analyze the political contributions of a sample of 996 top film actors, directors, producers, and writers, correlating them with demographic, family, and career success variables. I find that contributions flow overwhelmingly to left-of-center parties and organizations. I theorize about the causes of this bias, and argue empirically that, while demographic variables are not completely irrelevant, Hollywood liberalism is primarily a function of high, publicly visible incomes, and family connections. Neither religion nor birthplace effects seem to affect political activity in the film business.

FOLK DEVILS, NEWS ICONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MORAL PANICS

In studying media content and effects, scholars sometimes refer to amplifications of deviance and constructions of moral panics. The present article examines how “heroin chic,” a 1990s trend characterized by emaciated, disheveled fashion models and film actors, as well as the symbolic death of music icon Kurt Cobain, interacted with news representations of heroin—namely how the narcotic had reappeared to threaten a new generation of users—thus creating a moral panic. The article posits a role for exemplification theory and news icons in conversations of how moral panics arise and are sustained through mass media. Content analyses of heroin reports in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post (n=1770) revealed increases in references to popular culture during the middle 1990s, with officials citing dramatic exemplars as evidence of a “new scourge” and of “an old enemy making a dangerous comeback.” Actual heroin use did not appear to increase during 16 years of analysis.

The Life and Work of Howard Zinn

In May 2003, « a publishing milestone » was celebrated in New York City, the sale of one million copies of A People’s History of the United States by radical historian Howard Zinn. The popularity of this book can be measured in various ways. The book has served as an inspiration to various American artists, such as film director and actor Tim Robbins, rock star Bruce Springsteen, lead singer Eddy Vedder from the band Pearl Jam and folksinger Ani Difranco. Zinn’s treatment of Christopher Colum...

Publish and Graduate?: Earning a PhD by Published Papers in Australia

In the field of film and television studies there are numerous ways one can obtain a PhD. An alternative to the traditional PhD consisting of an 80–100,000 word thesis is the PhD by Publications. From the unearned honorary doctorate in film and television purchased on the Internet, to honorary doctorates bestowed according to film and television celebrity, to PhDs by Publications given to candidates who package together a number of films produced before enrolment to PhDs by Publications in which the submitted papers must be generated during candidacy, the range in requirements for this type of degree is huge. This paper argues for recognition of their varying status.

The ethical violence of celebrity chat: Russell Crowe and David Gulpilil

Tracing patterns of repetition in media interviews with Australian film actors, Russell Crowe and David Gulpilil, this paper looks at how Andrew Denton's Enough Rope interview with Crowe, and Darlene Johnson's biographical documentary Gulpilil: One Red Blood, work through anachronistic norms that have made Crowe and Gulpilil intelligible to Australian audiences over several decades. Drawing on the post-colonial feminist discourse of Ahmed, Butler and Gandhi on ethical encounters with familiar and strange others, I argue that both Crowe and Gulpilil, under different conditions of intelligibility, resist the ethical violence of social and media norms on which their national and international recognition depends.

Victoria Abril in Transnational Context

The article explores a range of cultural-political and aesthetic effects created by film actors working across linguistic and geopolitical dividing lines but carrying with them strong and stereotypical signs of original nationality. It takes Spanish-born actor Victoria Abril as an example, in Padre nuestro (Francisco Regueiro, 1984), Gazon maudit (Josiane Balasko, 1995), Sin noticias de Dios (Agustín Díaz Yanes, 2001), and 101 Reykjavik (Baltasar Kormákur, 2001). It suggests that Abril's representations of sexuality and gendered and national identity, enhanced by transnationalizing musical soundtrack and hybrid settings, end up freeing her and her audience from impoverished notions of fixed difference.

Gender and sexual orientation differences in sexual response to sexual activities versus gender of actors in sexual films.

In this study, the authors investigated the hypothesis that women's sexual orientation and sexual responses in the laboratory correlate less highly than do men's because women respond primarily to the sexual activities performed by actors, whereas men respond primarily to the gender of the actors. The participants were 20 homosexual women, 27 heterosexual women, 17 homosexual men, and 27 heterosexual men. The videotaped stimuli included men and women engaging in same-sex intercourse, solitary masturbation, or nude exercise (no sexual activity); human male-female copulation; and animal (bonobo chimpanzee or Pan paniscus) copulation. Genital and subjective sexual arousal were continuously recorded. The genital responses of both sexes were weakest to nude exercise and strongest to intercourse. As predicted, however, actor gender was more important for men than for women, and the level of sexual activity was more important for women than for men. Consistent with this result, women responded genitally to bonobo copulation, whereas men did not. An unexpected result was that homosexual women responded more to nude female targets exercising and masturbating than to nude male targets, whereas heterosexual women responded about the same to both sexes at each activity level.

The Old Friend

The Old Friend Laura Furman (bio) The audience was moving down front, people like herself with nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon. Nothing was better than Chekhov, though much was preferable to a panel discussion. That said, Irene was grateful to be included. The time wasn't far off when those who did the inviting would assume she was dead, deaf, or otherwise difficult, and there would be no more invitations. Once the long table and chairs were arranged up on stage, Irene gathered her things, climbed the steps, and took a place at the far end. She draped her shawl over the back of the metal chair and arranged her long skirt about herself. Behind Irene, the set was still up: Uncle Vanya's private room as a ranch office, with Western saddles and Mexican horse blankets writing the shorthand of atmosphere. Only moments before, Vanya had spoken, almost shouted: "I'm forty-seven; suppose I live to be sixty—that means thirteen more years! It's too much! What am I supposed to do for the next thirteen years?" Irene recalled feeling just like Vanya. Now she was almost eighty and she knew that things could get much worse: Vanya felt entirely alone but he still had his Sonya. Points of brilliance flashed, quick movement at the end of the second row, a woman arranging a white cardigan over her shoulders. She had the face of an actress, deep eyes and bland features that would surrender to artifice. The woman looked familiar. The phrase terribly familiar came to mind, but why terror? The rest of the panel trudged onstage, the moderator last of all, balding, with the stooped posture of an adolescent unused to his body. He took his sweet time introducing the panel members—Irene, our retired wonder; the director of today's production; the handsome actor in town to shoot an independent film; the Chekhov scholar from the Slavic Department; himself the distinguished [End Page 131] drama professor. He treated the audience to a plot summary of the play they'd just seen, then announced that each panelist would make a brief opening statement. Irene was signaled to begin; she'd prepared a brief statement, including praise of the production. When she finished, the other panelists spoke in turn, extemporaneously and for far too long; the allotted time for the panel was half over when an argument broke out between the director and the film actor. Irene listened politely as long as she could, then, for the audience's sake, she took the high road: Uncle Vanya was as generous a play as Hamlet, as she herself had learned when she directed it on her retirement from the university. Her colleague who'd played Vanya in her production would have made a better Sonya, but that was beside the point. The play had the capacity to take on any amount of tinkering, and outstanding productions came to mind, local, New York, London— "Then there's today. Wyatt Earp meets Anton Chekhov," the movie actor interrupted, getting a nervous laugh from the audience. Rising above the strife, Irene announced, "The play's the thing," which got her the last laugh, and was true. At the reception afterward, wine in plastic glasses, coffee in paper cups, Irene decided that no one would notice her immediate exit. Just as she reached the door, the woman with the sparkling sweater caught her. "Irene," the woman said, and her voice brought everything back. "You," Irene said. "Yes, it's me, after all this time." "How long has it been?" Irene asked. She took a step back to absorb the fact of her old friend. The decades since they'd met had been kind to Carolina, the last thing Time was to most blondes. "I can't remember, but— Oh, Irene. It's good to see you." Carolina's clothes were expensive versions of the thrift-store rags she once favored; though the white cardigan might be mistaken for any a matron might wear, it was of the highest quality. Irene didn't recall if Carolina was literally a matron—married, divorced, widowed—if her old friend...

Views and Reviews

In the spring of 2006, when Sir Paul McCartney came to New foundland to protest the seal hunt , the whole event seemed all too familiar. Hadn’t these battle-lines been drawn many times before? This division between an international class of celebrity do-gooders and a class of workers doing some god-awful job in the service of survival; this divide between a lobby of influential elites and a community of people in a remote part of the world - haven’t we seen all of this before? Here was a conflict replete with differences in politics, economics, culture and power over the media circus engendered by the battle. While the media focused on the obvious passions being inflamed by the event - the impoverishment in a rural Newfoundland community, the way the doomed seals tend to look just like the family pet or the way the celebrity (rock star, film actor, etc .) tends to look heroic as he or she apparently puts his or her own life at risk in the service of saving the world - I wondered more about what the staging of this conflict said about deeply perceived notions of enlightenment as they relate to one’s location in the world or simply to one’s place in Canada.

The Coming of Sound (review)

Reviewed by: The Coming of Sound David L. Morton (bio) The Coming of Sound. By Douglas Gomery. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xxi+181. $24.95. Over the past three decades, media scholars have sought to counter the myth that the transition to sound in the movies was a bolt from the blue that precipitated chaos in the studios. According to this myth, silent film actors could not easily make the transition to the "talkies" because of their unsuitable voices or inability to memorize scripts, and studio executives mostly dismissed the first talkies as a passing fad. Then they had to furiously scramble to catch up after the release of Warner Brothers' pioneering 1927 film The Jazz Singer, in which Al Jolson sang and spoke a few lines. Following on his oft-cited 1975 dissertation, Douglas Gomery has published numerous articles about this myth, some of which are now revised and collected in this full-length treatment of the coming of sound. Gomery argues that the transition to sound had been long in coming, and that by 1927 it was thought to be virtually inevitable. In part this was because so-called silent films were normally accompanied by live music in theaters, and various ways of adding "mechanical" sound to films had [End Page 653] existed at least since 1892. Gomery does not deny that by adding spoken dialog, singing, and audio special effects, mechanical sound had profound and sometimes disruptive effects on the content of movies. But content is not really his concern here. Rather, the coming of sound becomes a case study in the ways that corporate leaders use rational economic decision-making processes to bring about technical change. He argues that the sole cause for change was the desire to increase corporate profits. The technology for adding sound to the movies incubated rapidly during the first two decades of the twentieth century, its maturation paralleling that of the motion picture industry itself even though it had not yet been incorporated into commercially successful films. By the mid-1920s, Gomery argues, the technology of sound and the business of moviemaking were finally ready to combine. When Fox began to release movies using one of the new sound systems, each of the other studios explored its own technical options. Although Warner Brothers used a highly refined version of a phonograph-based technology to produce The Jazz Singer, Gomery is at pains to show that it was actually a later Jolson film, The Singing Fool, whose profitability ensured that talkies would become the norm. At exactly the same time, the motion picture industry was consolidating into a vertically integrated oligopoly, and the leading studios acted together to manipulate the adoption of a standardized form of this new, capital-intensive technology between 1928 and 1930. The Coming of Sound could profitably be read alongside Donald Crafton's 1997 book, The Talkies. Gomery and Crafton both tackle the corporate and economic background for the introduction of sound, but in very different ways. Crafton shows how the final form of movie sound technology resulted from interactions among the Hollywood movie producers, the consumers they served, and the general cultural environment. One of his major aims is to provide (in the language of cultural history) a reception study, though historians of technology will appreciate his analysis in terms of social construction theory. Gomery dismisses culture-based analysis, arguing that the implementation of sound technology was a top-down process determined by Hollywood executives, which resulted in a technological transition that was quick but orderly. Even though both approaches have their merits, historians of technology are likely to feel that Gomery's pays insufficient attention to well-established theories of technological change. Something else should be mentioned about The Coming of Sound. My own approach to scholarly reviewing is to emphasize a book's contributions rather than dwell on the minor shortcomings that mark nearly every historical work. In this case, however, I feel compelled to alert readers that The Coming of Sound is riddled with typographical, compositional, and stylistic errors; sentences and entire paragraphs are repeated, and some passages are entirely unintelligible. It is astounding that a manuscript could [End Page 654...

The Mexico City–Los Angeles Cultural Mosh Pits

This essay chronicles the career of pioneering Mexican rock band Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del 5° Patio. I argue that in a post–Chicano movement period, Maldita has become a borderless cultural institution infl uencing a generation of Mexicans on both sides of the border. Maldita has sought linkages with Mexicans from north and south through manifestos and music and through the revitalized figure of the pachuco. With its rock anthem “Pachuco,” Maldita looked back to Mexican film actor Germán Valdés and his hybrid pachuco character, el Tin Tan, to explain a new rebellious Mexican punk spirit that drew inspiration from past musical fusions. Maldita returned to the same working-class musical milieu, the “quintopatiera” tradition, that gave rise to 1940s music of the pachuco phenomenon evident in compositions by Mexican Americans Don Tosti and Lalo Guerrero. Thus Maldita combines rumba, mambo, bolero, and danzón with new rock genres, infusing its music with cultural openness.

The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, vols. 1 and 2 (review)

Reviews181 The New Partridge Dictionary ofSlang and Unconventional English, vols. 1 and 2. 2005. Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor. London & NY: Routiedge. Pp. 2400. t: 1he two volumes of this new dictionary (NPDSUE) represent a vast undertaking. The title pays tribute to the authors' spiritual mentor , the late Eric Partridge, but the authors cast a far wider net for slang items than Partridge (1970) did in his slang dictionary. Partridge was concerned primarily with the slang and unconventional English of Great Britain and to a lesser extent her dominions from the 1600s to the 1970s. NPDSUE expands the U.S. entries, and as for other areas, the list of contributors includes Richard Allsopp (Caribbean English), Diane Bardsley (New Zealand English), James Lambert (Australian English), John Loftus (Hiberno-English), and Lewis Poteet (Canadian English). Authors Dalzell and Victor cite Partridge's accurate observation that a dictionary constantly needs to be revised. Of course to some extent the updating has already been occurring with the publication of other dictionaries, e.g., Jonathon Green's Cassell's Dictionary ofSlang (2005: reviewed elsewhere in this issue — Ed.) and Jonathan Lighter's Historical Dictionary ofAmerican English (1994ff.). But every new dictionary, while overlapping to some extent with previous ones, also brings new material to the fore, and so we deal with a situation in which no single slang dictionary presents the entirety of English slang. For the amateur word lover, any of the slang dictionaries can be picked up and perused for enjoyment. In NPDSUE, there are, for example, Aunt Nell 'the ear' (UK; but why 'ear'?), Aunt Lily 'silly' (UK; rhyming slang, with the 1992 example 'Don't be so auntie'), Aunt Julia 'communist propaganda ,' Aunt Mary 'marijuana' (U.S., 1959; 'Mary is a familiar pun on "marijuana "'), basket! (Singapore; 'used for expressing great frustration.' But why?), Belushi (U.S.; 'a combination of cocaine and heroin. In memory of the speedball that killed film actor John Belushi, 1949-82'), Black Jeff 'a wasp' (Bahamas , 1982), burn logs 'smoke marijuana' (UK), Carrie/Carrie Nation/Carry/ Carry Nation 'cocaine' (US), carry the stick 'to live without a fixed abode' (US), carveyour knob 'to make you understand' (US; explanation: ?), CD 'a condom' (South Africa; Scamto youth street slang) , Coco the Clown 'cocaine' (UK) , coolaboola 'excellent, admirable, acceptable' (Ireland; 'an elaboration of cool (acceptable ) combining a slang abridgement of the Irish ruaille-buaille (a row, noisy confusion, noise)'). For the lexicographer or scholar of slang, NPDSUE is one of several dictionaries that need to be checked when researching a given slang item. So, for example, under shyster, NPDSUE correctly gives 1843 as the earliest attestation and then draws attention to my monograph Origin of the Term Shyster (1982), albeit without clarifying the etymology other than to say 'coined by Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Society ofNorth America 27 (2006), 181-183 182Reviews New York journalist Mike Walsh.' Actually there's more to the etymology than that, but NPDSUE's treatment is still a big improvement over the one in OED2. Under Windy City, NPDSUE reflects the state-of-the-art research on the term, drawing attention to the work of Barry Popik in debunking the myth that the sobriquet was coined in conjunction with the 1893 World's Fair and in accurately stating that "Popik has traced the term to Cincinnati newspapers in 1876." And under hot dog (hot sausage in a roll) NPDSUE correctly says: "The term arose at Yale University in 1894 and was quickly embraced by students at other colleges. Past suggestions that the term arose at New York's Polo Grounds have been disproven by U.S. slang lexicographers Barry Popik and Gerald Cohen." Popik and I both worked on this subject, but Popik alone deserves full credit for tracing hot dog- back to Yale 1894 (or 1895) (see Cohen, Popik, and Shulman 2004) . NPDSUE presents 27 pages of bibliographical references, containing such interesting-sounding items as Sophie Wilson's Teen Speak: The Definitive Lexicon 2001, Tim Nind's Rude Rhyming Slang (London 2003), George Percy's The Language ofPoker: TheJargon and Slang Spoken Around the Poker Table (selfpublished 1988), and Kim Rich's Johnny's Girl: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's...

With All Due Retrospect: The Essential Harold Lloyd

With All Due Retrospect: The Essential Harold Lloyd In our collective American psyche, we aspire to the twin ambitions of being spiritually connected to the natural world and of whirling with impunity through the sharp angles of a big city. We drive rugged vehicles that have four-wheel drive on the off-chance that we will someday leave the pavement for an untamed wilderness. In 2004, Sony Pictures bought the entire catalog of silent film actor, Harold Lloyd, and announced plans for a major retrospective of his work. This culminated in 2005, beginning April 20 (Harold's birthday) in theatrical re-releases in 35mm (first at the Film Forum in New York) of some of his best films. After his career in motion pictures came to an end, Lloyd spent his later years keeping a tight rein on his work, refusing to show it in the wrong format, especially television. He had a horror that the meticulous pacing of his films would be chopped up to fit commercial breaks or projected at the wrong speeds (an effect used for humor in the early days of TV). As a result, his artistry slipped unnoticed by a generation or two awed by Chaplin and Keaton. Sony's theatrical unveiling, featuring uncut prints from restored negatives with newly composed scores, continues the trend of reevaluation that began in the 1970s and brings Harold Lloyd to a new audience that recognizes a still-contemporary urge to prove it can measure up, whether in the raw, primeval forest or the tempest of a modern metropolis. In two of his silent comedy classics, The Kid Brother (1927) and Speedy (1928), Harold Lloyd reflects back to us our capacity for this duality. The former film depicts the pastoral lushness of an idyllic, rural setting, while the latter, filmed largely on location in New York, is a virtual semi-documentary of late-1920s city life. In these diverse surroundings, Lloyd embodies a quintessentially American conflict between pioneer nostalgia and urban verve, negotiating the vagaries of genre (romantic comedy and action), modern mechanization, and a shifting field of equality between men and women. Harold Lloyd grew up in a poor but working family starting in Nebraska and ultimately moving to the site of a new industry wrapped in an art form, Los Angeles. From his teenage years doing every job available in a theatrical company to his early days in Hollywood as a rough-and-tumble extra, he learned his trade, eventually landing in comedy because he had a talent for the creative physicality involved. Once he emerged from the shadow of Charlie Chaplin by putting on a pair of lens-less, horn-rimmed glasses, he began to develop his own distinct performances. The very ordinariness of the young men he played was what won viewers over. He did not have the alien otherworldliness of the Chaplin and Keaton personas but, rather, just that of a normal, all-American guy who had energy, wit, and luck. He was never down-and-out, never an angsty little man, never dark. He was cheerful and up-beat, yet could unwind with such furious force that audiences would gasp. He evinced sentiment without pathos. Above all, even if he had to dig deep to find it, he had confidence. Lloyd concentrated his efforts on making two kinds of films: the character picture or the gag picture. His injection of character development and psychological growth was an anomaly in silent-era comedy. And his gag efforts evolved into a new species of thrill pictures that have generated iconic images for over eighty years. Even people who have never heard his name have seen the bespectacled young man hanging from the tilting, nearly detached, clock face above an impossibly vertiginous drop to the street below in Safety Last (1923). In the 1989 film, Look Who's Talking, director Amy Heckerling recreated this moment in a dream sequence with Kirstie Alley, playing on our nearly unconscious knowledge of it. Lloyd plays Harold Hickory in The Kid Brother, the smaller, youngest son of a burly country sheriff, a man who has a lot more in common with his two elder sons, strapping, dim fellows, like himself. …

The Bushlet Administration:Terrorism and War on The West Wing

The West Wing is widely considered to be the product of its liberal writer Aaron Sorkin and of a left-leaning Hollywood community. Liberals, disappointed by the results of the 2000 election, could find some solace by tuning in following the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the fictional Bartlet administration every Wednesday night at nine o'clock. These same people might have looked forward to an alternative to President Bush's prosecution of the war on terrorism in the wake of September 11. However, Sorkin's President Bartlet, in the months after the terrorist attacks, pursued a foreign policy more hawkish than even that of the Bush administration. This article examines The West Wing's portrayal of terrorism after September 11 and Josiah Bartlet's zealous - and arguably overzealous - prosecution of a fictional War on Terror. To some, studying a fictional television's depiction of terrorism may seem frivolous in a time when real people are fighting and dying in a real war on terrorism. However, it is our argument that messages in fiction matter; they matter in real and ways. The depictions of terrorism and other public issues in fictional media affect how people think about the world. That these messages frequently go unexamined is troublesome. This article takes seriously the power of fiction to shape and form ideas and arguments about the world. In a time when people are afraid and living with the uncertainty that terrorism creates, it behooves scholars to look at all of the messages the public receives on the topic, from President Bush to President Bartlet. Literature Review History suggests that compelling narratives can carry remarkable social and force. The idea that stories hold persuasive power is at least as old as the parables of Jesus. Over the last century, both totalitarian and democratic governments have shown a healthy respect for narratives and their potential to bring about social change. The former Soviet Union censored the themed fiction of Nobel laureates Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Members of the US Congress blacklisted anti-American screenwriters, directors, and actors in Hollywood in 1947 (Rosenfeld). Today, the US Department of Defense routinely advises film companies and television networks on the portrayal of the military in their storylines. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Pentagon chose to release proposed rules for military tribunals of terrorist defendants to writers of the CBS television drama JAG before making the same information available to the news media (Seelye). As the lines between news and entertainment continue to blur, scientists have begun to acknowledge that a wide variety of television programming, including entertainment and fiction, can inform the public's ideas about politics. Michael Belli Carpini and Bruce Williams argue that any meaningful discussion of media and politics should move beyond the outdated and unsatisfying distinction between traditional conceptions of news and entertainment (2001a). When determining whether a piece of information or a certain medium is politically relevant, Delli Carpini and Williams argue for a test based on how individuals use the information rather than the information's genre, content, or source. Over the last fifty years -the Golden Age of Broadcast News -the test of whether a piece of information was considered political depended on its genre (news, not entertainment), its content (fact, not fiction), or its source (journalists, not film actors). Today, scientists have begun to recognize that individuals sometimes draw upon entertainment programs and fictional narratives in forming beliefs (Delli Carpini and Williams, 2001a). While the entertainment media do not rival traditional news media in relevant information, they argue that its importance should not be underestimated. …

Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema: From Banderas to Bardem (review)

PERRIAM, CHRIS. Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema: From Banderas to Bardem. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. 221 pages.Chris Perriam's excellent monograph aptly captures the sense of visual pleasure associated with watching male stars perform their signature styles of masculinity in on-screen roles and off-screen personae. The book is a study of a select group of Spanish film actors who achieved considerable success during the post-Franco period: Imanol Arias, Antonio Banderas, Carmelo Gomez, Javier Bardem, Jordi Molla, and Jorge Sanz. All of the actors were born between 1956 and 1970 and frequently appear together in films, providing Perriam with multiple opportunities to draw connections and contrasts between them. The book is divided into an introduction, six chapters (each devoted to a and in chronological order by date of birth), and a seventh that examines the careers of four younger, emerging actors. In the introduction, Perriam carefully contextualizes the concept of a star within the Spanish film industry, noting significant differences from the American and French systems. As galanes, the Spanish equivalent of men, the six actors share traits in common: they are perceived as ordinary rather than glamorous and have sex appeal, qualities that enhance their capacity to elicit viewer identification and desire; yet, unlike the Hollywood muscled ideal, they tend not to have overly developed bodies. Perriam's goal is thus to pin down what exactly is special, attractive, and sometimes disturbing in these highly mediated men (14). He does so by examining the ways in which these actors, on- and off-screen, replicate and destabilize conventional notions of masculinity.In each chapter Perriam traces the polysemic contours of a star's image through a detailed analysis of various film and television roles. The first chapter explores Arias, the classic novio de Espana, who desires to avoid being seen as a dumb hunk, with close attention paid to the oscillation of his image between modern and old-fashioned, exciting and dull. In Chapter 2, on Banderas, Perriam examines the progressive evolution of the original chico Almodovars career as he moves from predominantly homosexual to heterosexual roles and his subsequent exploitation in the U.S., albeit ambivalently, of his sex-symbol status as a Latin lover. The focus of the third chapter is on Gomez, who most closely approximates the classic model of the leading man who repeats the same role in film after film: Gomez represents a solid yet sensitive virility (71) whose brand of masculinity denotes an earthiness that is also cerebral and emotionally dispassionate. Chapter 4 turns to Bardem's hypermasculine image, his broad face and thick body denoting both machismo and morbo. The fifth chapter engages with the serious Molla, whose somber manner reflects the inner turmoil that often afflicts the characters he plays. The last of the single-actor chapters is devoted to Sanz, whose performances often convey youthful sex appeal in a light, comical tone, or sexual vulnerability that is ultimately repaired by the restoration of male sexual power. In the final chapter, Perriam examines the careers of rising stars Eduardo Noriega, Fele Martinez, Liberto Rabal, and Juan Diego Botto. Noriega's dark sensuality, Martinez's geeky vulnerability, Rabal's youthful sex appeal, and Botto's innocent and wide-eyed masculinity are treated in brief.In his analyses Perriam moves seamlessly between fictional characters and the star's media image, weaving together the various strands of an actor's persona as constructed by on-screen performances, interviews, internet sites, and journalistic articles. The combination of textual and visual analysis is quite successful in portraying the accretion of an actor's image, and Perriam complements the emphasis on the representation of masculinity with occasional forays into more detailed interpretations of films, such as the extensive treatment of Carne tremula in the chapter on Bardem. …

Double Jeopardy in Hollywood: Age and Gender in the Careers of Film Actors, 1926?1999

There have been few studies of the concept of “double jeopardy” as it pertains to the effects of gender and aging on occupational outcomes. This research examines the utility of this concept in the field of film acting, traditionally a gender-integrated occupation. The results confirm significant negative effects of being female and being older on the number of film roles received by actors and their average star presence. Moreover, the gendered effects of aging on the career opportunities of actors have diminished somewhat over time with respect to number of film roles but not with respect to star presence.

The Amateur Actors of Cannes 1999: A Shock to the (Star) System

At the Cannes film festival in 1999 the perennial tension within French film between popular cinema and auteur cinema came to a head with the award of the Palme d’Or to the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta. Moreover, three amateurs were given Best Actor awards: Émilie Dequenne for Rosetta, plus Emmanuel Schotté and Séverine Caneele for L’Humanité. This article analyses the performances of the amateur actors in the above films, and evaluates to what extent they offer a challenge to conventional modes of representation, and in particular to the idealised embodiments of masculinity and femininity traditionally presented by film stars. The notion of the amateur as Bressonian model will also be addressed, as will the possibility of amateur actors challenging the supremacy of the auteur and moving into the realm of popular stardom.

Peter Kellaway, PhD (1920–2003)

Peter Kellaway, renowned neurophysiologist and epileptologist, died June 25, 2003 in Houston, Texas, from complications of lymphoma, a disorder that he had battled for more than a decade. He was 82-years-old and had worked actively until his death. Dr. Kellaway was a pioneering clinical neurophysiologist and clinical investigator in the field of pediatric epilepsy. FIGURE Peter Kellaway Peter was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, the son of Cecil Kellaway, a stage and film actor, who was nominated twice for Academy Awards and won a Golden Globe award. As a child, Peter traveled extensively with his family, eventually settling in southern California. He attended Occidental College, earning bachelor and master degrees, and then moved to Montreal, Canada. There he worked with Herbert Jasper and received a doctorate degree in neurophysiology in 1947 from McGill University. In 1948, after a year on the faculty at McGill and the Montreal Neurologic Institute, Peter accepted a position at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, first in the Department of Physiology and later in the Department of Neurology. He founded and served as Head of the Section of Neurophysiology until 1998. He …

Michael J. Fox and his Parkinson's disease.

Michael J. Fox was a popular and successful film and television comic actor who developed Parkinson's disease at the age of 29 years. His recently published book, Lucky Man, structured around the story of his Parkinson's disease, is an amusing, briskly paced yet introspective memoir that covers the first 40 years of his life. Although quite anecdotal, it contains interesting observations on the preclinical phase of the disorder, evolution of motor fluctuations, and tactics for pharmacological treatment.