Michael Curtiz Research Articles

Blonde (2022)

Blonde (2022)

Dodge City

Michael Curtiz’s 1939 Dodge City ushered in a new era for the Western genre. Successfully modeled on the popular swashbuckler, this film was at the forefront of a renaissance in the production of feature-length Westerns that would continue almost unabated until the 1970s. Dodge City was closely modeled on previous Warner Bros. swashbucklers, retaining the same director (Curtiz) and several actors. Yet the decision to have Max Steiner create the musical accompaniment, instead of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, offered a fresh approach. Steiner’s prior experience with Westerns made him appropriately suited for this project as reflected in his composition and treatment of themes, as well as in his carefully crafted action music. Steiner’s music reflects the epic qualities of Dodge City, including the scenic surroundings, the tense action scenes, and the developing romance, yet with the added characteristics evocative of trains, wagons, and horses. Utilizing his original sketches for Dodge City, this essay examines how Steiner created a Western sound that was inspired by previous romantic swashbucklers, but altered to accommodate the frontier setting. To understand how Steiner tempered the dramatic intensity of the costume drama to complement the Western aesthetic, I focus specifically on the culminating action scene, examining how Steiner developed thematic material to underscore action scenes and reused key passages to create contexts for understanding the characters.

Jenő Janovics: Michel Curtiz’s first screenwriter

Jenő Janovics was Transylvania’s pioneer in film and one of the first screenwriter–producers in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He discovered talents like Michael Curtiz and Sir Alexander Korda. He wrote 31 film scripts, of which only one has survived: A tolonc (The Exile) and the silent film made from it, is the only remaining testimony of Curtiz’s and Janovics’s collaboration. In 2022, we commemorate the 60-year anniversary of the death of the former and 150 years from the birth of the latter. While all the known articles so far focus on Janovics’s legacy as a producer or a director, this article attempts to draw a portrait of Janovics the screenwriter, demonstrating his screenwriting qualities and his joint creative process with Curtiz in the case of A tolonc.

Review: Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960, by Liza Black

Review: <i>Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960</i>, by Liza Black

Jim Thorpe – All American: A Thin Hollywood Line of Truth?

Jim Thorpe – All American by Michael Curtiz (1951), with Burt Lancaster as main actor, is an interesting example of a sports biopic for all historians seeking both to build ties between reality and fiction, and decipher the construction and/or diffusion of certain collective representations. As such, it constitutes a ‘trace’ of time which contributes a posteriori to a ‘realization’. For the interest of the film lies less in the reconstitution or mere duplication of the sporting past than in its ‘reconstruction’. By placing this film in the context of the United States in the 1950s, and considering it from the contemporary angle of visual studies, it is easier to understand the place of American Indian sportsmen in North American society. In fact, even when reconstructed by the Hollywood machine, Thorpe’s sporting prowess led to indictment by a society that could not, and did not want to, really integrate its minorities. Behind this happy-end story and the rehabilitation of the champion, a reflection of deeply rooted racism in fine reared its head, driven by a self-righteous white community towards American Indians.

Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary: The Tragedy of Success, 1929–44

Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary: The Tragedy of Success, 1929–44

Austria Made in Hollywood by Jacqueline Vansant

Reviewed by: Austria Made in Hollywood by Jacqueline Vansant Ted Dawson Austria Made in Hollywood. By Jacqueline Vansant. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019. Pp. xii + 196. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-1571139450. Do Hollywood films set in Austria tell us more about Austria or about Hollywood? Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer's 1949 essay "National Types as Hollywood Presents Them" and its distinction between portraits and projections on-screen, Jacqueline Vansant comes down decisively on the side of projections (3). While certainly not denying some role to events in Europe and efforts to portray them in shaping filmic depictions of Austria, Vansant argues convincingly that these films are best interpreted in light of their American contexts. She surveys dozens of films, primarily from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, showing how, "Set in an imagined Austria, tied to American fantasies, and shaped by an American reality, the films contain embedded messages on changing American mores and gender relationships" (19). The book's most important contribution is doubtless its encyclopedic review of the surprisingly large number of Hollywood films set in Austria, and especially Vienna, during the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, we find the old imperial capital appearing time and again as the city of waltzes and trysts. The "Red Vienna," which actually existed when these films were produced, is entirely eclipsed by what Kracauer termed the "retrospective utopia" of "Gay Vienna" (4). Then, with the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, Austria became a locus for imagining an alternative to German politics. Viewed from the perspective of European events, the contrast is bizarre, since Austria was under its own fascist regime at the time, but Vansant shows how the imagined Austria provided an opportunity for Hollywood filmmakers to push US entrance into the war without running afoul of isolationists in Congress. Once the US had entered the war, depictions of Austria correspondingly changed and, for the first time, focused primarily on roughly contemporaneous events, with the Anschluss being relitigated on-screen, and not infrequently in ways that portrayed Austria as victim. This is an idea which would persist into the most familiar Hollywood Austria movie, The Sound of Music, and Vansant's command of the history of Austria on-screen allows her to show how this revisionist romanticism had already been rehearsed in scarcely remembered films like 1941's They Dare Not Love (108). While Vansant's focus on the American context occasionally appears little more than a narrative principle under which to organize the dizzying number of readings she carries out, it can also serve to revise older readings. In a chapter on Erich Stroheim, we thus find Vansant reading the Viennese-born filmmaker's two Vienna films, Merry-Go-Round (1923) and The Wedding March (1928), less as reflections of his own complex relationship with Austria—he left the empire in 1909 as the son of Jewish parents and introduced himself to Hollywood as a minor member of that empire's [End Page 200] by then defunct Catholic nobility (Erich von Stroheim)—than as commentaries on contemporary America. It is only by suppressing the dominant readings of Stroheim's work that Vansant is able to find "how the films weigh in on contemporary discussions on marriage, money, sex, and love" (24). At its strongest, Vansant's argument takes on a new historicist verve, revealing striking harmonies between Austrian stories and discourses of the contemporary United States. Stuart Walker's 1932 Evenings for Sale, a film in which a wealthy American widow travels to 1920s Vienna in search of operetta-inspired romance and finds herself connected to an erstwhile Austrian aristocrat now working as a sort of gigolo, becomes for Vansant a commentary on the connection between work and dignity. The fallen Austrian count "proves again and again that a man's value depends on his character and not his position," turning a narrative of European high culture into a palliative for the American working class during the Depression (45). In another particularly strong reading, Vansant shows how Michael Curtiz's 1960 A Breath of Scandal reworks Ferenc Molnárs's play Olympia by tying the discourse around the recently published Kinsey reports...

Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary: The Tragedy of Success, 1929–44 by Frey David (review)

REVIEWS 785 (dedicated to Britten), his Thirteenth String Quartet and Britten’s Third Cello Suite, described as reflecting the relationship between the two composers ‘in its closest form hitherto’ (p. 255), notably in the Suite’s full statement of the Russian Orthodox Kontakion for the Departed. The chapter ends with a consideration of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony and his projected operatic version of Chekhov’s ‘The Black Monk’ in relation to Britten’s opera, ‘Death in Venice’. In the conclusion to this admirably comprehensive book, Pyke introduces a number of other composers, including Mieczysław Weinberg, John Tavener and Arvo Pärt, who also showed the influence of Britten and Shostakovich. In sum, Britten’s building of bridges with Soviet culture undoubtedly improved for a while the progress of detente. Seventeen appendices provide valuable additional detail and background to the extensive footnotes. The book is remarkable for the author’s diligence and resourcefulness as well as his studious avoidance of exaggeration and excessive speculation. Rich in ideas, with musical, statistical and pictorial illustrations, this handsome volume is a splendid tribute to one of Rostropovich’s outstanding pupils, the tragically short-lived Professor Alexander Ivashkin who, incidentally, recorded Britten’s complete works for cello. Cameron Pyke’s admirable study deserves a place in all major libraries and on the shelves of many of the composer’s admirers who wish to know more about an important aspect of his life and work. London Arnold McMillin Frey, David. Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary: The Tragedy of Success, 1929–44. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2018. xvi + 462 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00: $115.00. Hungarian cinema has had a consistent impact on international audiences since the Second World War. Film-makers from Zoltán Fábri to Miklós Jancsó and Béla Tarr have all established their place in cinema history and the achievements of émigré film-makers such as Alexander Korda in the United Kingdom and Michael Curtiz in Hollywood are also well recognized. Yet its cinema before the 1950s remains virtually unknown. While this is scarcely unique in terms of common knowledge, it also applies to the world of academic film history. István Nemeskürty’s Word and Image was translated into English as early as 1968 and there was no other systematic account of the history of Hungarian cinema in English until John Cunningham’s seminal The Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex in 2004. But even here, the coverage of pre-war cinema is restricted in terms of space. In its extensive coverage of the period SEER, 97, 4, OCTOBER 2019 786 from the 1930s to 1944, David Frey’s new study therefore provides a much needed history of what was then a commercial industry. Referring to the Treaty of Trianon (1920), when the country lost 70 per cent of its pre-war territories, Frey points out that Hungary was transformed overnight from a multi-national state to one in search of a new identity. The cinema and, in particular, sound cinema was ‘to become a central collision point in the quest to define, locate, and discover Hungary’s national nature’ (p. 7). Not only would cinema represent ‘Hungarianness’ both at home and abroad but it would become a major element in the creation of a new identity. Surprisingly, between 1929 and 1942, it was also to become a major commercial success and, by 1942, was one of Europe’s most prolific industries, behind only Germany and Italy in terms of international exports. One of the book’s central themes is the role in this played by Hungarians of Jewish origin. The assimilation of Jewish citizens had been welcomed under the Dual Monarchy and, from a statistical perspective, they counted as ethnic Hungarians. Frey points out that by the 1920s they constituted the core of the middle and upper middle classes. Film distribution was controlled by Jewish Hungarians and nearly all leading producers and directors were of Jewish origin. When Hungary became an ‘ethnically homogenous’ nation state following World War One, he argues that Jews lost their ‘swing constituency’ status. Consequently, antisemitism found a new breeding ground, reaching its...

‘Opdat ik heenga als een man’

Abstract ‘That I may perish like a man’. War and masculinity This essay focuses on the cultural representation of masculinity in times of war. It unravels the gender effects of the topic ‘call to arms’ in which men are addressed as soldiers while women are often relegated to invisibility or to a helping role. Thus, the onset of war creates gender. The topic reconstitution of men and women in times of war is first analysed in a selected corpus of Dutch war poetry (Jan Camperts ‘Het lied der achttien dooden’ (1943) among others), secondly in Michael Curtiz’ classic film Casablanca (1942) and finally in W.F. Hermans’ novel De donkere kamer van Damocles (1958). Cultural texts can create genders, as I am demonstrating through a detailed analysis of Casablanca, but they can also resist this creation and critically enlighten its failure, which is, in my view, the gender scenario of De donkere kamer van Damocles.

The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz. Edited by R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance

The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz. Edited by R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance

On Thomson's &lt;em&gt;Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio&lt;/em&gt;

On Thomson’s Warner Bros:The Making of an American Movie Studio Stephen J. Whitfield Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio. By David Thomson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 220 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-19760-0 (hardcover). US $25.00. This sprightly volume is titled Warner Bros, not Warner Brothers, and the distinction is important. Although David Thomson has submitted an entry for Jewish Lives series, his book traces the history of a company—Hollywood studio Warner Bros.—and the legacy it gave moviegoers. The collective biographical portrait of Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack is rather sketchy when contrasted with the author’s analysis of films like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), or with his account of the contribution made by Darryl F. Zanuck (the chief of production in the 1920s and early 1930s—and incidentally a Gentile) to the success of the studio. Though commerce and art are entwined in all sorts of intriguing ways in the annals of American film, a paradox must be noted: Warner Bros is not—as the title hints—an addition to the field of business history. The careers and roles of stars like James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and Olivia de Havilland—all the way to Clint Eastwood—pique the author’s curiosity far more than front-office machinations or stockholder reports. Despite the rubric of Jewish Lives, the rationale for this lack of balance is obvious. Sam Warner died a few hours before the premiere of The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), the first sound movie, which made the studio’s reputation. [End Page 107] Sam basically disappears from the book by page 63. Treasurer Albert Warner was essentially a silent partner who lived uneventfully in New York. He died four decades after Sam, after spending the day at the race track (his chief pleasure) in Miami. That left Harry, the president of the company, an upright, solid citizen and a committed Jew, and Jack, who succeeded Zanuck and Hal B. Wallis as head of production. Jack Benny’s quip (“Jack Warner would rather make a bad joke than a good picture” [33]) isn’t quite fair; just think of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), and Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967). But when Thomson conjectures that Jack may be “the biggest scumbag ever to get into a Jewish Lives series” (2), his inclusion on a list made lustrous by Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Primo Levi, and Rabbi Akiva isn’t the only reason Warner Bros belongs uneasily on the shelf of new releases from Yale University Press. The exact relation between the accountants and the artists in the evolution of Warner Bros. is not a subject Thomson tackles directly. The bottom line certainly had primacy. It could not have escaped the brothers that in making a dog known as Rin Tin Tin (who starred in twenty-seven silent films between 1923 and 1925) famous, they were getting a star who “never complained or got a lawyer or an agent” (69). At virtually the same moment, the studio lost Ernst Lubitsch to Paramount; his comedies, Harry Warner told the émigré director, were “too subtle” (66). Hard bargaining and excessive demands provoked George Jessel to spurn the offer to reprise his Broadway role as Jack Robin—but can anyone besides Al Jolson be imagined as starring in The Jazz Singer? For large sections of this book, while Thomson covers gangster pictures, Busby Berkeley musicals, and forlorn tales of vulnerable women requiring toughness to survive, the brothers disappear entirely from the text. When they (mostly Jack) happen to reemerge, the episodes do not inspire confidence that the art was appreciated or understood. (None of the brothers graduated from high school, so they might be given some slack.) Although Jack Warner had sold the controlling interest in the studio to Seven Arts Productions in 1966, pocketing $32 million for himself, he wanted to have a hand in Bonnie and Clyde. Producer Warren Beatty showed him the film. But Warner apparently found the change in tone from jaunty comedy to bloody violence baffling. In a famous exchange...

Refocus: The Films of Delmer Daves eds. by Matthew Carter, Andrew Patrick Nelson (review)

Reviewed by: Refocus: The Films of Delmer Daves eds. by Matthew Carter, Andrew Patrick Nelson Bernard F. Dick Refocus: The Films of Delmer Daves Matthew Carter, Andrew Patrick Nelson, eds. Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 226 pages In The American Cinema (Dutton, 1968), Andrew Sarris' controversial hierarchy of directors, Delmer Daves is relegated to the "Lightly Likeable" category reserved for "talented but uneven directors with the saving grace of unpretentiousness" (171) such as Michael Curtiz, Henry Hathaway, and Mitchell Leisen. Daves should have been flattered to be numbered among the directors of Casablanca (1942), The House on 92nd St. (1945), and Easy Living (1937). Unpretentious Daves was, but not unprofound, as the ten essays in this excellent collection proves. Actually, there are eleven. The editors modestly refer to their joint article as an "Introduction," in which they make a case for Daves as an auteur with a vision that he not so much imposed on his material as allowed to come out of it. But before the editors reach that conclusion, they take us along the torturous route that led to auteurism, from Astruc's caméra-stylo, film as a form of writing, which implies a signature, to the signers themselves—directors who have given expression to narratives that they have not written but could tell in a way that the writers could not. Anyone teaching a course in Film Theory should make the "Introduction" required reading. I have yet to see a better analysis of authorship refracted through the prism of structuralism and post-structuralism. There is a rich humanity in Daves' vision seen particularly in his portrayal of indigenous peoples in Broken Arrow (1950), Bird of Paradise (1951), and Drum Beat (1954). Although, as Andrew Patrick Nelson notes in "Authorship and the Westerns of Delmer Daves," the director "spent three months living among the Hopi and Navajo" (54) after graduating from Stanford University in 1926, he made nine films between 1944 and 1949—six with a World War II background—before he attempted his first western, Broken Arrow (1950), which seemed revisionist at the time for its sympathetic treatment of native Americans within the setting of a doomed interracial romance. The western most associated with Daves is 3:10 to Yuma (1957), which Fran Pheasant-Kelly brilliantly analyzes in "Delmer Daves' 3:10 to Yuma: Aesthetics, Reception, and Cultural Significance," treating it both as a filmic text with close attention to framing, camera angles, and lighting and as a quest narrative about an impoverished farmer (Van Heflin), who, having failed to intervene during a stagecoach robbery, volunteers to deliver an outlaw (Glenn Ford) to Yuma prison both for the money and the opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of his wife and sons. To set his film apart from the traditional western, Daves intertwined the pursuit of manhood with the doubling of a flawed hero and an amiable villain, who is unusually deferential toward women. Small wonder that the Library of Congress designated 3:10 to Yuma as worthy of preservation for its historical, aesthetic, and cultural significance. An equally important western is Jubal (1956), but for reasons that have more to do with its noirish overtones than its place in the western canon. Don't be put off by Matthew Carter's unwieldy title: "'This Is Where He Brought Me: 10,000 Acres of Nothing!'": The Femme Fatale and other Film Noir Tropes in Delmer Daves' Jubal. "This is the highlight of the collection. While not a noir western like Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947), Jubal is an atypical variation on the eternal triangle (husband, wife, wife's lover) with a stolid but genial husband (Ernest Borgnine), his unfulfilled wife (Valerie French), and the innocent victim of her sexual aggressiveness (Glenn Ford), who kills the husband in self-defense. The film's steaminess, reflected in both the wife's vampish behavior and a ranch hand's (Rod Steiger) palpable lust for her, counterbalanced by Ford's almost puritanical rejection of her advances, reveals Daves' refusal to make anything resembling a pure western. [End Page 70] While all the essays afford valuable insights into Daves' art, one wishes the editors had commissioned a few more dealing...

Film ChronicleYankee Doodle Dandy dir. by Michael Curtiz, and: Shoulder Arms dir. by Charles Chaplin, and: The Big Parade dir. by King Vidor, and: Westfront 1918 dir. by G. W. Pabst, and: La Grande Illusion dir. by Jean Renoir, and: Paths of Glory dir. by Stanley Kubrick, and: Oh! What a Lovely War dir. by Richard Attenborough, and: Frantz dir.

Film ChronicleYankee Doodle Dandy dir. by Michael Curtiz, and: Shoulder Arms dir. by Charles Chaplin, and: The Big Parade dir. by King Vidor, and: Westfront 1918 dir. by G. W. Pabst, and: La Grande Illusion dir. by Jean Renoir, and: Paths of Glory dir. by Stanley Kubrick, and: Oh! What a Lovely War dir. by Richard Attenborough, and: Frantz dir.

American Biography: The Year in the US

American BiographyThe Year in the US Carl Rollyson (bio) Biography suffers from what I am going to call the significant subject syndrome. Choose to write about an American president, especially for a trade house or a prestigious university press, and you are automatically accorded due deference in The New York Times and other major publications. Over the last publishing season well-received biographies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, by John A. Farrell and Bob Spitz, join other recent presidential narratives of Grant and Nixon by Ron Chernow and Evan Thomas. The demand for such reassessment is insatiable. But even if the president is Calvin Coolidge—not one of the top-tier choices for biographers—you will find the book in an airport bookshop, as I did, when it was first published in 2013. What you will not find at the airport is Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film, Alan K. Rode's splendid 2017 biography of Michael Curtiz, director of Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945), and White Christmas (1954)—to name just four of his most famous, popular, and successful films. Coolidge is a priori considered more important (reviewed in The New York Times Book Review), while Curtiz is ignored. Who the subject is and who publishes the book outweighs the biography's quality or even its cultural importance. Might it be said that from a certain point of view Curtiz's contribution to the construction of American identity is as significant—or dare I say more significant—than Coolidge's? The University Press of Kentucky published the Curtiz biography, and that means the book will not be as widely distributed and reviewed as a trade book—no matter how diligent the publisher might be in sending out advance reading copies. A biographer of a film subject might have a better shot at a Times review and major distribution if, like James Curtis, he writes about Spencer Tracy, often considered the greatest male actor in Hollywood history, and the biography is published by the prestigious Knopf imprint. The pecking order is not just a matter of the publishing industry, or of media bias, but is also upheld by biographers too. A member of the New York University Biography seminar said to me when I told her I was writing a biography of Dana Andrews, a star of the 1940s: "Isn't he too small of a subject?" I [End Page 168] wish I had the wit then to say, "No, no small subjects. Only small biographers." A reviewer of my Rebecca West biography, Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl, marveled that someone who could write a biography about Marilyn Monroe would turn to such an important literary figure. When I mentioned a long biography of Barbara Stanwyck, which was only the first volume, a biographer of political figures said to me flat out: "No actor is worth a thousand pages." And look who wins the awards. Rarely is it the biographer of a film figure unless the subject is someone as hallowed and controversial as Orson Welles. Some major newspapers—notably The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post—do in fact review books like Rode's Curtiz biography. In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan, noting the hundred plus films Curtiz directed, including ninety-four at Warner Brothers, which defined his dazzling pictorial technique, identifies why until now there has been no biography of the director and why Rode's biography, "thoroughly researched," is so important: "You never got the sense Curtiz felt some kinds of films were more important than others." In short, the director was devoted to film, not to the subjects of film, just as a student or reviewer of biography ought to be concerned with biography, not just the subject of that biography. Curtiz did not fit the "auteur theory." He did not author films, imposing his vision on them, but instead surrendered himself to the script and brought to it his compositional genius. As Scott Eyman puts it in The Wall Street Journal, Curtiz's camera was "an active participant, a searcher after crucial emotional moments, making for a dynamic style that was a strong influence on the young...

Mildred Pierce : 'melodramma del rimatrimonio' tra romanzo, cinema e televisione

PurposeThis essay intends to analyze melodrama, in its enigmatic and heterogeneous essence, through a female character: Mildred Pierce, protagonist of the novel by the American writer James M. Cain (1941), of the film by Michael Curtiz (1945) and the miniseries by Todd Haynes (HBO, 2011) – three different works and the same title, which coincides with her name. Mildred’s story reinterprets the rhetorical myth of the melodramatic unknown women, those heroines searching for an existential way to state the right to tell their stories. MethodologyParaphrasing Stanley Cavell, author of a famous philosophical theory on cinematographic genres, that of Mildred Pierce’s could be defined a remarriage melodrama, namely a version of the story where we can find the restoration of the first marriage although in a melodramatic context of avoidance. The first step regards a rhetorical datum, that is the negation as the (re)generative tool in a system within which it’s possible to obtain a particular kind of melodrama from a certain comedy. Then this datum is incorporated in a wider philosophical perspective – concerning language, skepticism and the concept of “unknowness” – and it’s compared with the main theories about melodrama, from literature to cinema (Frye, Brooks, Elsaesser, Doane, Williams, Cook), until the implications connected to TV seriality (Mittel). Results/FindingsThrough the case “Mildred Pierce” in its different versions, using categories belonging to philosophical reflection, it’s possible to test the theoretical strength of melodrama as crucial and constant mode of modern imagination, as well as to reread its potentialities as intermedial genre.

“The Hard Shining Brightness of You”: Witnessing the Assumption of a Body in George Cukor's A Woman's Face

This essay focuses on George Cukor's A Woman's Face (US, 1941), a film that complicates a dominant narrative in studies of Joan Crawford's work that locates Mildred Pierce (dir. Michael Curtiz, US, 1945) as inaugurating the star's pronounced, albeit disparaged, iterations of masculinity. Not only does A Woman's Face anticipate displays that, as in Mildred Pierce, register challenges to normative gender and sexual identities, but it also exceeds them in range and degree. Cukor's tale of Anna Holm (Crawford), whose facial scarring codes her as a marginal figure, spawns an image of a woman who performs a masculinity that persists even after she is presumably cured through plastic surgery and conventional garb, indicating that masculinity is not necessarily aligned with appearance or anatomy. Crucially, Anna's felt sense that her scars persist after their removal—evoking the phenomenon of phantom limb pain—becomes especially suggestive for charting how Cukor's film contests established notions of doing gender and the body. By revealing—at precisely those moments when conventional gender expression is presumably reestablished—that the able body's contours extend beyond its visible borders in space, the film illustrates how psychoanalytically and phenomenologically informed, expansive notions of the body and perceptual field matter for understanding transgender and other forms of gender dissonance. Drawing on disability studies, queer theory, and transgender theory, this essay demonstrates that, however unwittingly, Cukor offers an expansive, fluid notion of the body and being.

Hollywood �ber Alles : Seeing the Nazi in American Movies

Hollywood Über Alles:Seeing the Nazi in American Movies Geoffrey Cocks No figure in fact or in fiction embodies absolute evil as much as the Nazi. The American-movie Nazi drew its initial presence and force from the sheer enormity of Nazi destructive impact on the real world, the Nazis’ own projection of their dark drama onto the movie screens of that world, and the emigration of much German, European, and Jewish talent to Hollywood in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Hollywood largely avoided the subject of Nazism for political and economic reasons. From 1941 on, however, the Nazi figure assumed a place in a wide variety of movie genres, not only because of the fervor of war, but because the Nazi allowed Hollywood to engage American issues of class, race, and power without indicting American culture itself. Hollywood movies about the First World War caricatured Prussian officers as bearers of the arrogant rot at the top of Old World society. This type of “pre”-Nazi figure was evident even in the urbane officer in Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941) in contrast to the thuggish party leader (Confessions of a Nazi Spy [Anatole Litvak, 1939]). Click for larger view View full resolution Nazi officers in Man Hunt (left) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy Such urbanity usually conceals thuggishness, however. Erich von Stroheim’s portrayal of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in Paramount’s Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943) recalls Stroheim’s earlier portrayals of Prussians, but it adds the menace of Nazi racism. Wilder, an Austrian-Jewish émigré, indirectly exposes the Nazi persecution of Jews when Rommel notes that there is no Moses to part the Red Sea for the British and when Rommel rages, in German, at officers dallying with a French hotel maid: “Is this the German army or a Jews’ school?” The movie elliptically refers to the Final Solution (articulated formally in early 1942) when Rommel observes ominously about prison camps that “we can use paper in Germany, a great deal of paper,” hinting at the bureaucracy of euphemisms used in Nazi communications (Sonderbehandlung—“special handling”—being the most infamous). Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) channeled Warner Bros.’s longstanding anti-German and anti-Nazi stance into themes of group identity and collective resistance to the Nazis, an approach promoted by the new Office of War Information. Colonel Strasser, as played by German émigré Conrad Veidt, is Teutonic in the aristocratic Prussian style without being self-stereotyped like von Stroheim and so exudes a more modern malevolence à la Nazi. He, like Rommel, sports no aristocratic “von.” His name has a utilitarian, even proletarian, simplicity and directness to it. He wears the uniform of the Luftwaffe, the most recent and Nazified of the German armed services, and he arrives in an airplane. The German army officers [End Page 38] around him are a blend of arrogance and officiousness, described and dismissed by Rick’s Russian bartender as “Germans boom, boom, boom, boom.” Click for larger view View full resolution The Nazi uniform is, in other words, dapper camouflage for thugs--typically played, ironically, by the sorts of people the Nazis despised. More than any other wartime American film, Casablanca’s production resounds with the powerful voice of recent emigrants, many of them Jewish, from fascist Europe. Director Curtiz was from Hungary. Veidt had fled Germany with his Jewish wife. Peter Lorre, born László Löwenstein in Hungary, plays Ugarte, an oily but hapless trader in refugee souls.1 But even though many of the crew and cast, as well most of the twelve German-speaking actors, were Jewish, there is famously no mention of Jews in Casablanca, or indeed of religion or race at all. Unlike Once Upon a Honeymoon (Leo McCarey, 1942), Address Unknown (William Menzies, 1944), Tomorrow the World (Leslie Fenton, 1944), and None Shall Escape (André de Toth, 1944), the Nazi in Casablanca appears not to be presented in the context of a war against the Jews. This tactic reflected the concern among Jewish studio heads in Hollywood that America, with its own obvious history of anti-Semitism, would interpret the war (or the film’s representation of it) as a defense of Jews.2...

Pirates of the Great Depression: Political Modes of Adventure in the Pirate Film

The intent of this paper is to conceptualize mode as a classifier that could be applied to the process of subdividing the American adventure cinema. Among myriad of films that are typically categorized as the action-adventure, pirate films are the most suitable productions that can carry in themselves certain political ideologies. By analyzing two canonical pirate films, The Black Pirate (Albert Parker, 1926) and Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935), this paper seeks to exemplify how pirate films can formulate their unique political modes by adopting different strategies in cinematizing pirate political and economic systems, and also in visualizing those outlaws. The Black Pirate consolidates the authority of a nation and its exercising violence against criminal pirates, while Captain Blood justifies the pirate rebellion against state power by romanticizing piracy. The Great Depression, happened in between the release of the two pirate films, gives clear, but only a partial answer to this diametrically opposite political modes. Supplementing this historical approach to the genre, this paper sheds light on other interpretative aspects such as the bandit myth and the actor persona. As a result, this study aims to add another dimension to the field of action-adventure studies.

Sensations of the Past: Identity, Empowerment, and the British Monarchy Films

Abstract Royal bio-pics have always enjoyed a high priority among cinematic representations of British history and taken a lion’s share in defining Britishness to audiences at home and abroad. These historical narratives never render national identity by capturing the past of historians, instead reconstruct the past as a mirror of contemporary reality and in a way as to satisfy their audience’s demand for both romantic qualities and antiquarian nostalgia, for sensations they regard their own. The author’s basic assumption is that such cinema does not represent history but exploits spectatorial desire for a mediated reality one inhabits through the experience of an empowered identity. The first part of the article examines how private-life films (a subgenre of royal bio-pics) mythologized and idealized Tudor monarchs in the 1930s, while in the second part, contemporary representatives of the subgenre are analysed as they portray the challenges of the Monarchy in its search for a place within modern British identity politics. Analysed films include The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Michael Curtiz, 1939), Mrs Brown (John Madden, 1997), The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006), and The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010).1

Towards a Politics and Art of the Land: Gothic Cinema of the Australian New Wave and Its Reception by American Film Critics

This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode.