Howard Hawks Research Articles

Images, Patterns and Audio: A Search for an Identifier of Genre Inclusive of Science Fiction

Genre is any style or form of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially agreed-upon conventions developed over time. The need to understand what movie is for whom persists despite the blurring the genres in modern film. This paper analyses part of Susan Sontag’s essay “The Imagination of Disaster”, which deals with the structure of sci-fi movies, and Vivian Sobchack’s “Images of Wonder: The Look of Science Fiction”, which deals with the iconography of science fiction, through three movies – Ridley Scott’s Alien, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Howard Hawks’ El Dorado. Beyond the structural elements revealed by Sontag, or the iconographic approach of Sobchack, audio is found to be a far reliable element that defines science fiction movies. Keywords: Science fiction, Alien, Solaris, western, genre, audio

Scarred Flesh and the X of Law

This essay responds to and expands the concept of the X for trans studies, theorized by Marquis Bey, as a graphic tool for thinking the intersection of gender, race, law, and crime. In doing so, the essay reads Howard Hawks's 1932 film Scarface, a work crossed throughout by the symbology of the X. Rather than providing a simple visual cue for death and closure, the X is vitalized, through a reading of Bey and Scarface together, as the (un)graphing of law that both inscribes and defaces the biopolitical state, which predicates itself on legislating the difference between genders, races, species, spaces, and criminals and law enforcement. The essay thereby moves toward a criminal reading of the Law, in which it becomes possible to see how the state's apparatus betrays its populous and itself, and to sketch out a vision of pluralized life otherwise, figured in the transgressions of a film in which crime becomes law, law becomes crime, and the riotously raced and gendered protagonist weave together the terms that the biopolitical state desperately attempts to hold apart.

Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” You Must Remember This

Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” <i>You Must Remember This</i>

“It’s All in the Reflexes”: John Carpenter’s &lt;i&gt;Big Trouble in Little China as a Hawksian Comedy&lt;/i&gt;

This article argues that the cult success of Big Trouble in Little China is a product of the successful synthesis of Carpenter’s fantastic sensibility and the filmmaking philosophies of Howard Hawks. Operating not only as a parody of Hawks’s western films and Hong Kong martial arts cinema, BTiLC uses the pre-existing structure present in Hawk’s comedies to produce a film that is able to convincingly portray Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) as both the hero of the film and the incompetent comic relief; thus positioning its Asian American characters as its functional heroes, without this inversion ever seeming condescending or mean-spirited. This framing of the film consequently highlights the differences between BTiLC’s use of genre and Reagan era masculine heroism and the more reactionary elements of their contemporaries.

Ride the Frontier: Exploring the Myth of the American West on Screen, by Flavia Brizio-Skov

Flavia Brizio-Skov’s Ride the Frontier: Exploring the Myth of the American West on Screen comes at a crucial time for the western. It is no secret that the genre has suffered a loss in popularity in recent years, compared to its ubiquity in the Hollywood golden era—also due, for instance, to high-profile critical and commercial failures such as Cowboys and Aliens (Jon Favreau, 2011) and The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, 2013), the latter of which is examined in this book’s final chapter. The conventions of classical westerns have been reappraised many times before. Cahiers du cinéma critics like André Bazin had high regard for the films of Howard Hawks, whereas Laura Mulvey, writing from a psychoanalytic perspective, discussed how the western hero was often split between nostalgic narcissism and social integration.

The Searchers: Aristoteles Revisited

In the first half of the 20th Century, the “western” was a major genre in Hollywood filmography. Starting as a simple and almost childish type of entertainment easily attained by the audience, it evolved into a more sophisticated form of film communication and art, and become the preferred genre for some film directors like Howard Hawks and John Ford, among others. This evolution allowed the genre to become an important tool of analyses and criticism of American Culture, History, Myths and Society, especially during the time of the McCarthyism and the Red Scare, a time when progressive and more critical views on these subjects could not be openly dealt with. Among the authors who saw the “western” as this privileged means of expression, Ford definitely stands tall, and in his filmography, “The Searchers” occupies a front row seat. For all of the above, we intend to bring some light to this movie, analysing some aspects of its narrative from the perspective of the Aristotelian principles of dramatic construction.

Does Vertical Integration Spur Investment? Casting Actors to Discover Stars during the Hollywood Studio Era

The Hollywood studio era of the 1930s and 1940s was remarkable for its abundance of glamorous stars. In this paper, we investigate whether the vertical structure of the Hollywood studios, by ensuring studios’ claims to “star capital,” spurred higher levels of investment in discovering stars than was (or is) achievable under alternate regimes (such as today’s film-by-film contracting). The vertical structure consisted of backward integration into talent through long-term contracts and forward integration into exhibition through ownership of theater chains. The investment involved the experimental casting of novice actors to gauge audience appeal. Collecting data on thousands of actors whose careers span nearly three-quarters of a century and conducting several sets of tests, we find evidence of higher levels of investment in actors working under the vertical structure of the studio era than in actors working under alternate regimes. [Those] who were running the studios at that time … gave me a chance—today, you may get one shot, and if you fail, they break your back and forget about you from that time on. Then, you were part of a system that gave you another chance. So, MGM gave me opportunity after opportunity. (Director Richard Brooks [Eyman 2005, p. 419])You realize that the greatest stars in the picture business were made during an era when they didn’t have one single thing to say about what they did. (Director Howard Hawks [Bogdanovich 1997, p. 362])The studios owned you, and they wanted their property in great shape. (MGM contract player Jean Porter [Davis 1993, p. 88])

La influencia de la fotografía americana del siglo XIX en el imaginario cinematográfico del western clásico. El caso de Río Rojo de Howard Hawks (1948)

Este artículo realiza un análisis historiográfico comparativo entre el trabajo de tres fotógrafos estadounidenses del siglo XIX: Charles D. Kirkland (1857-1926), Dan Dutro (1848-1918) o L. A. Huffman (1879-1931) cuyas fotografías sobre el Oeste americano, siguiendo la hipótesis apuntada por Roger Tailleur, sirvieron no sólo como documentación, sino que también influyeron en la construcción estética del filme Red River de Howard Hawks (1948). Para ello se ha consultado material inédito, como es el caso de las fotografías de Dan Dutro, digitalizadas especialmente para esta investigación, y se ha estudiado en profundidad la relación entre fotografía y western llegando a conclusiones que prueban la influencia en el filme de los tres fotógrafos anteriores y de otros, como Erwin E. Smith (1886-1947).

“The Most Harsh and Frank Gangster Picture We Have Ever Had”: Censoring Howard Hawks’s Scarface1

Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932) was one of the most violent and controversial movies ever produced during the studio era. The film was finished in September 1931 but was released only in April 1932, because of a prolonged fight between the Hays Office and the production company, Howard Hughes’s Caddo. This article not only reconstructs the relationship between Caddo and the Hollywood censors during the production of Scarface. On the basis of this historical evidence, it also addresses a question that has not been investigated yet: How did a movie that was so attentively – even obsessively – scrutinized by the Hays Office, which imposed numerous changes, still feature an incestuous passion between the protagonist and his sister? In an effort to answer this question, the article offers a broader hypothesis regarding the representation of criminals – especially Italian-American criminals – in classical Hollywood cinema.

The Black Cat dir. by Edgar G. Ulmer, and: I Walked with a Zombie dir. by Jacques Tourneur, and: High and Low dir. by Akira Kurosawa, and: The Pumpkin Eater dir. by Jack Clayton, and: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dir. by Howard Hawks, and: War and Peace dir. by Sergei Bondarchuk

Reviewed by: The Black Cat dir. by Edgar G. Ulmer, and: I Walked with a Zombie dir. by Jacques Tourneur, and: High and Low dir. by Akira Kurosawa, and: The Pumpkin Eater dir. by Jack Clayton, and: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dir. by Howard Hawks, and: War and Peace dir. by Sergei Bondarchuk Jefferson Hunter (bio) Film Chronicle: The Black Cat, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (Universal Vault Series, 2013; Amazon Prime streaming) I Walked with a Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur (Turner Home Entertainment, 2005; Amazon Prime and Criterion Channel streaming) High and Low, directed by Akira Kurosawa (Criterion Collection, 2011; Amazon Prime and Kanopy streaming) The Pumpkin Eater, directed by Jack Clayton (Powerhouse, 2017; Amazon Prime streaming) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, directed by Howard Hawks (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2014; Amazon Prime streaming) War and Peace, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk (Criterion Collection, 2019; Criterion Channel streaming) Edgar G. Ulmer, one of the many Jewish filmmakers who fled Hitler's Germany for Hollywood, had designed sets for Max Reinhardt and collaborated with Billy Wilder and others on the innovative German documentary Menschen am Sonntag, and with those credentials he quickly found work in California. The second feature he made there, Universal's The Black Cat (1934), brought Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi together onscreen for the first time and no doubt for that reason became a big hit. Viewed nowadays, it seems a rare old piece of hokum, entertaining, sometimes unintentionally funny, occasionally chilling. The screenplay is credited to Peter Ruric, a pseudonym for Paul Cain, one of the most lurid and violent of 1930s pulp writers. At the start his story could scarcely be more conventional. An innocent American couple on honeymoon in the Carpathians—ever since F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, the location of choice for horror movies—encounters a suave and mysterious European psychiatrist (Lugosi). Then after a road accident they take shelter from the dark and the rain—the weather of choice for horror movies—in the fortress home of a suave and mysterious European architect (Karloff, here wearing heavy eyeliner and a bizarre widow's peak rather than monster make-up). The architect, it develops, is a Satanist. He stores the dead bodies of beautiful white-gowned women in glass cabinets and gloats over the collection while fondling his pet black cat. Furthermore, by magical powers he seems to make the American couple kiss (an action shown in an artful deep-focus shot contrived by Ulmer and his cinematographer, John J. Mescall), then plays Bach on the organ before presiding over a Black Mass with chanted Latin. By this point the film has grown creepy rather than conventional, and the creepiness, in spite of being countered every now and then by the downhome Americanness of the [End Page 281] young husband ("Sounds like a lot of supernatural baloney to me"), stays in effect all the way to the violent final confrontation between psychiatrist and architect, wherein a flaying alive takes place. You will be relieved to hear it is shown in shadow rather than directly photographed. Universal's poster for the film blazons the title as "Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat." Poe did indeed write a story called "The Black Cat," the condemned-cell narrative of a dipsomaniac who perversely kills his pet black cat and then his wife, immures her behind a brick wall, and is finally driven to confess by his hysterical guilt. Clearly, Ulmer's film uses almost nothing of this plot except the black cat, which (as in Poe) is at first caressed, then killed. That business of the cabinet-enclosed female corpses may distantly recall Poe's secret-burial theme, and the overwrought visuals of Ulmer's film look like a stylistic response to Poe's no less overwrought prose ("the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the Gallows!—oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime—of Agony and of Death!"), but in making The Black Cat Universal was obviously less interested in reworking the story than in borrowing Poe's sure-fire title and co-opting his cultural standing. Karloff, Lugosi, and Poe—What a trio!, the studio publicists must have exclaimed...

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

Massif central by Christian Oster

Reviewed by: Massif central by Christian Oster Alexander Hertich Oster, Christian. Massif central. L'Olivier, 2018. ISBN 978-2-8236-1202-8. Pp. 160. Learning of the death of a friend after having left Maud, Paul decides to travel from Paris to the Massif Central. As with many of Oster's other novels (for example Mon grand appartement, which won the Prix Médicis in 1999, or his 2017 La vie automatique), the first-person narrative starts with a departure precipitated by relationship issues. This is followed by a journey during which the protagonist encounters a variety of quirky characters. An old acquaintance, Alexandre Gervel—"qui n'était pas à rigoureusement parler un ami, encore qu'en m'hébergeant il se fût mis en position d'en devenir éventuellement un, sauf qu'il lui eût fallu non seulement m'ouvrir sa porte mais s'ouvrir lui et m'écouter" (46)—and his wife Estelle manufacture dental protheses from their home near Saint-Sauveur. Paul moves in with them, reading classics during the day and watching old movies with the couple in the evening. In Limoges, he then runs into another old friend, Antoine Levasseur, who lives in a sort of treehouse, and briefly stays with him before deciding to take up residence in a hotel, the location of which he is not completely sure: "Je ne savais pas où je voulais aller, je n'ai pas su non plus où j'arrivais" (98). However, besides our protagonist's peregrinations in the area, there is another "massif" at the center of this novel—Carl Denver. The novel's first sentence reads: "Je ne dis pas que Carl Denver avait l'intention de me tuer" (9). This could be the case, however. The narrator not only stole Maud from Denver, but, adding insult to injury, has now left her—a second affront—and one does not cross Carl Denver. "Je m'étais souvent demandé si Carl était mauvais, ou pervers, ou torturé au point d'exercer sa vengeance comme une grammaire, à chaque détour de phrase, et dans quelle mesure elle pouvait se contenir dans les mots," the narrator writes (12). Yet as much as he tries to avoid Denver—both physically and mentally—the latter's presence is felt on every page, in nearly every sentence. Nevertheless, given the narrator's constant fluctuations between certainty and uncertainty, his second-guessing, reevaluations, and hypothetical tangents, it is difficult for the reader to determine precisely how much of a threat Denver truly is. Paul later notes: "Tout, une fois avec moi-même, passé les irruptions de Denver dans ma réalité, redevenait matière à hypothèses. Je pouvais douter infiniment" (121). Are those shadowy figures that the narrator frequently sees really Denver and his proxies? Did Denver, a cinema critic, send the narrator an anonymous quiz on Howard Hawks? The novel is a psychological thriller, a mystery, but unlike Oster's earlier works which explored the genre, this one is much more foreboding. It is this oscillation between detached bemusement of quotidian existence—the absurdity of living in a treehouse, the protocol for asking a new acquaintance to run an errand—and existential dread that makes this novel a compelling read. [End Page 243] Alexander Hertich Bradley University (IL) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Bracketting Noir

This paper will look at the subversion of tropes within The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973). Leigh Brackett, a veteran of the Hollywood studio system of the 1940s and 1950s, wrote the screenplay and previously had co-written Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1944). Brackett adopted a different approach when working with Altman, maintaining his working practices of over-lapping dialogue and abandonment of traditional three-act structure. Brackett uses this opportunity of the less restrictive production practices of the American New Wave of the 1970s to explore, and deconstruct, the myth of the detective. Throughout the narrative, Brackett populates the film with eccentric characters as Marlowe weaves his way through a labyrinthine plot and in many cases extreme representations of masculinity, evident in the scene where a gangster assaults his girlfriend with a coke bottle. Finally, Brackett presents Marlowe, played by Elliot Gould, as an out-of-time hero that needs updating.

Thoughts on Marilyn Monroe: emblem and allegory

This essay has emerged out of my own recent ‘turn’ towards Hollywood, which has been largely inspired by rewatching its old films with the possibility, characteristic of digital spectatorship, of pausing and repeating, as discussed in my 2006 book Death 24x a Second.1 This was really a ‘return’ rather than a ‘turn’; Hollywood had been for me, as for so many others, the origin of my love of cinema. This recent return, however, took me back, above all, to the last years of the studio system, the Hollywood of the 1950s, the decade of its decline. While the studios battled against the rise of television, upheavals in the industry as well as demographic and social change, Hollywood cinema experienced an amazing last flowering. My thoughts on Marilyn Monroe have recently become intertwined with this history. Some years ago I made a ‘remix’ of thirty seconds taken from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) in order to analyse Monroe’s performance and its particular significances and fascinations. In the process I began to think again about the emblematic nature of her image. I had begun to be interested in its enigmatic qualities in the context of my 1996 book Fetishism and Curiosity;2 interested that is, in the way that the ‘Marilyn’ figuration, in its very excess, seemed to conceal an unnamable repressed, emblematic of commodity fetishism but also implying an underneath, another side, to 1950s American prosperity and investment in sexual display. But in the context of my more recent return, I have come to see Monroe’s emblematic qualities in relation to the crisis in the Hollywood studio system and its decline. Not only was she the last, and probably the greatest, female superstar but her struggles with Twentieth Century-Fox were symptomatic of the changes taking place in the industry and their implications for Hollywood’s eroticization of the female star spectacle.

Dangerous Dakini: Monet Clark’s Bunny Girl and other Precarious Performance Videos

No images are visible during the opening sequence of Bunny Girl (2016), by California performance/video artist Monet Clark. Instead, Clark provides the most basic of sounds; a steady, syncopated clip-clop and the swish of fabric, sandy and hollow, like a lone Appaloosa trotting up a gulch in a Howard Hawks western. Riding over the black screen are credits, simple and white, and Clark leaves us with these for a beat. Then it's a hard cut to a bright, sunny exterior, the shoulder of a highway in the High Sienas, and we can finally see who's been making all the racket: it's Bunny Girl, teetering down a road, tackled-up in white lingerie, fishnet stockings, pink stiletto heels, the classic bunny drill. But something about Bunny Girl's context is off. Distinct alterations affect her traditional bunny attire: her black fishnets have a rip; her stiletto heels, one size too large, wobble precariously on the gravel of the emergency lane; her trademark bunny ears aren't perky and up-right--they're flopped down, clinging close to her face, reminiscent of those lop-eared bunnies at the Benton County Fair. Like Donny Kerabatsos in The Big Lebowski (1998, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen), this manifestation of Bunny Girl is distinctly out of her element; we're more accustomed to watching her serve cocktails and nuts at the Playboy Mansion, flirting with Jack Nicholson and Bill Cosby, vampy but innocent, a brightly colored bauble on Hugh Hefner's arm, the erotically fabulous but nevertheless submissive girl next door. In this subtle stylistic turn, Clark hijacks the traditional, chauvinist Playboy narrative and alters its setting, hobbling unsteadily down Highway 50 ten miles south of Tahoe, the muscles of her back tightly bunched, cheerfully but anxiously looking over her shoulder as the wheels of semi-trucks and sports cars roar by. Bunny Girl's trademark ears and tail may comprise a hackneyed symbolic system with which we have long grown familiarly contemptuous, but all the familiar contempt in the world doesn't debarb her peril, and from the video's outset we can already sense the moral-ethical imperative of Clark's narrative set-up: what happens to little bunnies who stray too far from Farmer McHeffner's Garden and find themselves caught on this high-speed asphalt patch? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In that sense, Bunny Girl has good reason to be anxious, though she never seems truly scared; it's simply in a bunny's nature to be fidgety. But her journey's just begun, and this isn't the only scene wherein Clark places Bunny Girl played by the artist herself) in a Californian landscape that seems alternately hostile and sublime. As the video progresses, Bunny Girl chambers over fallen pine tree trunks in the Sierras, crosses a salt slick in Death Valley, whirls in a superbloom of primrose and notchleaf phacelia in the Mojave Desert, vamps beside the decommissioned Rancho Seco nuclear power plant, romps with doomed lambs at a Nevada City slaughter farm, trips out beneath a Richard Diebenkorn pastiche of Emeryville cloverlcafs, and ultimately finds herself on a series of broken roads that empty into the coves of the Marin Headlands, where she dances to the crashing surf and end credits. As she briefly and delicately occupies each of these dystopian/utopian tableaus, the colorful, opaque quality of Clark's video is overlaid with found footage, sequences of environmental catastrophes and cultural strife: whales dying, crop-dusters spraying pesticides, protesters waving signs. But somehow; in the foothills of the headlands, she's a different bunny girl. Some of the character development takes place in the decomposition of her couture; zig-zagging dizzily toward the coast, her ensemble becomes increasingly frayed, her ears droop more than ever, and the tattered fishnets billow beneath her ankles. Yet dancing beside the suri' in her ravaged outfit, there is something heroic about Bunny Girl, and while I can't quite label this video an empowerment piece, there's no doubt that Bunny Girl has reached an affective apex of some sort. …

Allure of the Abroad: Tiffany &amp; Co., Its Cultural Influence, and Consumers

Allure of the Abroad: Tiffany &amp; Co., Its Cultural Influence, and Consumers

“The Italian Color”: Race, Crime Iconography and Dubbing Conventions in the Italian-Language Versions of Scarface (1932)

In the early 1930s the crime film Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932, USA, dir. Howard Hawks) stirred censorship controversies in the United States because of its gritty portrayal of criminality and violence. Debates over crime, race and immigration proliferated in the North-American press and finally led to Italian-American pressure groups to call out for the film’s boycott because it ‘offended the Italian nation and people’ and vilified immigrant communities. Archival historical research in AVT has revealed how film versions have frequently been cut and dialogues ideologically manipulated to suit political agendas, commercial interests and dominant sexual and religious moralities. Indeed the translation of films has often served too many masters, suffering direct or indirect censorship intervention whenever a film defied existing societal taboos. My contribution aims to offer a diachronic perspective on the reception of Scarface lo sfregiato in Italy. It will look at the film’s Italian-language translation and re-translations for cinema, television and DVD, prepared by different hands and re-voiced by different actors during a span of fifty years (1940-90s). From the textual and contextual analysis of the film’s different Italian editions, it will be possible to trace significant ideological shifts in the reception of Italian-American crime iconography and in the language used to communicate it.

From Periphery to Center: (Post-Feminist) Female Detectives in Contemporary Scandinavian Crime Fiction

INTRODUCTION I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. was worth a stare. was trouble. was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.... Her hair was black and wiry and parted the middle and she had the hot black eyes of the portrait the hall. had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full. --Chandler (1939, 17) This is the way Raymond Chandler's star detective, Philip Marlowe, introduces the reader--and his own eyes--to Mrs. Regan, one of the females circling around his investigation The Big Sleep from 1939. Like the other women, she is not making it any easier for him to find the culprit the rather confusing environment of corruption, mob-methods, gambling, drinking, easy women, and easy money. And yet she has come to represent the epitome of the female role the hard-boiled crime story for which Chandler set the standard. The book was turned into a movie 1945-1946 (directed by Howard Hawks) and, as Kevin Hagopian comments on the Images website: Shot during wartime, the film turns the draft-induced 'man shortage' into a satyr's fantasy; sloe-eyed heiresses, hash-slingers with come-hither looks, and horny lady cab drivers brazenly proposition Marlowe, who regrettably stiff-arms most of them the name of business (Hagopian 2004). Two clear exceptions seen the movie to the hands-off, all-work-and-no-play attitude of Philip Marlowe from the book are the romantic relationship with Vivian Regan and the afternoon tryst with a bookstore clerk. Primarily, Lauren Bacall, the role of Mrs. Regan, illustrates the quintessence of the female temptress turned victim of seduction. At the time, critic James Agee wrote the following a review Time: She has a javelin-like vitality, a born dancer's eloquence movement, a fierce female shrewdness, and a special sweet-sourness. With these faculties, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood has dreamed of a long, long while (quoted Thompson and Bordwell 2014). Lauren Bacall may have been tough, but her physicality as a sex kitten with sharp and potentially dangerous claws is the focal point her relationship with Marlowe. On a website created by Jorgen Grandt, it is possible to see the covers of the Danish translations of Raymond Chandler's novels. Six of the eight cover pages depict women whose primary attributes are exotic sensuality and seductive glances (Grandt 2001). As established by Bo Tao Michaelis, the influence of Chandler reaches far and wide (Michaelis 2013), and the portraits chosen to represent his female characters confirm the above-quoted rather juicy and sensuous perception of women crime stories that, obviously, were very popular Scandinavia. However, simultaneously with Chandler, across the Atlantic, Scandinavian writers, such as Else Faber, Karen Blixen, and Kjerstin Goransson-Ljungman, created female detectives of a very different substance, far from the legendary portrayal quoted above (Hejlsted 2008, 235). Their primary weapons were not their bodies but their brains. This also holds true for the contemporary female detectives discussed this article, yet their female bodies still generate gender-defined positions both public and private spheres. These, turn, create inequalities that then constitute the root problems of these women as representations of the attempt to undo gender. In a post- or neo-feminist framework, the detectives arguably use their feminine bodies in a way that involves both active and passive forms of recognition and motivation (Genz 2006, 339). …

Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

William Rothman is one of the great close readers of film, and he pioneered techniques of meticulous, exhaustive and astonishing frame-by-frame analysis in his 1982 book Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. For Rothman, what sets these films apart is that Hitchcock's images always think. While any juxtaposition of images cannot help but produce meaning, in a Hitchcock film there are no chance encounters between images. There are no mere accidents of formulaic editing, as the studio-era sometimes produced, nor, as in the case of experimentalists like Andy Warhol, does the camera ever simply run as a way of not thinking. Rothman argues that Hitchcock's films are different because every frame is related to and constitutes the whole of what Hitchcock, as auteur, is thinking. Indeed, The Murderous Gaze might be summed up as a lesson in how to recognize Hitchcock's filmic thought. In his new book, Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Rothman again performs virtuoso acts of close viewing Hitchcock's films, and he both develops and substantially revises his conclusions from The Murderous Gaze. Following the work of Stanley Cavell's classic 1981 book on comedies of the 1930s, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Rothman now wants to see Hitchcock's films, particularly his later films, in the very terms that Cavell applied to the new and decidedly American vision of self-invention we find in It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) or His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940). For Cavell, these films were different because the obstacle to marriage was not an external conflict of social class but internal to characters who had to overcome their own limits and reinvent themselves as worthy partners for each other. For Cavell, these films were examples of Emerson's moral perfectionism, and they were profound affirmations of an American optimism. However, they are also comedies, in the strictest sense, about and ending in marriage. Rothman's attempt to interpret Hitchcock in these terms is problematic, as he well knows. To begin with, Hitchcock's subject is not marriage but murder, and while few of his films are strictly tragedies, they are all characterized by a kind of European pessimism. Indeed, Hitchcock's reception has always characterized him as a kind of lapsed Catholic who believes in original sin by way of UFA studios and German expressionism. In a significant way, Rothman's new book reads against many of the commonplaces of Hitchcock's long reception.

Orizzonti di gloria e il canone del cinema bellico (1957)

Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) is the first relevant American film on World War I after Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941). Inevitably, World War Two, and the subsequent Cold War (with its hot moment in Korea), totally re-orienteered the movie genre, that in the thirties had flourished mainly on the memory - mediated by the war books boom of the late twenties - of the Great War. When he chooses to go back to the 1914-18 conflict, Kubrick deliberately goes back to the pre-World War Two canon, epitomized by Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). But at the same time, Paths of Glory represents the beginning of a new canon. Telling the story of a grotesque court-martial trial in a first line French infantry division, Kubrick depicts the Great War as the quintessence of every possible mass mechanized conflict, posing the founding stones of a canon which is still productive today.