What Made a Griffith Girl?

David Wark Griffith was born in Crestwood, Kentucky, on January 22, 1875; he was the fourth son of Jacob Wark Griffith, a onetime Confederate colonel. In 1908 he joined the American Biograph Company as an actor, after having been previously employed in the same capacity by the Edison Company. On July 14, 1908, his first film as a director, The Adventures of Dollie, was released. His last production, The Struggle, was released on December 10, 1931. He died in Hollywood on July 23, 1948.

That, in one cold precise paragraph, sums up the career of D. W. Griffith, the man who not only invented screen syntax, but also--and more importantly--gave the cinema the most precious gift of all, beauty. That beauty he presented to film audiences to a large extent through the actresses whom he used in his productions, actresses who studied individually might appear to have little in common but who together had one major common denominator: they were all Griffith Girls.

What made a Griffith girl? Physically, they were all small, slim, and young, the last attribute perhaps being the most important. "We pick the little women because the world loves youth, and all its wistful sweetness. . . . Youth with its dreams and sweetness, youth with its romance and adventure! For in the theater, as in our families, we look to youth for beauty and often for example. We sit in the twilight of the theater and in terms of youth, upon faces enlarged, we see thoughts that are personal to us, with the privilege of supplying our own words and messages as they may fit our individual experiences in life."

All the Griffith girls (excluding, of course, the character actresses) were less than twenty years of age when they came under his direction; Blanche Sweet was not yet fourteen when she joined Biograph, and Carol Dempster was eighteen when she made True Heart Susie, as was Miriam Cooper when she made Intolerance.

It is often said, foolishly, that the Griffith heroine was always ethereal. Which other Griffith actress, aside from Lillian Gish, can be described as ethereal? Certainly not Blanche Sweet or Mae Marsh or Clarine Seymour. As "The Little Disturber" in Hearts of the World, Dorothy Gish was anything but ethereal, and Carol Dempster was only ethereal in as much as she was trying to emulate Lillian Gish. If anything a Griffith heroine had many masculine traits, in that she would fight for what she desired, and if she did not get it, it was not through want of trying.
The quality which made these actresses so special, the quality which Griffith saw in each of them--perhaps not instantly, but very soon after the first meeting--was, I believe, "soul." By "soul" I mean emotion, an inner quality that could be brought to the surface and exposed before the camera: an inner quality that might remain dormant until its possessor came into contact with a mesmerist, a Svengali, a D. W. Griffith.

"Soul" was an expression Griffith often referred to when discussing film acting: "The actor with the Soul enters into the work with all the ardor there is in him. He feels his part, he is living his part, and the result is a good picture. . . . For principals I must have people with souls, people who know and feel their parts, and who express every single feeling in the entire gamut of emotions with their muscles. . . . It isn't what you do with your face or your hands, it's the light within. If you have that light, it doesn't matter just what you do before the camera."

Griffith's choice of actresses seldom faltered. He always seemed to know who had that "light within," although it wasn't always apparent the first time he worked with a particular actress. Linda Arvidson comments, regarding Blanche Sweet, that when she first applied for work at American Biograph, he was "as yet unwilling to grant that she had any soul or feeling in her work." Occasionally he failed to spot that light at all, as with Florence Lawrence, whom he allowed without demur to leave American Biograph and join Carl Laemmle.

All these players remained loyal to Griffith; their devotion was absolute. Lillian Gish has shown her devotion not only in the title of her autobiography, but in one of her acknowledgements therein: "To D. W. Griffith who taught me it was more fun to work than to play." Lionel Barrymore wrote, "Bless him, he always tried to make one feel his contribution was great even though it might have been piffle." All of his players have protected his good name throughout the years. It is almost impossible to find anyone who has ever worked for Griffith who has one word of criticism of him. (One almost feels obligated to use a capital "H" for his or him.) The general feeling about the man by all who knew him was summed up by Blanche Sweet, when we discussed his funeral.

"I did go to his funeral, although I don't believe in funerals. But I did go there, and felt very badly about it, because there were quite a lot of people there, but on the other hand, all of Hollywood should have been there--standing. All of Hollywood, because without him, maybe someone else would have come along and done it, maybe, but maybe not. Anyway, he did it. And he contributed more, actually, to making motion pictures than anybody else. There have been a lot of people, men and women, who had done a great deal for films, contributed a lot, but nobody did quite as much as he did. And I really felt that everybody who ever worked in the films should have been there. Well, that's one reason why I don't believe in funerals."

This volume chronicles lives and careers of several of the Griffith girls. Without him most, maybe all, would be unknown today, but I also like to think that his success owed much to their presence in his films. He brought out the best in them, and they responded by assuring his films--through their acting--a place in the history of the cinema.

In 1928, D. W. Griffith addressed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with the following words: "When motion pictures have created something to compare with the plays of Euripides, that have lasted two thousand years, or the works of Homer, or the plays of Shakespeare, or Ibsen, or Keats 'Ode to a Nightingale,' the music of Handel, Bach, and Wagner, then let us call our form of entertainment an art, but not before." Griffith was not a modest man; I believe he knew when he made that speech that his films had equalled the works of Homer, Shakespeare, or Handel, that Broken Blossoms was comparable in beauty to "Ode to a Nightingale." But, as in any great man's work, it was the collaborators, the interpreters, who played their part as well. The Griffith girls were the Sarah Bernhardt and the Julia Marlowe to his Shakespeare, the Kirsten Flagsted to his Wagner. To them also should be given the praise and the glory. We shall not see David Wark Griffith's like again; nor, I fear, shall we see theirs--the Griffith Girls'.

Movies include Rome

Rome has served as a backdrop for probably more historical dramas than any other city. Among the more important are The Roman ( 1910), Quo Vadis ( 1912), Nerone e Agrippina ( 1913), Nero ( 1922), Quo Vadis ( 1923), Ben-Hur ( 1926), Don Juan ( 1926), The Sign of the Cross ( 1932), Cleopatra ( 1934), Quo Vadis ( 1951), Androcles and the Lion ( 1953), Ben-Hur ( 1969), Spartacus ( 1960), Cleopatra ( 1963), The Fall of Rome ( 1963), The Fall of the Roman Empire ( 1964), The Agony and the Ecstasy ( 1965), and Fellini Satyricon. Rome has also served as a location for at least four historical comedies: Roman Scandals ( 1933), Fiddlers Three ( 1944), Carry on Cleo ( 1964), and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum ( 1966).

Italian features in which the city has played an important part include Roma, città aperta/Rome Open City ( 1945), Sciuscià/Shoeshine ( 1946), Paisà/Paisan ( 1946), Ladri di biciclette/The Bicycle Thief ( 1948), Umberto D ( 1952), Lo sceicco bianco/The White Sheik ( 1952), La notti di Cabiria/The Nights of Cabiria ( 1957), La ciociara/Two Women ( 1960), Il gobbo/The Hunchback of Rome ( 1960), La dolce vita ( 1960), Il conformista/The Conformist ( 1970), Roma ( 1972), and Scherzo del destino agguato dietro l'angelo come un brigante di strada/A Joke of Destiny ( 1983).

Among the American features that have utilized Rome are The Eternal City ( 1915), The Eternal City ( 1923), One Night in Rome ( 1924), Never Take No for an Answer ( 1952), Roman Holiday ( 1953), Three Coins in the Fountain ( 1954), Seven Hills of Rome ( 1958), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone ( 1961), Two Weeks in Another Town ( 1962), The Pigeon That Took Rome ( 1962), Light in the Piazza ( 1962), and Gidget Goes to Rome ( 1963).

Films that have utilized Paris

The many films that have utilized Paris as a historical backdrop, from the middle ages to the Second World War, include: Trilby ( 1913), The Two Orphans ( 1915), Camille ( 1915), Camille ( 1917), A Tale of Two Cities ( 1917), A Tale of Two Cities ( 1921), Camille ( 1921), The Three Musketeers ( 1921), The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ( 1921), Orphans of the Storm ( 1922), The Three Must-Get-Theres ( 1922), Scaramouche ( 1923), Trilby ( 1923), Zaza ( 1923), The Hunchback of Notre Dame ( 1923), The Phantom of the Opera ( 1925), Madame Sans-Gêne ( 1925), La Bohème ( 1926), Beloved Rogue ( 1927), Napoleon ( 1927), Camille ( 1927), Marie Antoinette ( 1929), Du Barry, Woman of Passion ( 1930), Svengali ( 1931), The Scarlet Pimpernel ( 1935), A Tale of Two Cities ( 1935), Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel ( 1937), Camille ( 1937), Marie Antoinette ( 1938), La Marseillaise ( 1938), The Three Musketeers ( 1939), The Hunchback of Notre Dame ( 1939), The Moon and Sixpence ( 1942), The Phantom of the Opera ( 1943), Les enfants du paradis/Children of Paradise ( 1945), Bel Ami ( 1947), The Three Musketeers ( 1948), Moulin Rouge ( 1952), French Cancan/Only the French Can ( 1955), The Hunchback of Notre Dame ( 1957), A Tale of Two Cities ( 1958), The Phantom of the Opera ( 1962), The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ( 1962), Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim ( 1962), Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines ( 1965), The Great Race ( 1965), La Bohème ( 1965), Is Paris Burning? ( 1966), The Madwoman of Chaillot ( 1969), The ThreeMusketeers Musketeers ( 1973), Le Dernier Métro/The Last Métro ( 1981), and Swann in Love ( 1985).
The 1922 British feature, Squibs Wins the Calcutta Sweep, reaches its climax in Paris. Also set in Paris are the three British silent features-- The Rat ( 1925), The Triumph of the Rat ( 1926), and The Return of the Rat ( 1929)--featuring Ivor Novello as the apache of the title--and the one British sound film-- The Rat ( 1937)--with Anton Walbrook as the same character. Other British films that utilize a Paris background include Paris Plane ( 1934), It Happened in Paris ( 1935), Old Mother Riley in Paris ( 1938), This Was Paris ( 1942), Idol of Paris ( 1948), Innocents in Paris ( 1953), The Lyons in Paris ( 1955), and To Paris with Love ( 1955).
The British film industry has generally taken a jaundiced look at Paris and the French. The French themselves adopted a similar approach in the 1955 feature Les carnets du Major Thompson/The French They Are a Funny Race. American filmmakers have viewed Paris more as a city of romance, and among the dozens of American features with a Parisian backdrop are A Woman of Paris ( 1923), Young April ( 1923), While Paris Sleeps ( 1923), Open All Night ( 1924), The King of Main Street ( 1925), Kiki, ( 1926), Paris ( 1926), Paris at Midnight ( 1926), A Gentleman of Paris ( 1927), 7th Heaven ( 1927), The Cohens and Kellys in Paris ( 1928), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ( 1928), The Battle of Paris ( 1929), Lady of the Pavements ( 1929), The Love Parade ( 1929), Paris ( 1929), Remember the Night ( 1932), Love Me Tonight ( 1932), Paris Interlude ( 1934), Paris in Spring ( 1935), History Is Made at Night ( 1937), Ninotchka ( 1939), Paris Underground ( 1945), Arch of Triumph ( 1948), An American in Paris ( 1951), April in Paris ( 1952), The Last Time I Saw Paris ( 1954), Funny Face ( 1957), Paris Does Strange Things ( 1957), Love in the Afternoon ( 1957), A Certain Smile ( 1958), Can-Can ( 1960), Paris Blues ( 1961), Gigot ( 1962), Gay Pur-ree ( 1962), What a Way to Go! ( 1962), Irma La Douce ( 1963), Charade( 1963), Paris When It Sizzles ( 1964), What's New Pussycat? ( 1965), Boeing Boeing ( 1965), How to Steal a Million ( 1966), Two for the Road ( 1967), Topaz ( 1969), and "The Aristocats" ( 1970).

As far as French filmmakers are concerned, no one has shown Paris more perfectly on screen than René Clair in such films as Paris qui dort/The Crazy Ray ( 1924), Sous les toits de Paris/Under the Bridges of Paris ( 1930), Le Million/ The Million ( 1931), À Nous la liberté" ( 1931), Quatorze Juillet/July 14th ( 1933), and Porte des lilas/Gates of Paris ( 1957). Other memorable French films set in Paris include Boudu sauvé des eaux/Boudu Saved from Drowning ( 1932), L'Atalante ( 1934), Rififi ( 1955), Le ballon rouge/The Red Balloon ( 1956), Mon Oncle/My Uncle ( 1958), Les quatre cents coups/The Four Hundred Blows ( 1959), Zazie dans le mêtro ( 1960), Cleo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 ( 1961), Belle de Jour ( 1967), Playtime ( 1968), La vie devant soi/Madame Rosa ( 1977), and Diva ( 1981).

The Italian film industry's best-known contribution to Parisian films is, of course, Ultimo tango a Parigi/Last Tango in Paris ( 1972).

Africa in the Movies

The African Continent has served as a backdrop for many features. Among the more important are West of Zanzibar ( 1928), A Dangerous Woman ( 1929), Sanders of the River ( 1935), Song of Freedom ( 1936), Rhodes of Africa ( U.S. Rhodes, 1936), King Solomon's Mines ( 1937), Stanley and Livingstone ( 1939), Africa Screams ( 1949), The African Queen ( 1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro ( 1952), Mogambo ( 1953), Call Me Bwana ( 1963), Guns at Batasi ( 1964), White Hunter ( 1965), Noir et Blanc en Couleur/Black and White in Color ( 1976), Raid on Entebbe ( 1977), Victory at Entebbe ( 1977), The Gods Must Be Crazy ( 1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark ( 1982), Greystoke ( 1985), King Solomon's Mines ( 1986), and Out of Africa ( 1986). The many features in the "Tarzan" series have also been set in Africa.

Two early adventurers-cum-cinematographers Martin E. and Osa Johnson made a number of features set in Africa, including Trailing African Wild Animals ( 1923), Congorilla ( 1932), and Baboona ( 1935). After the death of her husband in 1937, Osa Johnson worked solo, with later films including I Married Adventure ( 1940) and African Paradise ( 1942). Osa Johnson published a volume on the careers of herself and her husband, I Married Adventure ( Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott), in 1940.

The Glittering Gate 1915 Neighborhood Playhouse

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord Dunsany, who turned his Irish whimsy to the writing of short plays of Oriental mystery and horror, first came to the stage with his best play, The Glitter-ing Gate ing Gate, a one-act drama, which W. B. Yeats produced with the Abbey Players in Dublin, 1909.

Through the minds of two burglars that have died on the job, the play presents an ironic and whimsical satire on hope. In "the lonely place" before the Gate of Heaven, Jim -- who was hanged -- tilts empty whiskey bottles, only to be mocked by far-away laugher, while the more recently dead Bill takes out his jimmy and works. The glittering gate swings open, to reveal only the blooming great stars. Bill is aghast, as the mocking laughter rises, and Jim exclaims: "That's like them. That's very like them. Yes, they'd do that!"

The Glittering Gate opened at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse on March 6, 1915, and became popular all over the United States. The Milwaukee Leader, after a 1917 production, called Dunsany"the most imaginative dramatist now using the English language." The Glittering Gate, as well as Dunsany's later plays, allows for imaginative staging and lighting. The language is simple, yet fraught with tense anticipation and muted suggestion along the brink of terror.

The emptiness of the hereafter envisioned in The Glittering Gate has caused critics to seek to reassure their readers. It has been suggested that Dunsany meant to show merely that there is no heaven for such as Jim and Bill, but the London Referee ( March 25, 1920) was more consoling: "The stars are not, after all, a negation. Their only fault is that they are as far away as before. And we have to remember the possibility of more 'gates' than one to the Heavenly estate." The play remains quietly ironic.

The later dramas of Lord Dunsany were less universal in their evocation.

Broadway Play 1926 Broadhurst Theatre

This play remains significant for its full dramatic capture of the false glamour of the prohibition era in New York. As Alexander Woollcott said: "Of all the scores of plays that shuffled in endless procession along Broadway in the year of grace 1926, the one which most perfectly caught the accent of the city's voice was this play named after the great Midway itself, this taut and telling and tingling cartoon. . . . The theatre is at its best when it is journalistic, when it makes its fable and its parable out of the life streaming down its own street, when the pageant on its stage is just a cartoon and a criticism of the land and the day lying across the sill of the stage door. So journalistic is Broadway that. . . its manuscript could scarcely have been delivered through the ordinary snail-paced channels. It must have come in over the ticker."

Philip Dunning, who wrote the play with George Abbott, and who peddled it for three years before Jed Harris produced it, said that he was "casting a challenge to the so-called silver screen. . . I set out then to write a play of continuous action occurring in a background that adhered to its prototype in real life with utter fidelity. As an indication of the pace at which the action moves, there is the fact that in the three acts of Broadway there are more than three hundred entrances and exits."

In its summer tryout at Atlantic City, the play was called The Roaring Forties (the New York night-club and theatre district stretches from Fortieth to Fifty-Second Street). It opened in New York at the Broadhurst Theatre on September 16, 1926, as Broadway, and caught on like wildfire. Never before did a drama gross a million dollars in thirty-seven weeks. (It cost but $9,000 to produce.) Broadway ran in New York for three years, while it was being played elsewhere by ten other companies, four of them abroad.

St. John Ervine called the English production "very crude, very direct, and very real." The London Mail said, "Much of it seems exceedingly vulgar; and no revue producer has dared undress his chorus to the extent of the girls supposed to represent the cabaret troupe." The English Lord Chamberlain, in truth, ordered some changes. He deleted about 30% of the profanity, changed "God!" to "Gee!", and subdued "Make your hands behave!" to "Stop!"
Two movements are intertwined in Broadway. There is the melodramatic rivalry of the gangsters, with Steve Crandall as big boss of the bootlegging racket; and there is the sentimental story of sweet Billie Moore, of the chorus at the Paradise Night Club, and her sweetheart, the hoofer Roy Lane. Steve, however, also has designs on Billie, and when the gangster shoots an uptown rival, somehow the police find Roy holding the murder gun. Things look bad for Billie and Roy; but when the uptown gangster's girl friend shoots Steve, the lovers are free to hope for happier days on Broadway.

Some critics were not sure of the play's appeal. Brooks Atkinson observed that it often has "the illusion of motion even when it is not progressing at all," but he felt that it was on the whole a "firmly packed melodrama." Alan Dale insisted that "this ingenious chatter of Broadway has nothing at all to interest anybody but the residents of near-FortySecond street." The New York Telegram concurred with Dale. However, the play's stage history, including wide production among college groups, and "little" and summer theatres, shows that the rest of the country thrilled to the picture of life on the Gay White Way.

The play was twice converted into a motion picture: in 1929, with Lee Tracy and Sylvia Field; in 1942, with Pat O'Brien, Janet Blair, and George Raft (who played the part of "George Raft, the hoofer").

Early 1900s came the new generation of the 1920s

Businessmen began to realize the financial potential for movies. While movies were first shown as part of other forms of entertainment, they soon became the featured attraction themselves. By 1905 the first nickelodeon had opened in Pittsburgh, where customers each paid a nickel to see a full program of a half dozen short films. The opening of theaters completed the elements necessary for an industry: product, technology, producer, purchaser, and distributor.

In 1907, a would-be playwright came to Edison with a filmscript for sale. Edison did not like the script, but he hired its author, David Wark Griffith, as an actor. Griffith refused to use his real name, which he wanted to save for his true profession of the stage, but he needed money and accepted the job. Thus began the career of the man who would turn this entertainment into an art. He began making films himself shortly. His tastes in plots were melodramatic, but his interests in technique were both innovative and scientific. Guided by his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, he began to experiment with editing and shots, finding many ideas for cinematic technique in the sentimental novels and poems of nineteenth-century literature. Gradually he persuaded both audiences and company bosses to accept the idea of a more complicated plot told in a lengthy movie. The result was the first major, long film. In 1915, after unheard-of amounts of time in production, Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, a story of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The racial overtones of the film caused considerable controversy, but the power of the images and the timing of the editing created a work of art whose aesthetic excellence is not questioned. In response to the criticism of his racial views, the next year Griffith directed Intolerance, which interwove four stories of intolerance into a single film. Griffith was to continue as one of America's leading directors until audiences began to lose their taste for melodrama, and other directors had learned his methods. He had been responsible for launching the careers of several directors, such as Raoul Walsh, and numerous actors, such as Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mary Pickford, and H. B. Walthall.

While Griffith was learning how to get the most from screen actors, Thomas Ince was polishing the art of telling a story efficiently. In the early 1900s, he directed a few films ( Civilization, 1916, is the best known), but he quickly turned his attention to production, leaving the details of directing to others under his close supervision. His talent was for organization, and today he is credited with perfecting the studio system. Film is actually a collaborative art, and Ince learned how to bring the talents of many different people into a system that produced polished films, without the individualizing touches found in those films of Griffith or others who work outside the strict studio system.

One man who learned his trade from Griffith was Mack Sennett. Sennett worked for Griffith for a few years as a director and writer, but his interests were more in comedy than in melodrama. In 1912 he broke away and began to work for an independent company, Keystone. Here he learned to merge the methods of stage slapstick comedy with the techniques of film; the results were the Keystone Cops, Ben Turpin, and Charlie Chaplin. Sennett's films used only the barest plot outline as a frame for comic gags that were improvised and shot quickly. From the Sennett method, Charlie Chaplin developed his own technique and character. He began making shorts under the direction of Sennett, but in 1915 he left and joined with Essenay which agreed to let him write and direct his own films at an unprecedented salary. Here he fleshed out his tramp character; one of his first films for Essenay was The Tramp ( 1915). He continued making films that combined his own comic sense and acrobatic movements with social commentary and along with Mary Pickford became one of the first "stars." Later he made features, such as The Gold Rush ( 1925) and Modern Times ( 1936). Sennett and Chaplin began a period of great film comedy. Buster Keaton combined a deadpan look with remarkable physical ability and timing. He too began making shorts, but soon was directing and starring in features, such as The General ( 1926). Harold Lloyd ( The Freshman, 1925) and Harry Langdon ( The Strong Man, 1926) also created comic characters that demonstrated their individuality and imagination.

From these ingredients came the studio system and the star system. The demands of the moviegoing audiences created a need for a great number of films, and small companies were unable to meet the demands. Adolph Zukor at Paramount and Marcus Loew, Louis B. Mayer, and Irvin Thalberg at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer quickly learned the means of applying American business methods to this new industry. They bought out their competition and eventually controlled film production, distribution, and exhibition. Even the actors and directors got into the act as Chaplin, Griffith, Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks joined together to create United Artists, intended at first to distribute the various productions of its founders. Later it too became a studio force, along with Columbia, Fox, Warners, and others.

With the studios came the stars. The public hungered for new heroes and new sex objects, and the studios were quick to give the public what it wanted. Along with the stars who had been established in the early 1900s came the new generation of the 1920s: Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow. The stars soon became the nucleus of American myth, and the public followed the stars' affairs, marriages, and extravagant lives with keen interest. This was the stuff Hollywood was made of. Fortunately there were behind these stars creative directors, such as Cecil B. DeMille, Eric Von Stroheim, and Henry King, who were able to mold the talents of the stars into movies.

Kinetoscope A Trip to the Moon Great Train Robbery

The date was December 28, 1895. The place was the basement of a cafe in Paris. The audience was the first public one to pay its way to watch movies, paying to be fascinated by moving images of a baby eating his meal, workers leaving a factory, and a train rushing into a station. The scenes were taken from ordinary life, but the experience was far from ordinary. This event was produced by the Lumière brothers, but the technology that led to this moment had been the result of the imagination and persistence of many inventors, both in Europe and America.

Eadweard Muybridge in 1877 had discovered that sequential still photographs of a horse running could be placed in a series and "projected" in such a manner as to make the photographic image of the horse appear to be running. In New Jersey in the late 1880s Thomas Edison and his crew led by William Dickson developed the idea of putting photographs on a single piece of continuous film, and George Eastman supplied the film. For projection Edison decided on the Kinetoscope, a peephole machine through which the film could be shown to one person at a time. Several creative inventors worked on the idea of a projector, but it was finally the Lumière brothers who were able to adapt Edison's ideas and develop the first practical means of allowing many people to view a movie simultaneously. The history of this new art form was then to be written in light.

Once the photographic technology had been developed, the next stage was to decide what to do with it. Obviously audiences could not long be enthralled by shots of a baby eating and would demand more. Both the Lumières and Edison attempted to expand the cinematic subject matter; but it was another Frenchman, George Melies, who first achieved any success at telling a story with film. He was a magician who used the medium as part of his act, but in the process he began to depict plot as well as action. His most famous film was A Trip to the Moon ( 1902) which described a fanciful space voyage.

In order to develop a narrative process for film, the filmmaker had to learn to manipulate both space and time, to change them, and to move characters and action within them much as a novelist does. What Melies had begun, Edison and his new director of production continued. Edwin S. Porter learned how to use dissolves and cuts between shots to indicate changes in time or space, or both; the result was The Great Train Robbery ( 1903). This Western, shot in the wilds of New Jersey, told the complete story of a train robbery, the chase of the bandits, and their eventual defeat in a gunfight with the posse. Cross-cutting allowed Porter to show in sequence activities of both the posse and the bandits that were supposed to take place at the same time.

Cinema after World War II

After the war the rate of change accelerated. Anti-trust suits broke up the large companies and forced them to sell their theaters. And television began to keep the public at home. The movie industry responded with attempts at expanding the medium to attract new interests: 3-D, CinemaScope, Technicolor; and it continues to experiment: quadraphonic sound, sensurround, holographic images, and giant leaps in special effects have been tried.

However, in responding to competition from television, the use and type of subject matter has taken precedence over the development of technology. The movie makers have thought it necessary to give the public something that cannot be beamed into private living rooms. The results have been increased depiction of explicitness in sex and violence. Both sex and violence have been staples of the movies since the beginning, but the contemporary cinema has found new methods of enticing the public with them.

As the major Hollywood studios began to lose their domination of the American movie industry and turn their attention to television production, the leadership was taken up by independent producers and directors, making their own films and then distributing them through the networks originally established by the Hollywood companies. Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich, and Francis Ford Coppola have provided America with a new group of filmmakers, men who have demonstrated a certain independence of subject and method. Part of the void left by the diminishing importance of Hollywood has been filled by foreign filmmakers whose films have been greeted with enthusiasm by American audiences. Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, and Federico Fellini have dominated, but for the first time countries outside of Europe have begun to leave their mark. Japan has been especially productive.

Perhaps, however, the most important change in movies in recent years has been in the audience. By no means the number of people who went to the movies in the late 1930s still do, but those who do go are younger and more knowledgeable about film. They read the books, subscribe to film journals, watch filmed interviews with movie people on television, and read daily reviews. Many in today's audience are college-educated and have taken film courses while in school; they can talk intelligently about montage, jump cuts, and fade outs. It is for this audience that Scenes from a Marriage is imported from Europe and Star Wars is made.

1930's Movies Charlie Chaplin, Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable

The period between the coming of sound and World War II was dominated by the studios. They controlled the production--including story, the role of the directors, and the selection of actors--distribution, and exhibition (they owned their own theaters). In the 1930s America went to the movies; by the end of the decade some eighty million people saw a movie every week. The studios provided them with the means to live out their fantasies, find heroes, and escape from the Depression.

One factor directly affecting the films of the 1930s was censorship. Hollywood movies in the late 1920s and early 1930s had become rather open in their use of sex, and the scandals in the private lives of the stars shocked the public even as it hungered for vicarious living. Fear of government intervention and of the Depression forced the studios to censor themselves. They established the Hays Office under the directorship of Will Hays, former postmaster-general, and this office published a strict moral code for on-screen activities and language. The results stifled creativity, but the new moral tastes of the public were satisfied.

The stars captured the public's imagination as in no other time in American popular culture: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh, Edward G. Robinson, and Marlene Dietrich. The comics maintained the traditions of the silent comedians: Charlie Chaplin continued to make movies and was joined by the Marx brothers, Mae West, and W. C. Fields.

At the same time, the directors had to find a path through the maze created by the studios, the Hays Office, and the stars. They had to bring all these divergent elements together and make movies. Men such as John Ford and Howard Hawks created their own visions of America and discovered methods of capturing the American myth on film. Many of the directors of the period were immigrants: Josef von Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and Frank Capra. Each discovered for himself the essence of this country and its people. Perhaps that essence was most fittingly expressed in a film that came at the end of the prewar period, Citizen Kane ( 1941), the first film Orson Welles directed.

The war changed the industry. Many residents of Hollywood took time off to participate in the war effort. Some like John Ford and Frank Capra made films for the government. Others like Fritz Lang continued to make commercial films, but they were propaganda-oriented and helped build morale. The stars went to the battle areas to entertain the troops. Even studio space was commandeered to produce war documentaries, and war films became a dominant fictional genre.

1920's Movies Ernst Lubitsch Victor Seastrom F. W. Murnau

During the 1920s American films dominated the worldwide industry, but they were greatly influenced and enhanced by developments and personalities from Europe. The Russians Sergei Eisenstein ( Potemkin, 1925) and V. I. Pudovkin ( Mother, 1926) were especially influential in their understanding of montage (the relationship of the images to each other and the meaning that results). American interest in fantasy was influenced both directly and indirectly by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ( 1919) directed by the German Robert Wiene and Destiny ( 1921) directed by an Austrian working in Germany, Fritz Lang.

Some Europeans came to America to make films: Ernst Lubitsch, Victor Seastrom, and F. W. Murnau, for examples. The influence on American film of these films and filmmakers was profound; they left their strong impression on what came to be known as the Hollywood movie.
The story surrounding the coming of sound to movies is a complex and complicated one. The idea of connecting sound to the visuals was an old one; Edison had in fact entered the movie business because he was searching for visuals to go with the phonograph he was already marketing. To convert the movie technology to sound was expensive. Despite development of the necessary technology (most notably in this country by Lee de Forest), the industry was reluctant to invest in the change. In the mid-1920s Western Electric developed a method for putting the sound on a disk that could be roughly synchronized with the film. None of the big studios could be convinced to try it, but Warners Brothers was about to be forced out of business by the other, larger companies. It had little to lose and decided to take the risk. For a year Warners distributed a program with short sound films of slight interest, but on October 6, 1927, it premiered The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson. Sound was used to help tell the story, and the public loved it. Quickly, Warners established its financial base, and other studios rushed to emulate them; but problems developed. Studios had to reequip themselves. The camera, which had been struggling to free itself and discover new methods of expression, found itself confined to a large box and immobile. Actors had to learn to speak to their audiences, and exhibitors had to invest in sound projectors and speakers. Once the problems were overcome, however, the marriage of sound to the visuals became a natural extension of the art.

Dead Man's Chest Stunts

Stunts

JIM STEPHAN, RICHARD L. BLACKWELL, HUGH AODH O’BRIEN, WEBSTER WHINERY, J. MARK DONALDSON, JACK WEST, MARC SHAFFER, TRAMPAS THOMPSON, TOM MORGA, JEFF WOLFE, THEO KYPRI, CRAIG SILVA, KOFI ELAM, PAUL ELIOPOULOS, KURT LOTT, JAY CAPUTO, MARK NORBY, ROB MARS, JAYSON DUMENIGO, YOSHIO IIZUKA, DAVID WALD, CLAY FONTENOT, NORBERT PHILLIPS, ANTHONY KRAMME, THOMAS ROSALES, JR., DEREK MEARS, MARK DEALESSANDRO, MICKEY GIACOMAZZI, PHILIP TAN, JIM PALMER, BRIAN J. WILLIAMS, VICTOR QUINTERO, KIANTE ELAM, PHIL CULOTTA, RUSSELL TOWERY, GENE HARTLINE, JP ROMANO, GREG ELAM, JOEY ANAYA, KEITH CAMPBELL, JON VALERA, JOHN ROBOTHAM, KOFI YIADOM, SONJA JO McDANCER, STACY HOWELL, KORI MURRAY, CARYN MOWER, NOBY ARDEN, ANDREW STEHLIN, AUGIE DAVIS, SALA BAKER, ROBERT ALONZO, ROEL FAILMA, AARON TONEY, XUYEN VALDIVIA, JOHN DONOHUE, JOSEPH SOSTHAND, DEAN GRIMES, GARY STEARNS, ANDY DYLAN, DENNEY PIERCE, ALEX CHANSKY, BRIAN BENNETT, STEPHEN POPE, HENRY KINGI, JR., JEREMY FRY, DON LEE, CHRISTOPHER LEPS, CASEY O’NEILL, BRYCEN COUNTS, SAM HARGRAVE, LINCOLN SIMONDS, DANE FARWELL, BRIAN DUFFY

Stunt Coordinator: GEORGE MARSHALL RUGE
Assistant Stunt Coordinator: DANIEL W. BARRINGER
“Jack Sparrow” Stunt Double: TONY ANGELOTTI
“Will Turner” Stunt Doubles: ZACH HUDSON, MARK AARON WAGNER
“Elizabeth Swann” Stunt Double: LISA HOYLE
“Norrington” Stunt Double/Sword Master: THOMAS DUPONT
Lead Utility Stunt Double: KIRK MAXWELL

Pirates of The Caribbean Dead Man's Chest Cast

Pirates of The Caribbean Dead Man's Chest Cast

Jack Sparrow: JOHNNY DEPP, Will Turner: ORLANDO BLOOM, Elizabeth Swann: KEIRA KNIGHTLEY, Norrington: JACK DAVENPORT, Davy Jones: BILL NIGHY, Governor Weatherby Swann: JONATHAN PRYCE, Pintel: LEE ARENBERG, Ragetti : MACKENZIE CROOK, Gibbs: KEVIN R. McNALLY, Cotton: DAVID BAILIE, Bootstrap Bill: STELLAN SKARSGÅRD, Cutler Beckett: TOM HOLLANDER, Tia Dalma: NAOMIE HARRIS, Marty: MARTIN KLEBBA, Mercer: DAVID SCHOFIELD, Captain Bellamy: ALEX NORTON, Scarlett: LAUREN MAHER, Short Sailor: NEJ ADAMSON, Large Sailor: JIMMY ROUSSOUNIS, Sunburned Sailor: MORAY TREADWELL, Leech: SAN SHELLA, Fisherman (Montage): JIM CODY WILLIAMS, Cannibal Warrior: MICHAEL MIRANDA, Frightened Sailor: LUKE DE WOOLFSON, Very Old Man: DERRICK O’CONNOR, Skinny Man: GEORGES TRILLAT, Crippled Man: ISRAEL ADURAMO, Irish Man: GERRY O’BRIEN, Maccus/Dutchman: DERMOT KEANEY, Koleniko/Dutchman: CLIVE ASHBORN, Shrimper (Montage): ROBBIE GEE, Cannibal Boy: NEIL PANLASIGUI, Sailor/Edinburgh: MATTHEW BOWYER, Burser/Edinburgh: MAX BAKER, Quartermaster/Edinburgh: STEVE SPEIRS, Wyvern: JOHN BOSWALL, Palafico/Dutchman: WINSTON ELLIS, Jimmy Legs/Dutchman: CHRISTOPHER ADAMSON, Clacker/Dutchman: ANDY BECKWITH, Ogilvey/Dutchman: JONATHAN LINSLEY, Shrimper’s Brother: SYLVER, Chaplain: SIMON MEACOCK, Cannibal Women: NATSUKO OHAMA JOSIE DAPAR, Giselle: VANESSA BRANCH, Edinburgh Cook: DAVID STERNE, Scuttled Ship Helmsman: DAVID KEYES, Cannibal: ANTHONY PATRICIO, Carruthers Guard: BARRY McEVOY, Deckhand/Edinburgh: MICHAEL ENRIGHT, Sweepy: HERNANDO “SWEEPY” MOLINA, Turkish Prisoners: JOHN MACKEY, SPIDER MADISON, BUD MATHIS, Turkish Guards: MARCO KHAN, DAVID ZAHEDIAN, FAOUZI BRAHIMI, Torch Native: JONATHAN LIMBO, Native Bridge Guard: ALEX CONG, Ho-Kwan: HO-KWAN TSE, Headless : REGGIE LEE, Lejon: LEJON O. STEWART, Parrot Voice: CHRISTOPHER S. CAPP

Orlando Bloom Cutouts

There is only one Hollywood in the world

There is only one Hollywood in the world. Movies are made in London, Paris, Milan and Moscow, but the life of these cities is relatively uninfluenced by their production. Hollywood is a unique American phenomenon with a symbolism not limited to this country. It means many things to many people. For the majority it is the home of favored, godlike creatures. For others, it is a "den of iniquity"; a center for creative genius, or a place where mediocrity flourishes and able men sell their creative souls for gold; an important industry with worldwide significance, or an environment of trivialities characterized by aimlessness; a mecca where everyone is happy, or a place where cynical disillusionment prevails. Rarely is it just a community where movies are made. For most movie-goers, particularly in this country, the symbolism seems to be that of a never-never world inhabited by glamorous creatures, living hedonistically and enjoying their private swimming pools and big estates, attending magnificent parties, or being entertained in famous night clubs. The other symbols belong to relatively small groups of people.

Of all the symbols, sex and wealth are the most important. Every Hollywood male is supposed to be a "wolf" and every Hollywood female a tempting object easily seduced. The movie fans, worshiping their heroes, believe this. For the conservative or radical, sex over and beyond the traditional mores and codes is part of their idea of Hollywood. The other characteristic -- easy Hollywood money, an enormous fortune quickly made -- is the contemporary Cinderella theme for the naive youngster in Alabama who has just won a beauty contest, as well as for the sophisticated New York writer who has been asked to come for six months to a Hollywood studio. No matter what the other symbols, or for whom they have meaning, the accent is on sex and money, for the Hollywood inhabitants as well as for the world outside.

Many other communities have a symbolic character. Paris, New York, a farming community in the Midwest, a town in the Deep South, an island in the South Seas, all mean many things to many people. For some, a South Seas island is thought of as an escape from a troubled world, for others as a place where money can be made by exploiting natural resources; for some it is a place where natives live a peaceful life, for others one where savages roam about in head-hunting expeditions. The anthropologist tries to find out what the place and people are really like. In studying Hollywood, he asks: Which of the myths and symbols have a basis in reality, which are fantasy, and which are a combination? What is their effect on the people who work and live there? What are significant elements about which the world outside does not even know enough to develop a folklore or mythology?

The geographical location of any community always has important social implications, and Hollywood is no exception. The semitropical climate gives a certain soft ease to living. Beaches, desert and mountains are all within easy reach, and the almost continuous sunshine is an ever-present invitation to the outdoors. Although Los Angeles stretches in distance for eighty-five miles and has a population of approximately four million, the whole of it is dominated by Hollywood. If the center of movie production had been in New York, the metropolis would probably have influenced the making of movies, rather than being dominated by it. Its location on the West Coast successfully isolated the movie colony in the past. Today, however, this insularity no longer exists, since many movies are being made on location in different parts of the country and abroad. There is also among the upperbracket people considerable trekking -- more literally, flying -- back and forth between Los Angeles and New York. But these actors as well as the many others who do not travel have their roots in Hollywood, and the new trend has not materially changed the colony's essential character.

Hollywood's domination of Los Angeles comes out in many ways. The most trivial news about personalities in the movie world are front-page headlines in the city newspapers. Many of the local mores have been strongly influenced by the movie industry. The standard technique for a "pick-up" in Los Angeles is for the man to suggest to the desired female that he knows someone who will give her a screen test. Pretty girls, working in the popular drive-ins, live in hopes that a producer or director will notice them. Schoolteachers, doctors, white-collar workers and many others who have never shown any talent for writing, and who in another community would have quite different goals, spend their spare time writing movie scripts. Earnest little groups meet an evening a week to criticize each other's work, expecting soon to reach the pot of gold at the end of the Hollywood rainbow. The people who work at the making of movies refer to those unconnected with the industry as "private people," the implication being that such individuals are unimportant.

American Movies Made by Australians

Witness

Peter Weir's film, Witness, was the outstanding success among the American movies made by Australian directors. It won eight Academy Award nominations, and received an award for best screenplay, written by Earl Wallace and William Kelley. Although working with an all-American crew except for his Australian cameraman, John Seale, Weir retained an Australian sense of detachment from American culture, strong enough to realistically show the Amish people, yet sympathetic enough to develop a plausible, tough cop role for Harrison Ford as Philadelphia detective John Book. Witness is a crossover, mixing the elements of a western, a crooked cop story, and a romance, that raises important questions about the role of violence in modern American life.

King David, Iceman, and Plenty

In comparison with the success of Witness, Beresford's American-made King David, with Richard Gere, was a dismal flop. The film's trailer shows Gere's David as the lover of Bathsheba, the slayer of Goliath, a rebel, a fighter, and a king. Beresford brought some of the legendary battle scenes off well, and the romance more awkwardly, but other sequences in the movie, like Gere's semi-nude dancing entry to Jerusalem, verged on the ridiculous.

Schepisi's American film, Iceman( 1984) and, more notably, his 1985 feature, Plenty, with Meryl Streep, were more critically successful, with Plenty doing satisfactory box-office business.

Plenty, in comparison, had many strong features, notably the presence of Meryl Streep as Susan Traherne, an ex-World War II Resistance fighter, and later an English diplomat's wife in the 1950s. Streep had emerged by this time as one of the major postfeminist female stars. Her performances in Julia( 1978), Silkivood( 1983), and Out of Aftica( 1985) made her a 1980s update of the Jane Fonda-feminist image of the 1970s.

Mrs. Soffell

The other Australian-directed American movie that did very well critically, if not so well commercially, was Gillian Armstrong's feature Mrs.Soffell Soffell, featuring Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson. An unlikely love story, Mrs. Soffell ( Diane Keaton) is the wife of Warden Soffell ( Edward Hermann) in Philadelphia in 1901.

Some Other Movies:

The Adventures of Barry Mackenzie
Alvin Purple
American Graffiti
Apocalypse Now
Barbarosa
Blazing Saddles
Bliss
Blue Collar
Breaker Morant
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
Burke and Wills
Caddie
Careful, He Might Hear You
Carrie
The Cars That Ate People/Paris
The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith
The Coca-Cola Kid
Cocoon,
The Color Purple
Coming Home
Conan the Barbarian
The Coolangatta Gold
A Country Practice (TV)
Crocodile Dundee
Cyclone Tracy (TV)
Death of a Soldier
The Deer Hunter
Desperately Seeking Susan
The Devil's Playground
The Don Lane Show (TV)
Don's Party
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
The Empire Strikes Back
Far East
First Blood
Flashdance
For the Term of His Natural Life
Frances
Friday the 13th
The Fringe Dwellers
Gallipoli
The Getting of Wisdom
The Godfather
Grease
Happy Days (TV)
Heatwave
Heaven's Gate
High Noon
Iceman
It's a Wonderful Life
Jaws
The Killing Fields
King David
Kramer vs. Kramer
The Last Frontier (TV)
The Last Wave
Laugh In (TV)
Little Big Man
Lonely Hearts
Mad Dog Morgan
Mad Max
Mad Max II/The Road Warrior
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
Malcolm
The Man From Snowy River
Man of Flowers
M*A*S*H* (TV)
The Mosquito Coast
Mrs. Soffell
My Brilliant Career
My Survival as an Aboriginal
Nashville
Newsfront
The Night, the Prowler
The Odd Angry Shot
On Our Selection
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
One Night Stand
Patrick
Phar Lap
Picnic at Hanging Rock
The Pirate Movie
Plenty
The Plumber
Pretty in Pink
Psycho II
Puberty Blues
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Rambo
Razorback
The Return of Captain Invincible
The Right Stuff
Rocky
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Sentimental Bloke
Shock Treatment
Silver City
Skippy (TV)
Smash Palace
Sons of Matthew
Star Trek
Star Wars
Stir
Stone
Storm Boy
Sunday Too Far Away
Sword of Honor (TV)
Taxi Driver
Tender Mercies
The Thief of Sydney
The Thorn Birds (TV)
They're a Weird Mob
A Town Like Alice (TV)
Top Gun
The Twilight Zone
Wake in Fright
Walkabout
We of the Never Never
Witness
Wolfen
Wrong Side of the Road
The Year of Living Dangerously

The Western Image and Influence

If there is a single keynote to contemporary discussion of the western it lies with Henry Nash Smith. He sees two broad symbolic clusters hanging over the treatment of the West in American culture: the 'Garden of the World' and the 'Great American Desert'. Although the symbol of the Garden has predominated, that of the Desert has been a potent force. The imagery is truly dual. Now Nash Smith is not concerned with cinema, and it is fair to say that most applications of these ideas to film have retained their spirit rather than their detail. The imagery of Garden and Desert has been invoked as a critical cue to trigger off whole series of more specific contrasts. Kitses suggests eighteen such pairings arranged in three sub-groups of six: the sub-distinctions are those between individual and community, nature and culture, west and east, while the whole set fall under the master distinction between Wilderness and Civilisation.

This more complex analysis points up the simplifications inherent in taking the straight Garden-Desert contrast, or, for that matter, the familiar moral-heroic image of the westerner so well expressed by Robert Warshow. The western deals in more complex distinctions than this, though its very familarity may delude us into underestimation. The Wilderness may be a context for an agrarian dream (as in Wagon Master or Drums Along the Mohawk the Mohawk), or an intrinsically antagonistic desert (as in Fort Apache). Civilisation may be both the community spirit of the pioneering township (the 'Sunday morning' sequence of My Darling Clementine), or unwanted 'control' from back East (the military high-ups unseen but felt in Rio Grande or Fort Apache). The simple distinction between Wilderness and Civilisation is a key; it is not also the whole melody. The western is richer than that.

One thing, though, is immediately notable: all the examples just quoted are films made by John Ford. It is a remarkable characteristic of the western that one director has figured so prominently in it. From his first feature, Straight Shooting, in 1917, through to Cheyenne Autumn in 1964, he has charted most reaches of the genre. And where he has led the rest have followed, many of the characteristic images and interests of the western deriving from Ford's particular articulation of American history. To trace the changing shape of his westerns is to follow the contours of the genre from its beginnings in romantic dream to the progressive souring of the sixties and seventies. So, inevitably, Ford provides the standard example for the Garden-Desert conception. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance straddles the two images; its twin heroes encompass the contrast. Doniphon ( John Wayne), the pragmatic, individual, man of the west, loses the girl and his dream of a ranch, finally dying a pauper. His fate is sealed by his unselfish actions: he shoots Liberty Valance in such a situation that Stoddart ( James Stewart) is credited with the success. On this basis Stoddart wins both girl and a successful political career; he is the eastern-trained lawyer and through him Civilization is brought west, but only at the expense of Doniphon and the individualistic integrity for which he stands. One recurrent image binds the elements together, uniting in itself components of both Garden and Desert: the cactus-rose, its final sad resting place on Doniphon's coffin.

They grew liberally around his projected ranch, and this was his dream, to keep the best of Garden and Desert, Wilderness and Civilisation. The film's poignancy lies in the demonstrable impossibility of preserving the western spirit in the face of Civilisation. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers Wayne finally sees out the earlier aspirations of Ford's Henry Fonda in Drums Along the Mohawk and My Darling Clementine.

In this context it is easy to see why Nash Smith's conception has proved so attractive. It is a general formulation which makes sense out of a number of facets of the western. In one straightforward conception it is possible to capture the typical environments, social structures, and themes which inform the genre. The frontier spirit, the creation of 'civilisation', law enforcement, subjugation of the 'natural savage', and the wagon train, are all quite sensibly linked within the master conception.

Even so, to start by abstracting Garden and Desert invites a highly selective view. And although selectivity is unavoidable it must be possible to start with more open parameters than this. The risk in reducing the genre to this 'master theme' is that we by-pass inflections which are thereby rendered insignificant. Revenge, for example, is one of the most common narrative patterns of the western. As such it has no particular affinity with the Garden-Desert conception. Yet it has been central to many westerns; the code of honour that it represents is an integral part of the western landscape. It would be a very limited account which failed to include such an important element. So, although the Nash Smith imagery has surely been established as an important part of any analysis of the western, it is not all. It is a useful backdrop against which we can consider the history and content of the genre.

There was a good deal already to hand when the movies latched onto the western. Some of the popular conventions had already found expression in the dime novel and other fiction of the period. The familiar image of the cowboy was already established. Besides, action was predictably proving a great attraction in the new medium; what else in moving pictures? And what better context than the largely imaginary world of the silent movie frontier? The very first influential story film, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery, was a primitive combination of a roughly western setting with a good deal of action interest. That was in 1903. But what Jacobs refers to as 'a flood of western pictures' came round 1907 when some film companies moved west. As in the other movies of the time the primitive story line was all-important. It was sufficient to make exciting narrative sense. But year by year the movies became more sophisticated. By the time the westerns shift out of the tworeelers and into features we are in the era of Bronco Billy, William S. Hart, Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson. It was in this situation that the historic cowboys overlapped with those in the movies -- Ford talks of meeting Wyatt Earp and a number of friends from Tombstone. And it is in this formative period that the pattern of the genre was first outlined. Here the morally scrupulous cowboy hero comes to the fore. The western is born.

So far the success of the western seems largely immanent to the genre. The proven capacity of the medium for exploiting action, plus this idealised historic and geographic context, seem just as important as any thesis invoking 'national identity'. Following Alan Lovell's excellent discussion we can see that it is later, in the early twenties, that more generally significant developments come. In Cruze's The Covered Wagon and Ford's The Iron Horse begins the shift from a handily located action picture to a celebration of the historic move west. The crudely developed cowboy hero now had the beginning of a fitting context. With these films the genre was opened to '. . . the full force of Western history; inside it played all the themes, legends, and heroes associated with that history'. A romanticised history could now go hand in hand with a romanticised hero. The classical period had begun; its climacteric, Lovell argues, lay in My Darling Clementine, a western integrating all the basic elements. Which is not to say that the two intervening decades showed no changes in the genre. One thing evident as early as The Covered Wagon was a certain 'documentary' inclination, a detailed and realistic surface to the film. This injection of realism -- 'naturalism' is a better word for it -- has stayed with the western for most of its development.

The 'French thesis' on the western tends to see increasing realism in the thirties as a response to the concerns of the depression, and it is obviously true that some films of the period, not just westerns, betray a concern with 'realistic social issues'. But a large part of the naturalism of the western must surely have derived from a combination of growing technical accomplishment applied to the historical and physical context of the movies. The events and settings of the western demanded naturalistic treatment; for years they were almost the only films shot anywhere but on tawdry sets. Western naturalism must owe its development as much as to the internal requirements of the genre as to outside social and political factors.

Dietrich: Empress of Signs

Can we really read faces, even those that come at us so plainly crying their meanings? Can it be right to speak, as Charles Affron does, of Garbo's acting, when he seems to be describing what he finds in her face? Large questions about interpretation, and not only of faces, hover here. I shall say for the moment that I think we really can read faces, but that accounting for our reading is a quite different story—rather like explaining a joke, as distinct from getting it. I want to read, to register a reading of, Dietrich's face, particularly as it appears in Shanghai Express and The Scarlet Empress (1934); but I also want to confess to a feeling of helplessness, because that is part of the reading.

Let's go back to the shimmer of the myth, the fur-haloed head. What is the myth? The general myth of stardom, as I've said, of a perfection so stylized and mystified that it scarcely seems human. But there is also a particular Dietrich myth. She is not just a star, but this star; the star she is, as Bishop Butler nearly said, and not another one. This myth has to do with the lure and the durability of an impossible innocence, an innocence, what's more, which finally turns into something else, an odd mixture of endurance and independence.

Much of what Dietrich "means" in films is caught between her two most frequent looks: her eyes are wide open, trusting, she is a woman who dares to be a child; her eyes are hooded by the heavy lids, she is smoking, shut away in her worldliness and scorn. Does she endure by becoming hard and cynical? No, because then she wouldn't be able to go back to her vulnerable look. She endures by being able to travel between the two looks, or to hint at the one hiding in the other. The heart of the myth, it seems to me, is this. Dietrich's beauty is so refined and geometrical, so abstract, so much a matter of smooth skin, carved cheekbones, and eyebrows that owe everything to draughtsmanship and nothing to hair, that she seems untouchable and therefore untouched—whatever the implications of the plots of her movies, or of the fact that she had a daughter in 1925. It is worth comparing this face with those of the pudgy vamps of an earlier generation, or indeed with that of the much pudgier Dietrich herself in The Blue Angel (1930). Sternberg, seeing Dietrich in Berlin, was first attracted, he said, by her air of "cold disdain," and he helped turn her face into a mask with this meaning: Andrew Sarris, writing about The Scarlet Empress, identifies a "glacial guile" in Dietrich. She herself told Maximilian Schell in Marlene (1983) that she was sure Sternberg was interested in her apparent lack of interest: since she was sure she wouldn't get the part he was recruiting for, she decided not to care.

All this finds its way into her screen presence. Of course "disdain" and "guile" are ways of moralizing the curious distance that every viewer perceives in Dietrich's performances. We see her absence, so to speak. Her heart is not in the movie, and the lurid narrative form of this perception is to say that the character she plays has no heart. I don't doubt that Dietrich's rumored sexual preferences have a role here, although I would also guess that even a heteromaniac could be less than wild about Clive Brook; and some of her aloofness is plainly just metallic bad acting. She is not in Garbo's class as a stylist. But I am interested here in the icon and its compulsions. Marilyn Monroe projected an alarming, almost hysterical innocence. Dietrich projects nothing of the kind, but we lend her innocence, because we can't bear to suspect such beauty—or at least the beauty presented to us in certain romantic shots. And yet of course—here is the contradiction that gives the myth its life and trouble—this kind of beauty is a treasure and a temptation, a goldmine, both in countless movie plots and in an actress's life, and it is impossible to believe that the world's collectors and prospectors have not had their hands on it. "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily." I suppose this famous sentence, as written, was meant to conjure up the sad, soupy story of the fallen woman, unhappy victim of poverty and rampaging male desire. As Dietrich says it, it suggests a fine, barely damaged superiority, as if anything men could do to her could only be done by sheer force of numbers. The same crushing quality, the note of insolence verging on indifference, appears later in the same film, when Werner Oland, as a prosperous revolutionary leader, invites Dietrich to come and live at his nearby palace. "In time you will weary of men," he says, playing the man who knows the human condition and the mutability of the passions. Dietrich, with a mildness that is itself an insult, says, "I'm weary of you now."

She is not innocent after all, and she is not invulnerable. She has been hurt, and her very kindnesses show traces of pain. But her story is not that of the brave defeat Garbo so wonderfully portrayed, and it is not that of the warm-hearted whore Dietrich was so often, especially in her later films, asked to embody. It is the story of weathering out storms that destroy nearly everyone else, preserving a purity where most people are smudged, and her continuing stage appearances confirmed this piece of the myth. The slurred, drooping voice did the old songs well, but the main feature of the spectacle was the visible conquest of time: a taut, trim woman of sixty putting flabby forty-year olds to shame. Dietrich disappeared into her own shape the way Garbo disappeared into her New York City hiding.

Within the films, though, this extraordinary endurance of the chosen self is expressed as a change of face, a replacement of the romantic, "feminine" aura by a jaunty, mocking "male" gaze. As I shall suggest a little later, this change of face is the whole subject of The Scarlet Empress. In Shanghai Express the soft-focus furs give way to Clive Brook's peaked cap, which Dietrich lifts off his head and places on her own, flicking it back to settle at a raffish angle. She looks at such moments, if I may step carefully into a thicket of un‐ deconstructed assumptions, not like a woman dressed as a man, but like a boy trying to ape the heavy gestures of manhood—or better, like a brilliant parodist of a boy's attempts at such apery. She doesn't impersonate males, she turns them into language, assemblages of signs of malehood. The trick is so complicated that I don't entirely trust my account of it, but I think Dietrich's persistent femininity— small bones, smooth skin, faint eyebrows—makes it clear that the parody is a parody; while her aloofness, her obvious distance from all the easy conventions of womanliness, makes the trick really eerie, since it seems simultaneously to underscore sexual difference and to cause it to wobble. A test of this reading is to ask whether Dietrich ever really looks like a man, whether we are ever in any doubt about her sex (or even her gender). If she doesn't (if we aren't), then several recent interpretations of the icon need to be revised.

American Motion Pictures and the New Popular Culture, 1893-1918

Early film historians and journalists chose to perpetuate and embellish the legend of Edison's preeminence in the development of motion pictures. In fact, as the painstaking and voluminous research of Gordon Hendricks has shown, the true credit for the creation of the first motion picture camera (kinetograph) and viewing machine (kinetoscope) belongs to Edison's employee, W. K. L. Dickson. Between 1888 and 1896, Dickson was "the center of all Edison's motion picture work during the crucial period of its technical perfection, and when others were led to the commercial use of the new medium, he was the instrument by which the others brought it into function." Edison himself admitted in 1895 that his reason for toying with motion pictures was "to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear"; however, his interest in motion pictures always remained subordinate to his passion for the phonograph.

With the perfection of a moving picture camera in 1892, and the subsequent invention of the peep hole kinetoscope in 1893, the stage was set for the modern film industry. Previewed at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago during the summer of 1893, the kinetoscope could handle only one customer at a time. For a penny or a nickel in the slot, one could watch brief, unenlarged 35-mm black-and-white motion pictures. The kinetoscope provided a source of inspiration to other inventors; and, more importantly, its successful commercial exploitation convinced investors that motion pictures had a solid financial future. Kinetoscope parlors had opened in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and scores of other cities all over the country by the end of 1894. The kinetoscope spread quickly to Europe as well, where Edison, revealing his minimal commitment to motion pictures, never even bothered to take out patents.

At this time the Dickson-Edison kinetograph was the sole source of film subjects for the kinetoscopes. These early films were only fifty feet long, lasting only fifteen seconds or so. Beginning in 1893 dozens of dancers, acrobats, animal acts, lasso throwers, prize fighters, and assorted vaudevillians traveled to the Edison compound in West Orange, New Jersey. There they posed for the kinetograph, an immobile camera housed in a tarpaper shack dubbed the "Black Maria," the world's first studio built specifically for making movies.

With the technology for the projection of motion pictures a reality, where were they to be shown? Between 1895 and 1905, prior to the nickelodeon boom, films were presented mainly in vaudeville performances, traveling shows, and penny arcades. Movies fit naturally into vaudeville; at first they were merely another novelty act. Audiences literally cheered the first exhibitions of the vitascope, biograph, and cinematograph in the years 1895 to 1897. But the triteness and poor quality of these early films soon dimmed the novelty and by 1900 or so vaudeville shows used films mainly as chasers that were calculated to clear the house for the next performance. Itinerant film exhibitors also became active in these years, as different inventors leased the territorial rights to projectors or sold them outright to enterprising showmen.

By 1909 motion pictures had clearly become a large industry, with three distinct phases of production, exhibition, and distribution; in addition, directing, acting, photography, writing, and lab work emerged as separate crafts. The agreement of 1909, however, rather than establishing peace, touched off another round of intense speculative development, because numerous independent producers and exhibitors openly and vigorously challenged the licensing of the Patent Company. In 1914, after five years of guerrilla warfare with the independents, the trust lay dormant; the courts declared it legally dead in 1917. Several momentous results accrued from the intense battle won by the innovative and adventurous independents. They produced a higher quality of pictures and pioneered the multireel feature film. Under their leadership Hollywood replaced New York as the center of production, and the star system was born. At the close of the world war, they controlled the movie industry not only in America, but all over the globe.

Of all the facets of motion picture history, none is so stunning as the extraordinarily rapid growth in the audience during the brief period between 1905 and 1918. Two key factors, closely connected, made this boom possible. First, the introduction and refinement of the story film liberated the moving picture from its previous length of a minute or two, allowing exhibitors to present a longer program of films. One-reel westerns, comedies, melodramas, and travelogues, lasting ten to fifteen minutes each, became the staple of film programs until they were replaced by feature pictures around World War I. George Melies, Edwin S. Porter ( The Great Train Robbery, 1903), and D. W. Griffith, in his early work with Biograph ( 1908 to 1913), all set the pace for transforming the motion picture from a novelty into an art.

Time in the classical film

Our examination of exposition has shown that the narrational aspect of plot manipulates story time in specific ways. More generally, classical narration employs characteristic strategies for manipulating story order and story duration. These strategies activate the spectator in ways congruent with the overall aims of the classical cinema. We shall also have to pay some attention to how narration uses one device that is commonly associated with the Hollywood style's handling of time: crosscutting.

After dramas supposedly without endings, here is a drama which would be without exposition or opening, and which would end clearly. Events would not follow one another and especially would not correspond exactly. The fragments of many pasts come to bury themselves in a single now. The future mixed among memories. This chronology is that of the human mind.

Jean Epstein, writing in 1927, thus describes his film La Glace à trois faces. Hollywood cinema, however, refuses the radical play with chronology that Epstein proposes; the classical film normally shows story events in a 1-2-3 order. Unlike Epstein, the classical filmmaker needs an opening, a threshold-that concentrated, preliminary exposition that plunges us in medias res. Events unfold successively from that. Advance notice of the future is especially forbidden, since a ftashforward would make the narration's omniscience and suppressiveness overt (see Chapter 30 on alternative cinemas' use of the flashforward). The only permissible manipulation of story order is the flashback.

Flashbacks are rarer in the classical Hollywood film than we normally think. Throughout the period 1917-60, screenwriters' manuals usually recommended not using them; as one manual put it, 'Protracted or frequent flashbacks tend to slow the dramatic progression'-a remark that reflects Hollywood's general reluctance to exploit curiosity about past story events. Of the one hundred UnS films, only twenty use any flashbacks at all, and fifteen of those occur in silent films. Most of these are brief, expository flashbacks filling in information about a character's background; this device was obviously replaced by expository dialogue in the sound cinema. In the early years of .sound, when plays about trials were common film sources, flashbacks offered a way to 'open up' stagy trial scenes (e.g., The Bellamy Trial, Through Different Eyes, The Trial of Mary Dugan, Madame X, all 1929). Another vogue for flashbacks ran from the late 1930s into the 1950s. Between 1939 and 1953, four UnS films begin with a frame story and flash back to recount the bulk of the main action before returning to the frame. Yet those four flashback films still comprise less than 10 per cent of the UnS films of the period. What probably makes the period seem dominated by flashbacks is not the numerical frequency of the device but the intricate ways it was used: contradictory flashbacks in Crossfire (1947), parallel flashbacks in Letter to Three Wives (1948), open-ended flashbacks in How Green Was My Valley (1941) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks in Passage to Marseille (1944) and The Locket (1946), and a flashback narrated by a dead man in Sunset Boulevard (1950).

It is possible, of course, to present a shift in story order simply as such, with the film's narration overtly intervening to reveal the past.

In The Ghost of Rosie Taylor (1918), an expository inter-title announces that it will explain how the situation became what it is; the title motivates the flashback. The Killing (1956) uses voice-over, documentary-sty le narration to motivate 'realistically' its jumps back in time. The rarity of these overt intrusions shows that classical narration almost always motivates flashbacks by means of character memory. Several cues cooperate here: images of the character thinking, the character's voice heard 'over' the images, optical effects (dissolve, blurring focus), music, and specific references to the time period we are about to enter. If we see flashbacks as motivated by subjectivity, then the extraordinary fashion for temporal manipulations in the 1940s can be explained by the changing conception of psychological causality in the period.

Classical flashbacks are motivated by character memory, but they do not function primarily to reveal character traits. Nor were Hollywood practitioners particularly interested in using the flashback to restrict point-of-view; one screenwriters' manual suggests that 'unmotivated jumping of time is likely to rattle the audience, thereby breaking their illusion that they participate in the lives of the characters.' Even the contradictory flashbacks in Through Different Eyes or Crossfire serve not to reveal the teller's personality so much as they operate, within the conventions of the mystery film, as visual representations of lies. Jean Epstein's aim in La Glace à trois faces-to reflect the mixed temporality of consciousness, fragments of the past in a single now-is far removed from Hollywood's use of flashbacks as rhetorical 'dispositions' of the narrative for the sake of suspense or surprise. Nor need the classical flashback respect the literary conventions of firstperson narration. Extended flashback sequences usually include material that the remembering character could not have witnessed or known. Character memory is simply a convenient immediate motivation for a shift in chronology; once the shift is accomplished, there are no constant cues to remind us that we are supposedly in someone's mind. In flashbacks, then, the narrating character executes the same fading movement that the narrator of the entire film does: overt and self-conscious at first, then covert and intermittently apparent. Beginning with one narrator and ending with another (e.g., I Walked With a Zombie), or compelling a character to 'remember' things she never knew or will know (e.g., Ten North Frederick [1958]), or creating a deceased narrator (e.g., Sunset Boulevard)-all these tactics show that subjectivity is an arbitrary pretext for flashbacks.

Classical manipulations of story order imply specific activities for the spectator. These involve what psychologists call 'temporal integration, ' the process of fusing the perception of the present, the memory of the past, and expectations about the future. E.H. Gombrich points out that temporal integration depends upon the search for meaning, the drive to make coherent sense of the material represented. The film which challenges this coherence, a film like Not Reconciled (1964), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), or India Song (1975), must make temporal integration difficult to achieve. In the classical film, however, character causality provides the basis for temporal coherence. The manipulations of story order in Not Reconciled or Marienbad are puzzling partly because we cannot determine any relevant character identities, traits, or actions which could motivate the breaks in chronology. On the other hand, one reason that classical flashbacks do not adhere to a character's viewpoint is that they must never distract from the ongoing causal chain. The causes and effects may be presented out of story order, but our search for their connections must be rewarded.

Bonnie and Clyde Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow

How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours--not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours. When an American movie is contemporary in feeling, like this one, it makes a different kind of contact with an American audience from the kind that is made by European films, however contemporary. Yet any movie that is contemporary in feeling is likely to go further than other movies--go too far for some tastes --and Bonnie and Clyde divides audiences, as The ManchurianCandidate Candidate did, and it is being jumped on almost as hard. Though we may dismiss the attacks with "What good movie doesn't give some offense?," the fact that it is generally only good movies that provoke attacks by many people suggests that the innocuousness of most of our movies is accepted with such complacence that when an American movie reaches people, when it makes them react, some of them think there must be something the matter with it--perhaps a law should be passed against it. Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about. And once something is said or done on the screens of the world, once it has entered mass art, it can never again belong to a minority, never again be the private possession of an educated, or "knowing," group. But even for that group there is an excitement in hearing its own private thoughts expressed out loud and in seeing something of its own sensibility become part of our common culture.

Our best movies have always made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life; they bring to the surface what, in its newest forms and fashions, is always just below the surface. The romanticism in American movies lies in the cynical tough guy's independence; the sentimentality lies, traditionally, in the falsified finish when the anti-hero turns hero. In 1967, this kind of sentimentality wouldn't work with the audience, and Bonnie and Clyde substitutes sexual fulfillment for a change of heart. (This doesn't quite work, either; audiences sophisticated enough to enjoy a movie like this one are too sophisticated for the dramatic uplift of the triumph over impotence.)

Structurally, Bonnie and Clyde is a story of love on the run, like the old Clark Gable-Claudette Colbert It Happened One Night but turned inside out; the walls of Jericho are psychological this time, but they fall anyway. If the story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow seemed almost from the start, and even to them while they were living it, to be the material of legend, it's because robbers who are loyal to each other--like the James brothers--are a grade up from garden-variety robbers, and if they're male and female partners in crime and young and attractive they're a rare breed. The Barrow gang had both family loyalty and sex appeal working for their legend. David Newman and Robert Benton, who wrote the script for Bonnie and Clyde, were able to use the knowledge that, like many of our other famous outlaws and gangsters, the real Bonnie and Clyde seemed to others to be acting out forbidden roles and to relish their roles. In contrast with secret criminals--the furtive embezzlers and other crooks who lead seemingly honest lives--the known outlaws capture the public imagination, because they take chances, and because, often, they enjoy dramatizing their lives. They know that newspaper readers want all the details they can get about the criminals who do the terrible things they themselves don't dare to do, and also want the satisfaction of reading about the punishment after feasting on the crimes. Outlaws play to this public; they show off their big guns and fancy clothes and their defiance of the law. Bonnie and Clyde established the images for their own legend in the photographs they posed for: the gunman and the gun moll. The naïve, touching doggerel ballad that Bonnie Parker wrote and had published in newspapers is about the roles they play for other people contrasted with the coming end for them. It concludes:

Someday they'll go down together; They'll bury them side by side; To few it'll be grief-To the law a relief-But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.

That they did capture the public imagination is evidenced by the many movies based on their lives. In the late forties, there were They Live by Night, with Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell, and Gun Crazy, with John Dall and Peggy Cummins. ( Alfred Hitchcock, in the same period, cast these two Clyde Barrows, Dall and Granger, as Loeb and Leopold, in Rope.) And there was a cheap--in every sense-- 1958 exploitation film, The Bonnie Parker Story, starring Dorothy Provine. But the most important earlier version was Fritz Lang You Only Live Once, starring Sylvia Sidney as "Joan" and Henry Fonda as "Eddie." which was made in 1937; this version, which was one of the best American films of the thirties, as Bonnie and Clyde is of the sixties, expressed certain feelings of its time, as this film expresses certain feelings of ours. ( They Live by Night, produced by John Houseman under the aegis of Dore Schary, and directed by Nicholas Ray, was a very serious and socially significant tragic melodrama, but its attitudes were already dated thirties attitudes: the lovers were very young and pure and frightened and underprivileged; the hardened criminals were sordid; the settings were committedly grim. It made no impact on the postwar audience, though it was a great success in England, where our moldy socially significant movies could pass for courageous.)

Just how contemporary in feeling Bonnie and Clyde is may be indicated by contrasting it with You Only Live Once which, though almost totally false to the historical facts, was told straight. It is a peculiarity of our times--perhaps it's one of the few specifically modern characteristics--that we don't take our stories straight any more. This isn't necessarily bad. Bonnie and Clyde is the first film demonstration that the put-on can be used for the purposes of art. The Manchurian Candidate almost succeeded in that, but what was implicitly wild and far-out in the material was nevertheless presented on screen as a straight thriller. Bonnie and Clyde keeps the audience in a kind of eager, nervous imbalance-holds our attention by throwing our disbelief back in our faces. To be put on is to be put on the spot, put on the stage, made the stooge in a comedy act. People in the audience at Bonnie and Clyde are laughing, demonstrating that they're not stooges--that they appreciate the joke--when they catch the first bullet right in the face. The movie keeps them off balance to the end. During the first part of the picture, a woman in my row was gleefully assuring her companions, "It's a comedy. It's a comedy." After a while, she didn't say anything. Instead of the movie spoof, which tells the audience that it doesn't need to feel or care, that it's all just in fun, that "we were only kidding," Bonnie and Clyde disrupts us with "And you thought we were only kidding."

Filmic Images of Women Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell

Until television overtook them, movies were the favorite visual entertainment in the United States. Fully half of the population, 60 million people, went to the movies each week during the 1930s. Because it was a period of economic depression, people needed the enjoyment, the escape, and the fantasy of films more than ever. The 1930s and 1940s became Hollywood's Golden Era. Among the hundreds of movies produced by the big studios each year, women were featured both in the very popular romance-melodramas and in the newer form, the independent woman films. Often, there were creative mergers: romance combined with independence and Eve types displayed strength and assertiveness. The newer type of film, however, had stronger women playing stronger parts in greater quantity than ever before, or possibly since.

The fantasy power of movies operated at full throttle. Precisely when the Depression created mass insecurity, vivacious women in film were surviving and taking control of difficult situations. As independent Eves, they used their physical attractiveness to carve out decent lives for themselves; as careerists, they became pilots, illustrators, reporters, doctors, lawyers, and businesswomen. And as aristocratic women whose family fortunes gave them unprecedented freedom, they often demonstrated, comically or melodramatically, some of the dilemmas of wealth; after all, women were not expected to function alone as adults. Hollywood also reveled in the opportunity to satirize the rich while clearly showing them in enviable positions. Aristocratic women paraded around in sumptuous surroundings while the masses were unemployed. In My Man Godfrey ( 1936), a classic screwball comedy, Carole Lombard and her socialite friends went to a charity treasure hunt. Lombard won the prize by bringing back a real life bum. In The Women ( 1939) rich New York City women were ridiculed for their useless lives, while a lengthy fashion show punctuated the middle section of the movie.

It is an interesting cultural statement that in the classless United States, during the bleak days of the Great Depression, moviegoers were treated to films about rich women. Many movies showed country homes, servants galore, and gorgeously dressed hostesses presiding over classy cocktail parties. The conspicuous signs of wealth in a country that preached egalitarianism appeared ironic indeed. Yet these films produced no revolutions; audiences enjoyed them and kept coming back for more. Their dreamlike qualities seemed to provide the needed escape. The U.S. public accepted the myth of everyone being equal while knowing full well that it was a myth. Blacks were not equal to whites, and rich people were different from everyone else. But Hollywood's movies about wealthy people in the United States were very popular in the 1930s.
The major studios of Hollywood each produced about 200 movies a year during that period. They satisfied an audience of all ages and races. There were family movies as well as special interest movies for every taste. Actresses found roles, as stars and in supporting roles, in most of Hollywood's offerings, though they were featured in romance-melodramas and independent women films. A generation of female movie stars arose to meet this seemingly insatiable appetite for movies. The list of women who became stars in the 1930s and 1940s cannot be rivalled by any subsequent generation of movie stars, primarily because there are no longer such large numbers of movies made each year. While Bette Davis, under long-term contract to Warner Brothers, often made three or four movies a year during the 1930s, a movie star in the post-1950 generation would be lucky to make one movie every two or three years. Joan Crawford, another star of the era, worked for MGM during the 1930s and made 29 movies during the decade.

While the 1930s generation of women actresses played in all of the standard fare--westerns, gangster movies, melodramas, and comedies--they also starred in the variations of independent women films. This role featured a heroine who was often restless and spent a lot of time discovering herself, though she usually ended up defining herself in terms of romance and marriage. The independent woman was also the working girl who found life bleak during the depression; her only path to future security and happiness was in the arms of a rich man. This film genre, in its variety, distinguished itself from the other types by featuring women, especially strong women, whose personal quest seemed to personify everyone's search for answers in very trying times. Indeed, this may have been part of its appeal; audiences were treated to unsettled times with a woman, usually the traditional anchor of the home, thrust into a new life situation. The resolution, with her returning to the home, offered assurances to both sexes that the difficult, and unusual, times would eventually be righted. The status quo ante depression would be restored.

Though many movie actresses played in this genre, Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell are probably the most clearly identified as exemplars of independent women. In the period under discussion, 1930-50, Hepburn played in five career woman films and four aristocratic women films, while Russell was a career woman seven times and an aristocratic lady three times (see table). Other popular stars of the period, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford, though often known for their work in romance and melodrama, also played many roles where their strength, independence, and grit were critical factors. They demonstrated some of the varieties of independent women. Careerists were portrayed along with aristocratic ladies and independent Eves. Hepburn was never an Eve. Her screen roles were the most consistent as she never entered into a long-term contract with any studio, in contrast to most other actresses. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, as already suggested, did not have the luxury of choosing roles, but their personalities and talents lent themselves to roles about unusual women.

1960's Made-For-Tv Movies

On September 23, 1961, NBC introduced its new series, "Saturday Night at the Movies," featuring Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable in "How to Marry a Millionaire." This broadcast was an astounding success and pointed to Hollywood's growing inclination to release its post-1948 movies to television. Seven more series representing all three networks and every night of the week appeared over the next five years. The culmination of this trend was an ABC Sunday telecast of "The Bridge on the River Kwai" in September 1966. "An estimated 60 million viewers in 25 million homes sat down to watch one movie" for which ABC had "paid Columbia Pictures $2,000,000." Even at the price, the American Broadcasting Network was understandably delighted, as the television viewing public clamored to consume big-budget, star-studded, color extravaganzas from Hollywood in the privacy of well over 95 percent of the homes in the United States.

The only drawbacks, of course, were that these feature pictures were still over four years old on the average; and more critically, Hollywood's supply was quickly being depleted by prime-time TV. Consequently, ABC's video stage was appropriately set for the successful nurturing of the American made-for-TV movie.

The precise birth date of the telefilm is arguable, although only a handful of contenders exist prior to 1961. Claims range from Ron Amateau's 60-minute Western, "The Bushwackers, " which appeared on CBS in 1951, to Disney's "Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier," which was broadcast as three separate segments during the 1954-55 debut season of "The Wonderful World of Disney." Also, it was not uncommon during the late 1950s for TV's dramatic anthologies to present some of their teleplays on either film or videotape. Three shows especially, "Desilu Playhouse," "Kraft Theatre," and "The Bob Hope Show," filmed a number of their one-hour offerings, while a few of these presentations were even expanded into a second hour airing the following week as a finale of a two-parter. Still, these haphazard examples have really more to do with trivia than historical precedent, as the man primarily responsible for pioneering the formal properties of the telefeature is Jennings Lang, a New York lawyer who became programming chief for MCA's Revue in the late 1950s.

Lang had been promoting a longer form beyond the television series as early as 1957. "He began his experiments with anthology shows like 'The Alfred Hitchcock Hour' and 'The Chrysler Theater,' in the one-hour format, and he had a big hand in the first 90-minute regularly scheduled series, 'The Virginian,' which premiered on NBC in 1962. Nineteen sixty-two was also the year that the powerful talent agency, the Music Corporation of America (MCA), purchased Universal Pictures. As a result, this operation absorbed and merged with Revue, which, in turn, considerably extended the operational purview of Jennings Lang and his subsequent television ventures. Lang, now of Universal Television, foresaw "the era of the TV epic, when an entire evening [would] be given over to a single spectacular, made for the occasion." In fact, the term "event programming" had not even been coined yet, although each network would be exploring this strategic avenue in their own separate ways by 1966.

As mentioned earlier, the fall of 1966 was when ABC first decided to begin telecasting a number of Hollywood "blockbuster" films, including "The Bridgeon the River Kwai" on the River Kwai" and later "The Robe." CBS, on the other hand, strove for prestige programming to counterbalance its lineup of popular, though pedestrian situation comedies, such as "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Green Acres," "Petticoat Junction," the "Andy Griffith Show," and "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C." These specials were composed mostly of important American plays, like "Death of a Salesman" and "The Glass Menagerie," which actually pulled moderate, though respectable ratings for a time. Most important, however, Lang was first able to interest NBC in financially promoting the made-for-TV form in the spring of 1964. By 1966, it was apparent to both Universal TV and NBC that they had gambled themselves into developing a television genre of enormous potential, as economic dividends were realized almost immediately from this feature-length hybrid. In contrast, however, much of the aesthetic and socio-cultural possibilities inherent in the telefilm would lie dormant for another five years.

NBC and MCA, Inc., inaugurated 1964 by creating "Project 120," a never fully actualized weekly film anthology whose very name echoed the live dramatic series of the 1950s. NBC allotted $250,000 for the first telefeature, as MCAUniversal hired Hollywood journeyman Don Siegel to direct "'Johnny North,' an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story, 'The Killers,' starring John Cassavetes, Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and Ronald Reagan in his last role. The movie that resulted eventually cost over $900,000 and was deemed by the network "too spicy, expensive, and violent for TV screens." Clearly, it was evident to both NBC and MCA from the outset that the budgetary constraints and the dictates of content would be different for the telefilm from what was previously expected for the usual theatrical picture. As a result, "Johnny North" was retitled "The Killers," and the film was subsequently released to movie theaters nationwide. Mort Werner, NBC-TV vice president in charge of programming at the time, reflected upon this experience: "We've learned to control the budget. Two new 'movies' will get started soon, and the series probably will show up on television in 1965."

Actually, the very first made-for-TV movie, "See How They Run," premiered on October 17, 1964, a few months sooner than expected. This Universal production is a mediocre crime melodrama that was quickly followed six weeks later by the broadcast of Don Siegel's next excursion into the telefilm genre, "The Hanged Man." Like "The Killers" before it, Siegel's second assignment for NBC-MCA is another remake of a classic film noir, "Ride the Pink Horse." Without a doubt, this movie along with the only telefeature to appear during the 1965-66 season, a Western pilot for Dale Robertson entitled, "Scalplock," both point to the fact that the early TV movie was more derivative of Hollywood for source material than any other dramatic avenue. In fact, the telefilm had not yet produced its own crop of production talent. In the late 1960s, this genre harkened most to Hollywood's least "respectable" genres for story ideas and themes: the Western, the melodrama, the spy thriller, and the horror/supernatural tale. Therefore, in retrospect, it is obviously no surprise that the trade publications and movie critics alike were immediately inclined to christen this new form--the rebirth of Hollywood's B-movie; indeed, it would take the made-for-TV film genre a dozen more years to outgrow this benign, though ultimately disparaging label.

The American Made-for-TV Movie

There is an often stated misconception that the American made-for-TV movie is today's "B" picture. The implication, of course, is that the telefeature is an inferior product modeled on the Hollywood paradigm. In fact, this supposition is an oversimplication of the generic origin and nature of the TV movie. Primarily, this film genre is derivative of both the traditional Hollywood feature movie and the live dramatic TV anthologies of the 1950s, although other secondary progenitors are certainly traceable in the aesthetics, technology, economics, and culture of American society during the past century. All the same, the made-for-TV movie fits comfortably into the developing narrative tradition that is at present inextricably linked to commerce and industry in the United States.

Telefilms now cost millions of dollars to make and are channeled throughout the world by a number of old and new distribution technologies. Very few TV movies garner the astronomical income of a Hollywood blockbuster; still, the substantial majority of "vidpics" return a profit in contrast to only 20 to 25 percent of their more prestigious counterparts. In addition, a successful madefor-TV movie can attract approximately 40 to over 70 million viewers at any one time, while only 20 million people attend all the theatrical movies in America in any given week. Obviously, the commercial influence of the telefilm is immense, as this type of picture has been a consistently productive programming source for over twenty years at the three networks. Paradoxically, however, the aesthetic and socio-cultural significance of this genre is usually dismissed. The American telefeature is underrrated; and for the most part, it still labors under a critical reputation as Hollywood's "stepchild" or second-class citizen. Nevertheless, the made-for TV movie, albeit young, is a rich and varied genre, encompassing its own unique formal, stylistic, and topical strategies on which the process of definition and evaluation can continue to develop.

As with any genre, determining the parameters of the telefilm remains its foremost challenge. Since 1964, well over 1,500 examples have appeared on network television in the United States, varying in length from 74-minute offerings fitting into 90-minute time slots to a 26.5-hour mini-series. Overall, this aggregation can be divided into three manageable categories: the telefeature, the docudrama, and the mini-series. In addition, all three of these subgenres can be either original creations or story adaptations from a previous source. First, the telefeature refers to a fictional narrative produced for TV that is a discrete entity occupying at least 90 "commercial" minutes but not exceeding one evening of programming. Next, the docudrama is a story film designed to recreate actual persons, places, and events. Moreover, this form is purported to blend essential aspects of both the fictional and the documentary film modes, although the narrative form has usually dominated in its subsequent execution on American television to date. Thirdly, the mini-series is an extended telefeature or docudrama that is broadcast in multiple segments over two or more nights. As a final note, these three short explanations are meant to be working definitions, and each will be elaborated on in more detail.
From a critical standpoint, movies made-for-television have historically struggled to adapt and eventually merge their roots in the classical cinematic style of Hollywood with the inherent contingencies of the television medium. In the beginning, the grammar and story types of the theatrical feature took precedence, while the basic method of storytelling and characterization indigenous to TV drama eventually surfaced as well to better balance the aesthetic form that is today characteristic of the television movie. What resulted is a media hybrid with a variation of its own rules governing technique and plot structure, an audiovisual dialect, a star system, and particular thematic emphases and concerns. In other words, the usual telefilm is a "high-concept" picture, that borrows from the intrinsic topicality of the TV medium itself. Likewise, this concept can be a controversial theme, a historical recreation, or a spin-off from an already popular book, play, theatrical feature, or cultural trend. The important point here is that there is a previously established familiarity between the American viewing public and the subject matter at hand. Additionally, the TV movie's inherent aesthetic strategy is to provide a personal dramatization of this theme or topical issue, while always remaining within the bounds of "good taste" and network proprieties. In this way, the feature-length film form is filtered through the domesticity, "living-room" intimacy, and social relevancy of the television environment. In turn, this union suggests a new and evolving generic type, mixed in origin, but essentially unique as the ultimate offspring arising out of the respective traditions of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s and the golden age of TV drama during the 1950s.

Women in Films of the 1970s

Very little in movies of the early 1970s prepared audiences--maybe even the filmmakers themselves--for the radical changes that were about to occur on screen, then ultimately elevate themselves, like a 3--D pop-up card, into a position of tremendous influence in people's lives. It was almost as if, like the backgrounds in those cards, the movies became the far less important item, giving way to the new role possibilities women film stars were embodying.
In the first part of the decade, films that were the most popular, and made the most money, were either without any female roles or else contained female roles that were superficial. A Variety headline from the era announces that family films did the most business in 1969, the top two grossers of that year being The Love Bug and Funny Girl. In 1970 Love Story swept all other contenders before it, and other big winners in the early 1970s were The Godfather, Fiddler on the Roof, and What's up, Doc? Of the top ten grossers of 1974, the year The Sting headed the list, only The Great Gatsby and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had major roles for women, and those roles were hardly progressive.

The year 1975 brought Lucky Lady, with Liza Minelli as a wisecracking bootlegger and in 1973 the usually serious Glenda Jackson won an Oscar for a comedy, A Touch of Class, in which she portrayed a married but separated dress designer having an affair with a married man, played by George Segal.

You would hardly know or guess that this was the tail end of the hippie era when free love, female anger, and bra-burning were the zeitgeist in many segments of society.
For though political and social events of the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraged independence and autonomy for women, paradoxically women's parts in movies were reactionary or even retrograde. Mia Farrow, for instance, carried a child against her will in Rosemary's Baby in 1968. Passively accepting the weird food--rats and the like--that her horrid neighbors give her ( Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer as wittily evil oldsters who are stepgrandparents of sorts to the coming child of the Devil) and unquestioningly accepting the dictates of her possessed husband, John Cassavetes, Farrow is like a 1950s nightmare of wifedom.

On the other end of the role model spectrum, Jane Fonda brilliantly plays a prostitute in Klute ( 1971), a role for which she won an Oscar. As the ultimate symbol of female exploitation, this prostitute can find herself, and be liberated, only with the help of a man: a policeman played by Donald Sutherland. This film makes an interesting comparison with a 1985 movie about prostitutes, Working Girls, by the young feminist filmmaker Lizzie Borden, in which the heroine is so autonomous that she manages to regard her work as simply that, something done for the money only, and never gets involved with the johns or feels degraded by them or by the work. Of course it must help that she is a Yale Ph.D., and that she is gay. Still, the issue of self-esteem never comes up, as it does in Klute, where Fonda's negative self-image, matched by her surroundings and circumstances, creates the movie's emotional mood.

Yet by contrast with these either lighthearted or negative role models, though perhaps a few light-years beyond what their real-life sisters were busy with, progressive women like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug were on public platforms preaching self-fulfillment and self-discovery, even if the cost was high. There was also their national mythical alter ego, the feminist superwoman who was beginning to be able to have, and do, it all. Or at least she looked as if she could. But women's images in films lagged langorously behind.

In fact, the gap was so apparent that two books of film criticism, Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape and Marjorie Rosen Popcorn Venus (both 1973) took this fact as their premise and made critical breakthroughs based upon it.
Even publications as straitlaced and venerable as the New York Times published pieces on the paucity of good roles for women. Panels on women and film proliferated on college campuses, particularly on both coasts, where film in general had a high profile because of the numbers of movies made there. The first Festival of Women's Film, held in New York in 1972, was composed of films by and about women, and concentrating on women's issues.

Middle age in women was also celebrated in The Turning Point ( 1977), with Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine. In this film the emphasis was on the mutually exclusive choices women of their generation had to make: career, represented by Bancroft, or marriage and motherhood, as embodied by MacLaine.

In 1976 there had been one prototype for a strong, elegant career woman in Faye Dunaway's portrayal of a ruthless TV executive in Network. But, while attractive, her character was simply too mean-spirited for American women to identify with in any way.

Soon others came along, though. There was, for instance, Jane Fonda's suddenly liberated wife in Coming Home ( 1978). Her liberation is signaled most clearly by the surface change from a prim and proper Marine's wife to a freer-dressing, freer-acting, and newly sexually enlightened woman. There was also Jessica Lange's attractive single mother, who never mentions the father of her child, in Tootsie ( 1982), and the possibly less romanticized portrait of Meryl Streep as a conflicted mother who also wants to fulfill herself as a person in Kramer vs. Kramer ( 1979).

The Marx Brothers United Artists Movies 1946 - 1950

(distributor; independently produced)

1946
A Night in Casablanca (85 minutes). Producer: David L. Loew. Director: Archie L. Mayo. Screenplay: Joseph Fields and Roland Kibbee. Additional Material: Frank Tashlin. Music: Werner Janssen. Music and Lyrics: Ted Synder, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (the song "Who's Sorry Now"). Cast: Groucho ( RonaldKornblow), Harpo (Rusty), Chico (Corbaccio), Lisette Verea ( BeatriceRheiner), Charles Drake (Lt. Pierre Delmar), Lois Collier (Annette), Dan Seymour (Captain Brizzard), Lewis Russell (Galoux), Harro Hellor(Emile), Frederick Gierman (Kurt), Siegfried Rumann (Count Pfeffer-man, alias Heinrich Stubel).

1949
Love Happy (85 minutes).

1950
Producer: Lester Cowas (Presented by Mary Pickford). Director: David Miller. Screenplay: Frank Tashlin and Mac Benoff. Story: Harpo. Special Effects: Howard A. Anderson. Cast: Groucho (Detective SamGrunion), Harpo (Himself), Chico ( Faustino the Great), Ilona Massey(Madame Egilichi), Verra-Ellen ( Maggie Phillips), Marion Hutton( Bunny Dolan), Raymond Burr ( Alphonse Zoto), Bruce Gordon ( Hanni-bal Zoto), Melville Cooper (Throckmorton), Leon Belasco (Mr. Lyons),Paul Valentine ( Mike Johnson), Eric Blore (Mackinaw), Marilyn Monroe( Grunion's Client).

The Marx Brothers RKO Radio Movies 1938

1938
Room Service (78 minutes). Producer: Pandro S. Berman. Director: William A. Seiter. Screenplay: Morrie Ryskind. Based upon stage production Room Service: JohnMurray and Allen Boratz. Cast: Groucho ( Gordon Miller), Chico ( HarryBinelli), Harpo ( Faker Englund), Lucille Ball (Christine), Ann Miller (Hilda), Frank Albertson ( Leo Davis), Donald MacBride ( GregoryWagner), Cliff Dunstan ( Joseph Gribble), Philip Loeb ( Timothy Ho-garth), Philip Wood ( Simon Jenkins), Alexander Asro (Sasha), CharlesHalton (Dr. Glass).

The Marx Brothers Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Movies 1935 - 1941

1935
A Night at the Opera (92 minutes). ( Irving Thalberg producing.) Director: Sam Wood. Screenplay: GeorgeS. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. Additional Material: Al Boasberg.Story: James Kevin McGuinness. Cast: Groucho ( Otis B. Driftwood), Chico (Fiorella), Harpo (Tomasso), Kitty Carlisle (Rosa), Alan Jones(Ricardo), Walter King (Lassparri), Siegfried Rumann ( Herman Gottlieg),Margaret Dumont (Mrs. Claypool), Edward Keane (The Captain), RobertEmmet O'Connor ( Detective Henderson), Billy Gilbert (Engineer'sAssistant), Leo White, Jay Eaton, and Rolf Sedan (Aviators).

1937
A Day at the Races (109 minutes). ( Irving Thalberg production; he died after the road tour.) Director: SamWood. Cast: Groucho (Dr. Hugh Z. Hackenbush), Chico ( Tony), Harpo(Stuffy), Allan Jones (Gil), Maureen O'Sullivan ( Judy Standish), Mar-garet Dumont (Mrs. Emily Upjohn), Leonard Ceeley (Whitmore), Douglas Dumbrille (Morgan), Esther Muir (Miss Nora--"Flo"), SiegfriedRumann (Dr. Leopold X. Steinberg), Robert Middlemass (The Sheriff),Vivien Fay (Solo Dancer), Ivie Anderson and the Crinoline Choir (Sing-ers), Charles Trowbridge (Dr. Wilmerding), Pat Flaherty (Detective),Frank Dawson and Max Lucke (Doctors).


1939
At the Circus (87 minutes). Producer: Mervyn LeRoy. Director: Edward Buzzell. Screenplay: Irving Brecher. Music: Harold Arlen. Lyrics: E. Y. Harburg (including"Lydia, the Tattooed Lady"). Cast: Groucho ( Attorney J. CheeverLoophole), Chico (Antonio), Harpo (Punchy), Kenny Baker ( JeffWilson), Florence Rice ( Julie Randall), Eve Arden ( Peerless Pauline), Margaret Dumont (Mrs. Dukesburg), Nat Pendleton (Goliath), FritzFeld (Jardinet), James Burke ( John Carter), Jerry Marenghi (LittleProfessor Atom), Barnett Parker (Whitcomb), Frank Orth (LunchroomAttendant).

1940
Go West (80 minutes). Producer: Jack Cummings. Director: Edward Buzzell. Screenplay: IrvingBrecher. Music and Lyrics: Gus Kahn and Roger Edens, BronislauKaper, Charles Wakefield Cadman. Cast: Groucho ( S. Quentin Quale), Chico ( Joe Panello), Harpo ( "Rusty" Panello), John Carroll ( TerryTurner), Diana Lewis ( Eve Wilson), Walter Wolf King (Beecher), RobertBarrat ("Red" Baxter), June MacCloy (Lulubella), George Lessey (Rail-road President), Mitchell Lewis (Halfbreed), Tully Marshall ( Dan Wilson), Harry Tyler (Telegraph Clerk).

1941
The Big Store (83 minutes). Producer: Louis K. Sidney. Director: Charles Reisner. Screenplay: SidKuller, Hal Fimberg, and Ray Golden. Story: Nat Perrin. Music: HalBorne. Lyrics: Sid Kuller and Hal Fimberg. Cast: Groucho ( Wolf J. Fly-wheel), Chico (Ravelli), Harpo (Wacky), Tony Martin ( Tommy Rogers),Virginia Grey ( Joan Sutton), Margaret Dumont ( Martha Phelps), DouglasDumbrille (Mr. Grover), William Tannen ( Fred Sutton), Marion Martin( Peggy Arden), Virginia O'Brien (Kitty), Henry Armetta (Guiseppi), Anna Demetrio (Maria), Paul Stanton ( George Hastings), Russel Hicks( Arthur Hastings), Bradley Page ( Duke), and Charles Holland.

Marx Brothers Paramount Movies 1929 - 1933

The Marx Brothers at the Paramount Movies

1929
The Cocoanuts (96 minutes).Producer: Walter Wanger. Directors: Robert Florey and Joseph Santley.Screenplay Adaptation: Morrie Ryskind. Based on stage productionThe Cocoanuts: George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind; music andlyrics: Irving Berlin. Cast: Groucho (Mr. Hammer), Harpo (Himself),Chico (Himself), Zeppo (Jamison), Mary Eaton ( Polly Potter), OscarShaw ( Bob Adams), Katherine Francis (Penelope), Margaret Dumont (Mrs. Potter), Cyril Ring ( Harvey Yates), Basil Ruysdael ( Hennessey), Sylvan Lee ( Bell Captain), Gamby-Hale Girls and Allan K. Foster Girls(Dancers).

1930
Animal Crackers (98 minutes).Director: Victor Heerman. Screenplay: Morrie Ryskind. Continuity:Pierre Collings. Based on stage production Animal Crackers: George S.Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind; music and lyrics: Bert Kalmar and HarryRuby (including "Hooray for Captain Spaulding"). Cast: Groucho( Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding), Harpo (The Professor), Chico ( SignorEmanuel Ravelli), Zeppo ( Horatio Jamison), Lillian Roth ( ArabellaRittenhouse), Margaret Dumont (Mrs. Rittenhouse), Louis Sorin( Roscoe W. Chandler), Hal Thompson ( John Parker), Margaret Irving(Mrs. Whitehead), Kathryn Reece ( Grace Carpenter), Robert Greig(Hives, the butler), Edward Metcalf (Inspector Hennessey), The MusicMasters (Six Footmen).

1931
Monkey Business (77 minutes). ( Herman Mankiewicz produces.) Director: Norman McLeod. Screenplay: S. J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone. Additional Dialogue: Arthur Sheekman. Cast: Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo (Playing Themselves asStowaways), Thelma Todd (Lucille), Tom Kennedy (Gibson), RuthHall ( Mary Helton), Rockcliffe Fellowes ( Joe Helton), Ben Taggart( Captain Corcoran), Otto Fries (Second Mate), Evelyn Pierce (Manicu-rist), Maxine Castle (Opera Singer), Harry Woods ("Alky" Briggs),"Frenchie" Marx (Extra on Ship and at Dock).

1932
Horse Feathers (68 minutes). Director: Norman McLeod. Screenplay: Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, S. J.Perelman, and Will B. Johnstone. Music: Bert Kalmar, and Harry Ruby(including "I'm Against It"). Cast: Groucho ( Professor Quincey AdamsWagstaff), Harpo (Pinky), Chico (Barovelli), Zeppo ( Frank Wagstaff),Thelma Todd ( Connie Bailey), David Landau (Jennings), Florine Mc-Kinney ( Peggy Carrington), James Pierce (Mullens), Nat Pendleton( McCarthy), Reginald Barlow ( Retiring President of Huxley College),Robert Greig ( Professor Hornsvogel), E. J. LeSaint and E. H. Calvert( Professors in Wagstaff's Study), Edgar Dearing (Bartender), Sid Saylor(Slot Machine Player).

1933
Duck Soup (70 minutes). ( Herman Mankiewicz produces.) Director: Leo McCarey (Responsiblefor much of the visual comedy, including the classic mirror sequence).Screenplay: Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Additional Dialogue: ArthurSheekman and Nat Perrin. Music and Lyrics: Bert Kalmar and HarryRuby (including "This Country's Going to War"). Cast: Groucho ( RufusT. Firefly), Chico (Chicolini), Harpo (Pinkie), Zeppo ( Bob Rolland), Raquel Torres ( Vera Marcal), Louis Calhern ( Ambassador Trentino), Margaret Dumont (Mrs. Teasdale), Verna Hillie (Secretary), LeonidKinsky (Agitator), Edmund Breece (Zander), Edwin Maxwell (Secretaryof War), Edgar Kennedy (Lemonade Peddler), William Worthington(First Minister of Finance), George MacQuarrie (First Judge), Fred Sul-livan (Second Judge), Davison Clark (Second Minister of Finance), Charles B. Middleton (Prosecutor), Eric Mayne (Third Judge).

Anti-Culture at Public Expense

As Mr. Irving Kristol points out, what most rebellious students demand by way of university reform is not culture, but anticulture. Real reform and reinvigoration of the higher learning are desperately needed in this land, Lord knows; yet (with some honorable exceptions) that is not at all the sort of change the intemperate student desires.
Finding genuine humane studies and pure science too rigorous for his undisciplined and uninquisitive intellect, the student rebel shrieks "Give Me Relevance!"--by which he means trivia and ephemera requiring no painful thought.

On many campuses, defenders of real culture are enfeebled. Not a few professors and administrators are themselves anticultural; many others supinely acquiesce in the clamor for a "relevance" signifying hostility to the works of the mind. In the present struggle over what a college or university should teach, one recalls the lines from Yeats:

"The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity."

In every age, the majority of young people have felt no strong desire for attainment of high culture. Only in our time, however, have great masses of ineducable folk, positively hostile to culture, penetrated within the Academy. The extracurricular life of the campus possessing its attractions, nevertheless, and enrollment being a means for escaping the draft, and a college degree having become essential to social status and many forms of employment --why, this mass of "students" remaining undesirous of cultural attainment, anti-cultural boondoggles must be created to occupy their time.

Some of the boondoggles are harmless enough, and for people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. If a young person can abide only trivia and ephemera, and his parents concur in his taste--well, supposing that such "students" or their parents pay their own bills, at least four awkward postadolescent and pre-employment years are filled for those to whom thought is unbearably painful.

Providing anti-culture at public expense, however, is something else. Even in this country, public funds for the higher learning are limited: what is appropriated for anti-culture must be deducted from culture. Worse still, students capable of something better are thrust or enticed into educational boondoggles, supported by public revenues, on the tacit principle that what the masses relish ought to be good enough for anybody.

Consider the plight of a kinswoman of mine, a good schoolteacher, required to obtain two credits in education this summer, that she may be officially certified as competent in a specialized discipline which she already has taught with distinction for several years. Of the hollow courses offered by the anti-cultural department of education at the university where she endures this summer servitude, the most promising is entitled "Creativity."

This course is taught (or monitored, rather) by the dullest dog in the department, into whose brain no creative impulse ever has entered. Mercifully, perhaps, the professor never lectures: he merely beams while the captive teacher-students in search of two credits lackadaisically discuss among themselves whatever vagrant notion may be offered by one of their number. The slim textbook, written by some obscure educationist, is calculated to make any decent student abjure creativity forevermore.

Oh, there are "workbooks," too, that the students are supposed to submit--the sort of thing they pasted together in the sixth grade. On most days, class is dismissed early, inspiration having flagged. A grade of A minus--at worst--is virtually automatic in this course.
More bluntly anti-cultural programs of study, stripped of the last stitch of moral imagination, are taking shape on other campuses. Michigan State has its course in "detective fiction," which does not have room enough for a third of the students who would like to enroll. Ohio State has its course in "drugstore literature," no less popular with Burke's swinish multitude.

Bowling Green State University, in Ohio, is the proudest pioneer--or sapper--in the demolition of culture and the erection of anti-culture in the shadow of the Ivory Tower. At that former normal school, there has been founded a Center for the Study of Popular Culture, with 35,000 recordings, twenty thousand books, a grand collection of underground newspapers and of posters, etc., etc. All this is supposed "to make education more meaningful to a mobile society." (No society ever was more mobile than that of the Huns.) The director of this Center sneers at the "solemnity" of traditional courses; he means that his charges shall study menus, cigar bands and baseball picture cards--really and truly. Soon, he hopes, the University will offer a bachelor's degree in popular culture.

Actually, Bowling Green is no more anti-cultural than a good many other former teachers' colleges converted into universities by act of legislature. Bowling Green State's general library, let it be said, is a distinctly superior collection, carefully if voraciously enlarged over the past quarter of a century.

But for some notion of students' interests at Bowling Green, walk through the university bookstore. That shop sells enormous stacks of girlie magazines and worse, though it is difficult to find any serious periodical. And Pop Culture endowed by the state, rapidly devours the remains of civilization.

Prototypes in Movies: The Gangster Cycle

Between the beginning of the Depression in 1930 and the early days of the Roosevelt administration in 1933, when confusion and desperation gripped much of the country, Hollywood momentarily floundered. Not only did the studios have to make the difficult transition to sound, they had to adjust to the rapidly changing tastes of a nation in upheaval. These two variables--sound and the Depression--created a whole new set of aesthetic demands requiring that the old Formula be placed within a new context. The studios at first experimented with extravagant musicals and photographed plays, but dwindling audience interest quickly prompted them to revert to action and melodrama. It didn't take too long to realize that the talkies required a greater surface realism. The romantic, ethereal fantasies of the twenties' films sounded ridiculous when put into words: John Gilbert's passion may have been eloquently mirrored in his face and eyes, but when he attempted to express it verbally the emotions seemed silly and banal. Correspondingly, the hard facts of the Depression demanded a shift in subject matter. Latin lovers and college flappers now seemed rather remote, completely unrelated to the changed mood and the overriding preoccupation with social breakdown. The romantic ideals of the thirties had to be more firmly grounded in a topical context.

The films of the early Depression years reflect much of the desperation of the time, both in their initial groping for new character types and settings and in their eventual preoccupation with an amoral society and the inefficacy of once-sacred values. By late 1933, with the New Deal inspiring confidence, Hollywood had found its bearings. The studios were now secure with the new sound medium and had established the dramatic conventions expressive of new attitudes. New Deal confidence and Hays Office moralism removed much of the hard edge from the early thirties cycles, but the basic groundwork for the remainder of the decade had been laid and Hollywood could now proceed with greater self-assurance.

It was during this period that the social problem film emerged as an important genre. It did not immediately spring into existence with the arrival of a major social crisis but was rather the end product of a gradual evolution. Important stylistic and narrative motifs had to be developed before the talkies could begin self-consciously to analyze the issues of the day. First among these were character prototypes--the gangster, the fallen woman, the convict, and the shyster--and a contemporary setting--the alleyways, slums, and speakeasies of the big city. Shot in a racy but essentially realistic style, these early films are the archetypal Depression movies. Though they do not really constitute problem films in themselves, the gangster, fallen woman, and prison cycles metaphorically comment on the relationship between the individual and society, taking a highly cynical attitude toward social institutions. The hero must be tough and amoral in order to endure in a society crumbling under the weight of its own corruption and ineffectuality. Dramas lingering on images of a hostile urban environment and glorifying criminal heroes seethed with antisocial undertones. Then by 1932-33, with these dramatic conventions firmly entrenched as part of popular culture, they could be readily extended into an overt discussion of modern society. The implied social criticism of these cycles quickly gave way to the exposés, commentaries, and inquiries of the problem film.

The most popular of the prototype cycles was the gangster movie. It reestablished the action movie as Hollywood's staple by grafting a realistic, fast-paced narrative style onto stories out of the headlines. For the first time, films went beyond mere talk and exploited the full possibilities of sound, utilizing the sound track to create a physical impact which increased dramatic tension. The screen exploded with "the terrifying splutter of the machine gun, the screaming of brakes and squealing of automobile tyres." Furthermore, the gangsters were character types more familiar to audiences than the teacup sophisticates of the photographed plays. They spoke like truckdrivers ( Bugs Raymond in Quick Millions, 1931), slum kids ( Tommy Powers in Public Enemy, 1931), Italian immigrants ( Rico in Little Caesar, 1930, and Tony Camonte in Scarface, 1932), and stockyard workers ( "Slaughterhouse" in The Secret Six, 1931). And most important of all, the films adapted the Formula to make the gangster a contemporary hero. Stress was still placed on the individual but his circumstances were made more appropriate to the times. Like the traditional Formula hero, the gangster hungers after personal success, but he is different in that he can no longer fulfill this goal within the bounds of society and must pursue it through crime. The old avenues of fulfillment had been circumvented by the Depression.

Rico (Edward G. Robinson) in Little Caesar demonstrates an absolute faith in the American Dream by carefully following Andrew Carnegie's step-by-step formula for success: he starts at the bottom and with a single-minded dedication works his way to the top, the whole time abstaining from such distractions as sex and alcohol and studying hard to learn the operation of his organization. Rico typifies the hardworking Puritan businessman, except that the corporation has been replaced by the gang and murder is Rico's main business tactic. Similarly, Tommy Powers of Public Enemy is a more cynical version of the early Douglas Fairbanks comic hero. Lewis Jacobs' description of the Fairbanks persona perfectly fits Jimmy Cagney's portrayal of Powers: "In all these films Fairbanks was the 'self-made man,' unbeatable and undismayed. Quick intelligence and indefatigable energy always won him success in terms of money and the girl." But the only area that can accommodate Powers' drive and energy is that of the corrupt underworld. So Tommy, the true thirties go-getter, turns to bootlegging to fulfill his potential.

Thus the traditional good guy whose success affirms society had been transformed into the good bad guy whose success questions society. The films demonstrate that in thirties America only crime pays. Tommy's virtuous older brother ( Donald Cook) is ambitious but stays within the law and languishes as a frustrated trolley conductor, while Tommy graduates to stylish suits, fast cars, and luxury penthouses. This of course contradicts a basic moral tenet and the films must therefore kill off their heroes to invalidate lawlessness as a route to success. But in trying to uphold society, the endings only reinforce the films' basic pessimism. The success drive either leads to frustration within the system or violent death outside it. The viewer is left with the choice between the bland existence of Tommy's brother and the exciting, doomed career of Tommy.

The Happy Ending has been temporarily turned topsy-turvy. The audience identifies with the evil gangster's aims and frustrations and is invited to laugh at the representatives of good. Tommy sneers that his brother is just a "ding-dong on the streetcar." The legal establishment is likewise hopelessly inept, something to beat. If the police manage to arrest a gangster, a mouthpiece lawyer is immediately able to secure his release. Newton ( Lewis Stone), the lawyer-gangleader in The Secret Six, is able to clear Slaughterhouse ( Wallace Beery) of murder by manipulating the jury with courtroom tricks and bribery. In Scarface, the manipulation becomes a running gag. Every time Tony Camonte ( Paul Muni) is arrested, he uses the phrase "habeas corpus" as an open sesame for his automatic release. The gangster's downfall is usually the result of gangland rivalry or a tragic personal flaw, not police efficiency. Rico has already been toppled by his rivals and has turned to alcohol when the police kill him, while Tony Camonte is destroyed by his incestuous love for his sister.

Thus, Good is hardly triumphant, and the audience, which vicariously identifies with the gangster's flaunting of every accepted code of social behavior (e.g., Cagney mashing the grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face), has very mixed feelings about Evil being vanquished. Robert Warshow suggests that the films are emblematic of our deepest fears, that the gangster expresses "that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects 'Americanism' itself."

Casablanca: Philosophy of the Film

The aim of this Introduction is to clarify what might be expected of the philosophy of film, offering thereby a framework into which can be fitted the scattered and diverse efforts of others. All the arguments and theses will be illustrated with the help of one film: Casablanca.

This will, I hope, seem an unlikely choice: in taking up the challenge to show its appropriateness I may diminish that sense of unlikelihood. In a banal sense there is plenty of philosophy in films. We can all recall, ‘Johnny, Johnny, why don’t you stop fooling yourself’, and countless other deathless aphorisms. Some of these may be true, though not original; culling them from films is more likely to be a satirical than an enlightening exercise. Most of the canonical works of academic philosophy were written before films existed and are, therefore, unlikely to discuss them. Nevertheless, film may be embraced within some of the things philosophers do, whether mentioned or not.

We call a certain sort of thinking, taking as its object anything under the sun, ‘philosophical’, as when we speak of philosophy of life or a philosophical attitude to things. Films are full of that. Such very general thinking is not confined to philosophers. What sort of thinking do philosophers call ‘philosophical’? One answer, a highly self-conscious one, can be attributed to Kant, or to his influence. That answer is: thinking about thinking. Can this apply to film? On this view philosophy of the film is thinking about how we think about film; is, so to speak, thinking about the very possibility of thinking about film. Kant pushed his argument all the way, and concluded that the purest form of philosophy concerned itself with thinking itself, and in general, the possibility of thinking about anything at all. I am uncertain whether that leaves any room for film.

While not necessarily endorsing Kant’s stipulation of what constitutes philosophy, I shall, for the purposes of characterizing the subject of philosophy of the film, utilize it as a starting point. If film is to be an object of thought, one question involved in thinking about it at all might be, what sort of a thing is film that we can think about it? Questions framed in such a way—using ‘thing language’—are characteristically answered by telling us that the thing is a material object, in this case celluloid on spools, created by a photographic process and then realized by a reverse process—instead of light coming through a lens to strike film, light is thrown through the film to go out through a lens on to a screen (a more circumspect answer would add parallel clauses about sounds going through microphones and, as electricity, through photoelectric cells and so, as light, to film, and light through film sent out through photoelectric cells as electricity to loudspeakers to become sound). But as material object the film is only one among many—sticks and stones, trees and people, dynamos and cameras—and does not pose any peculiar philosophical problems. Casablanca considered as several reels of celluloid in cans is just one material object among many.

Philosophers variously theorize that our very capacity to think of material objects—things—can be explained because they are accessible to our senses, or intellects, because they fit the categorial apparatus; they participate in universals, because they have both primary and secondary qualitites; and so on. Each is an attempt to specify what it is about material objects that makes it possible for us to think about them. Films qua material objects—like books—are uninteresting because they do not create special problems for any of these (problematic) theories. (problematic) theories.

So it is not the material object that is being addressed when we consider the very possibility of thinking about the film in general, about Casablanca in particular. What is being addressed is something we loosely speak of as ‘on’ the film, or ‘contained in’ the film; namely the content, or meaning—usually a form of narrative. Such an object of thought as narrative is not material; yet it is at the same time not immaterial or mental. It is in a metaphysical limbo in much the same way as are relationships. People are concrete but the relationships between people, equally real, are abstract. The stories, plots, themes or meanings, in short the content of films, are also abstract objects.

How then is it possible to think about the film in general as abstract object, as meaning; about Casablanca in particular as an abstract object? This is a question; how does it become a problem? What is to stop us thinking about abstract objects? This is to misunderstand. ‘How is such thinking possible?, asks, ‘how is it done?’, not, ‘how on earth can it be done?’ What then are the conditions that make it possible to think about film as abstract object? As with physical objects, thought can be construed as a relation between the thinker and what is being thought about. There must then be capacities in the thinker to discern, identify and understand the object of thought which, in its turn, must at least partly possess features that make it accessible to the thinker. The thinker about film content, I suppose, is not different from the thinker about mathematics or motor cars. In so far as philosophy has any theories of the thinker (viz. empiricism, associationism, rationalism, phenomenalism, Kantianism) these need not find the thinking part of thinking about the film problematic. However, when it comes to the object of thought, such as a book, a film, or Casablanca in particular, the philosophy is more problematic. There are philosophical theories of material objects or physical substance, and of mental entities or mental substance, and reductions of the one to the other. But the field of relations, meanings and of abstractions in general is contested at such a fundamental level that narrative in general, never mind narrative film in particular, still less Casablanca, has scarcely been theorised about at all. Hence what follows will be crude.

The most general answer to how it is possible to think about the film qua abstract object is that film’s contents, which are information stored in retrievable form on rolls of celluloid, can be actualized so that those who experience the film build up from it an intelligible content, one we even might be tempted to call ‘a world’. The real world includes among its contents things, people, relations, abstractions; so does the world on film; the world we can discern on film simulates the real world so closely that we can speak of a resemblence, even of a continuity, between the two. Yet since the film world is a world contained on celluloid, it is philosophically important to discuss whether we know in principle how to demarcate this imaginary world from whatever we take to be the real world that it resembles. Only if we can demarcate the film world from the real world can we ask the question of whether the presuppositions involved in making the contents of film intelligible to ourselves resemble those presuppositions we need for intelligibility in general and hence whether film is a useful way to think about thinking and making sense in general.

A basic condition enabling us to think about film, then, is that it is such that we are able to discern in its content something resembling a world; something, that is, like the world, but yet in some definite way not the world, merely like it. ‘World’ here could be expanded: it connotes order not chaos, contents not void, intelligible not meaningless. So we can redescribe what is presupposed by our discerning a world on film by saying that it permits us to impose order, to make intelligible, to individuate and to identify things. What we might call the project of constituting a world on film is merely a small part of the wider project with which we are constantly engaged; that is, imposing intelligibility, order, individuation and identity on the world in which we live. Precisely because film in some way replicates locally what we are constantly engaged in globally there is the possibility that we may learn from our constitution of the film world about our world-constituting activities in general.

The overwhelming majority of the intelligibles, the ordering forces, the individuals and the identities to be found in the film world are people; or, as some philosophers prefer to call them, persons. Each narrative film such as Casablanca has what we may call a cast of persons. But films in general also have casts of persons, persons who reappear in one film after another—shifting their personae from one story to another, changed yet the same. I am referring to stars, a by no means trivial variant of the notion of a person. Here then we have a feature of the world on film that both differs from and resembles our world. Stars provide points of continuity and recognition across or between films. They may be a principle or cause of whatever reality we decide the films have, as well as another clue to the very possibility of thinking about the film.

Why not now go on to explain how it is possible for us to discern a world on film? This Kantian question is better avoided here, for the simple reason that it is too ambitious. Our understanding both of thought and of the objects of thought is rudimentary, no more so than when we try to tackle world constitution. We have only the dimmest idea of how infants build up their picture of the world from the undifferentiated manifold of experience, especially when all our communication presupposes our results being coordinatable. It is possible that studying how it is done with films may illuminate that murky area. If world constitution from films is to illuminate world constitution tout court we have some way to go as yet.

Not only do we discern a world on film, but that world resembles our world. Here again the theory of resemblance is bitterly disputed territory—ironically, since none of the competitors has strength to do much more than throw a punch or two at their opponents before collapsing.
For the present, then, I take it that thinking about film is possible because we have the physical and mental equipment and they provide the materials for us to constitute something it is natural to write of as a world, both resembling and differing from ours, differing in particular because the world on film is an artifact, not a natural occurrence. Furthermore, although resembling our world, it differs from it decisively in being known not to be real.

Western Television Series: The spirit of the Western

The destruction of the Western as viable television fare was no inconsequential accomplishment. It was truly the all-American genre. No type of popular entertainment has been associated more completely with American civilization. Politically, spiritually, economically, and ethically the genre has communicated an understanding of the United States and its place in the world.
Historically, the Western has flourished in popular literature, film, radio, and especially television. The noted scholarly critic Leslie Fiedler traced its New World inspiration to Massachusetts as early as 1609.

For a nation seeking enduring social role models, the genre offered an array of frontier characters whose names and exploits remain legion. From embellished historical realities like Daniel Boone, Wyatt Earp, and Buffalo Bill to purely fictional types such as Natty Bumppo, Pecos Bill, and the Lone Ranger it has offered a pantheon of heroic activists as inspirational as they were entertaining.

The spirit of the Western has ingratiated itself into varied dimensions of American reality. It endures in the commercial names given to models of automobiles. High schools and universities adopt its terms to describe themselves. Professional sports franchises use its vocabulary to name their teams. Urban dwellers have been drawn to the leather boots and denim that are its clothing styles, and to countrywestern performers and songs that are its musical tastes.
Even recent national presidential administrations have found the mystique of the Western appropriate. John F. Kennedy christened his presidency "The New Frontier." Lyndon B. Johnson was more or less an authentic cowboy whose LBJ Ranch, situated on the banks of the Pedernales River in south-central Texas, became the alternate presidential residence throughout the mid-1960s.

Twice elected chief executive, Ronald Reagan formerly starred in cowboy movies such as Santa Fe Trail and Cattle Queen of Montana; and during the 1965-66 television season he hosted the Western series Death Valley Days. Even Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, the foreign relations advisor for Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, understood himself as a frontiersman with portfolio. He characterized his diplomatic technique in terms of the heroic loner who rides to the rescue. "I've always acted alone," he told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1972.

Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn't shoot. He acts, that's all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western.

The genre has exercised a significant influence on American society in the twentieth century. Despite the learned debunking of an intellect otherwise as perceptive as Henry Nash Smith, it has been considerably more than a vacuous form of amusement that has degenerated since its inception "to the near-juvenile level it was to occupy with virtually no change down to our own present day." To the contrary, the Western has been hailed as an original art and cultural form sprung totally from U.S. civilization. Its mythic characters have been emulable types for generations. Its stories have offered timely justification for a society that at base remained a relatively pristine experiment in self-governance.

The Western possesses a classic formulation recognizable to all audiences. Here is the cowboy, frontiersman, or lawman operating on or near the furthest reaches of civilized life. Here is the cruel wilderness in which incipient American society struggles against adversity to survive and even flourish. The classic Western contains familiar ingredients: heroes and guns, horses, cattle, outlaws and Indians, and the like--usually situated in desert locales on the nineteenth-century U.S. frontier.

As with most entertainment classifications, however, there exist gray areas within the Western, places where the traditional formulation overlaps other genres. Here it meets and blends with such forms as situation comedy, adventure stories, and military dramas. In cases where the archetypes and themes of the Western dominate these relationships, the result is a modified, peripheral Western -- but one that must be understood together with the classic relationship of the genre.

In television the hybrid Western constituted a small, but not insignificant, part of the totality. In Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans, for example, the West was located in upstate New York in the eighteenth century. In Daniel Boone, frontier heroics took place in the Kentucky backwoods at the time of the Revolutionary War. Yancy Derringer was set in New Orleans immediately following the Civil War. Alaska and the Canadian Yukon during the Gold Rush were locales for Klondike, The Alaskans, and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.

Alias Smith and Jones added levity to the drama of the Old West, The Rounders offered humor in the new West, and F Troop and Pistol 'n' Petticoats burlesqued the genre. Series like Stoney Burke, The Wide Country, Empire and The Yellow Rose ranged into the contemporary West interpreting that area as a place where civilization now thrived, but where modern cowboys and ranchers faced challenges similar to those confronted by their pioneering ancestors.

For the most part this study focuses on those series with classic formats. Such programs constitute the vast majority of the Westerns shown on television. These were dramatic offerings inspired by fanciful notions of the historic West. Ironically, the West in actuality was little more than a geographic region explored, conquered, and assimilated in a short, distinct time. But for a nation built by self-motivated immigrants seeking personal betterment, the West, real or otherwise, always seemed to perpetuate the promise. Here was elbow room and a fresh start -- a place to plant and to grow. For a nation fashioned by dreamers, the West was an antidote to crowded cities and failed careers, a refuge for the bold still seeking challenges, a spiritual and geographic last chance to make the dream come true.

This strategic relationship between the West and the American psyche was not a detection of modern academic analysis. Its earliest delineation was made in 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner described the manner in which the frontier experience shaped the character of the United States and its citizenry. Among his contentions, Turner argued:

The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and quisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyance and exuberance which comes with freedom -- these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

In its own peculiar way, the West -- through its chief vehicle of communication, the Western -- has been the American affirmation of an ancient aspiration. Its tales envisioned the new Eden, the land of milk and honey lost by the Israelites, the idealized city limned from Plato to St. Augustine to Jefferson. With such an influential place in American civilization, indeed in world culture, its unimportance as a contemporary television format is all the more striking.

Western Movies, the historical reconstruction, the historical romance, and the formulary western

The western is the richest and most complex of all American genres, cinematic or otherwise, and the most enduring of all the stories that our society continually tells itself. As an American foundation myth it has been endlessly updated, transformed, and reworked through an array of discursive forms, from wood carvings and folk ballads to pulp novels and cigarette ads. Its lineage can be traced back through centuries of American lore to Indian captivity tales and colonial folk music, to the writings of James Fenimore Cooper and other less renowned fiction writers, and particularly to the popular accounts of the "taming" of the American West in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the western story has been told most frequently, most powerfully, and most accessibly on film. Not until the emergence of the cinema in the early twentieth century as a genuine mass medium, in fact, did the western gain the widespread circulation and thus the "cultural currency" to be considered as something of a national legend.

This is a complex and perhaps a contradictory cultural issue, for to consider the circulation of western stories via the cinema is also to consider the formal and commercial imperatives of the burgeoning mass medium. From as early as 1903 with the huge success of Edwin S. Porter The Great Train Robbery, western stories were perceived as marketable commodities, and they were repeated and varied until certain basic structural features--many of them specific to the film medium--were clearly understood by both filmmakers and audiences alike. These economic imperatives demanded the repetition of the western story and the steady refinement of its narrative and thematic conventions, but it was the very existence of the movie industry and the social climate it represented that ensured the western's "larger" cultural and ideological status.

The rise of Hollywood signaled the arrival of America's urban-industrial age, a period when traditional values and established notions of family and community, of the social and political order, and of individual freedom and initiative were radically transformed. Hollywood movies were among the first and were certainly the most widespread and accessible manifestations of an emergent "mass culture" which brought with it new forms of cultural expression. The western genre was among the more prevalent of those forms, and in a very real sense it was "about" the very same conflicts that the new industrial age (and thus the movies themselves) had come to represent--conflicts between rural and urban lifestyles, between agrarian traditions and the conditions of modern city life, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between the old world and the new.

The half-century "life span" of the genre, then, might be seen as the period necessary for our society to collectively work through those conflicts, to resolve the ideological contradictions that infused the western genre with its basic dramatic structure and its thematic nexus. And thus the socalled death of the western in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a mass media staple may indicate an ideological as well as a historical distance from the virtual world that the genre repeatedly displayed.

In essence, of course, the western is both historically and geographically specific; it traces the settling of the American West (defined generally as the land west of the Mississippi) from the end of the Civil War until the early twentieth century. In this sense the western is tied more directly to social and historical "reality" than virtually any other film genre, with the possible exceptions of the gangster films and bio-pics of the 1930s and the combat films made during and after World War II. But as Robert Warshow so aptly pointed out in his study of the gangster film, every genre gradually generates its own distinct reality. "It is only in the ultimate sense that the type appeals to the audience's experience of reality," Warshow argued. "Much more immediately, it appeals to the previous experience of the type itself; it creates its own field of reference."

This was particularly true of the western, since the historical reality it portrayed already had been "processed" for popular consumption not only by writers and painters but by self-styled purveyors of their own mythology, especially such outright hucksters of the symbol as Bill Cody and Wyatt Earp. But given the cinema's commercial, ideological, and formal-narrative imperatives, it was inevitable that historical reality yield to a romanticized and formulaic treatment. Jon Tuska, who has done extensive research into the filming of the West, suggests that movie westerns might be categorized as formula, as historical romance, and as historical reconstruction. Predictably enough, Tuska finds that formulary westerns and historical romances far outnumber authentic reconstructions.

The narrative structure of the formulary and romantic western is essentially the same. As Tuska puts it: "There is conflict within the community. The hero eventually decides to take part in the conflict and his involvement precipitates the death-struggle between himself and one or more villains." The conflict invariably is resolved in the most fundamental of all western plot conventions, the climactic gunfight. In the formulary western the outcome of the struggle is altogether predictable: the hero prevails, simply because the formula demands it. Here the historical romance differs. "What happens in the romantic historical reconstruction," observes Tuska, "happens for an ideological reason." A historical romance does not simply play out the familiar formula, as a B-grade western might do, thus repressing the sociopolitical and cultural stakes involved in American history (which did, after all, involve the near extermination of an entire race and the appropriation of their land in the name of progress and Manifest Destiny). Instead it steadily discloses its own "internal"--i.e., textually specific--value system, its own particular skew on the issues and conflicts inherent within the western "story."

This necessarily varies from one western to another, even if the films in question depict the same historical figures and events--the Earps and Clantons fighting for control of Tombstone, say, or Custer and Crazy Horse at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. We have little trouble with the idea that different film versions of these events tell the story differently, because each telling creates its own narrative context and, beyond that, each is specific to the political and ideological stakes of its era. It is no surprise, for instance, that Custer's legendary Last Stand against the Sioux and Cheyenne in 1876 would be depicted as a glorious and heroic military venture in They Died With Their Boots On, since it was produced by a Hollywood studio in 1942 when nationalism, xenophobia, and a call to arms were the order of the day. Nor was it surprising when some thirty years later in Little Big Man, the same event was portrayed as a self-destructive imperialist venture of absurd proportions, since it was directed by the iconoclastic Arthur Penn at the height of the American antiwar movement, when antiestablishment sentiments were running rampant among the "youth culture" for which the film was targeted.

All three types--the historical reconstruction, the historical romance, and the formulary western--have been prevalent throughout the genre's development, and in fact all three are at work in any one western film. The conventions of feature filmmaking, and especially the demand that conflict be resolved by an individual, goal-oriented protagonist, require that even the most accurate depiction of historical events be romanticized to some degree. And at the same time, even the most banal and predictable formulation requires a minimum of historical authenticity simply to be recognized as a western.

Western Movies Posters

Women Movie Stars as Role Models

The movie stars became role models to their female fans in many senses: the fans demonstrated their admiration and loyalty by attending all of their favorite stars' movies and buying whatever product they endorsed. Peroxide sales went up when Jean Harlow became a blonde; fashions, especially by designer Adrian who dressed Joan Crawford in all of her films, were copied for the masses. Further, though impossible to document fully, it is also conceivable to imagine that people identified with the suffering of their favorite star and connected it to their own travails. The actresses, in this sense, provided a constructive model of how to survive adversity, how to develop self-confidence, and how to take control of one's life.

We know about the lives of the female actresses by reading the same magazines read by the fans. The juicy stories usually appeared in each and every feature about the person. Every time a new film appeared, the press office of the studio flooded the magazines and newspapers with stories on the movie and the players, a practice still in effect today. While studios served as a major supplier of information about their "properties," magazine reporters also sought out the most popular stars for interviews. Gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons supplied readers with inside scoops as well. Collectively, these sources created a rich variety of gossip, rumor, and partial truth, material that was avidly consumed by the magazine buyers. The validity of the stories mattered less than the vitality of the news.

Often, the actresses contributed to the excitement by doing unusual or outrageous things. Magazine readers delighted in learning that Rosalind Russell greased her hair with vaseline in preparation for her meeting with studio chief Carl Laemmele in the early 1930s. Russell had wanted to end her contract with Universal Studios and decided to appear as unglamorous as possible at the renewal meeting. She succeeded. Russell's reputation as a shrewd businesswoman, on and off the screen, became well known and prompted one Hollywood reporter to write, "In Hollywood, Rosalind Russell is regarded as the one star who has done more to make women with brains popular." Carole Lombard staged innumerable comic antics, swore like a sailor, which even surprised some veteran Hollywood types, and lived her own iconoclastic life. Katharine Hepburn told reporters whatever outrageous story entered her head and shut up one particularly nosy reporter in 1934 by telling him that yes, she had two children, and they were both black.

Joan Crawford ran a contest in one movie magazine in which she rewarded fans who sent in the best pieces of acting advice to her. The constant support of the fans was obviously essential to the success of a movie star, and she, and the public relations department of her studio, used many different techniques to achieve and then to maintain her popularity. The best proof, of course, of the fans' loyalty was their attendance at all of the movies starring their favorite actress. Despite the critics, in the 1930s and 1940s, audiences followed the stars, whatever the plot or the quality of the movie. New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall lamented this fact in his review of Crawford 1934 movie, Sadie McKee, when after panning the movie, he noted that Sadie "is acted by Joan Crawford which probably accounts for the throngs attracted to the Capitol yesterday."

The movie stars of the 1930s generation came from a variety of class and family backgrounds. Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Elizabeth Taylor, for example, all came from upper-middle-class families; they were raised to believe in their own worth and to stand up for their own opinion. Hepburn and Russell, especially, had fathers who encouraged them as did their mothers. Hepburn spoke admiringly of her mother, who was a suffragist and birth control advocate, and her father, who was a physician; both parents contributed to her sense of self assurance.

Hepburn's image, in all interviews, was that of a self-confident person, someone who would succeed in whatever profession she chose. In 1950 she told a reporter, "I have to be a person, not a piece in a pattern."

Rosalind Russell's father was a lawyer, and her mother was an editor at Vogue magazine. She recalled how her loud voice annoyed her mother at the dinner table, while her father assured her that, since she wanted to be heard, it was a useful instrument. She took her father's advice and always projected her voice well beyond the third row of the theater. Russell considered herself a tomboy who played football and pool, knew how to fix a carburetor, and learned at the age of six, she later said, that "males are not as hot stuff and as omnipotent as they think they are." Strongly influenced by both her parents, she continuously exhibited high spirits. American magazine complimented her in 1941 by saying that her distinctive quality was that "she dared to be herself."

Elizabeth Taylor arrived in Hollywood from England at the age of seven and went from being a child star to adult star successfully. She has observed how schooling at MGM, a traumatic experience for many child stars, amused her. Even the formidable head of the studio, Louis B. Mayer, failed to intimidate her. Taylor's family provided her with emotional support. Biographer Dick Sheppard defined her strength and endurance as based on four things: "a sound family foundation and a consequent inner assurance which has never failed her; the mutual love and devotion of those closest to her; a bond with the public which transitory crises could never sever; and a professional knowledge of the crafts of film acting second to none."

Though her mother had some of the characteristics of a pushy stage mother, she also acted as a refuge for Taylor. In 1950, at the age of 17, Elizabeth Taylor told interviewers that she was a traditional girl and very concerned with her mother's opinion of her. "I'm being painted as a goodtime girl," she told Louella Parsons, "who stays out all hours of the night. That is hard to take. If you could see how my mother cries, you'd know what I mean."

Many actresses described in movie magazines came from one-parent families where the mother became the positive model of independence for the daughter to emulate. Bette Davis's parents, for example, divorced when she was eight years old, an unusual phenomenon in 1916. Her mother, Ruthie, had to earn a living to support Bette and her younger sister, Bobbie. Attorney Mr. Davis failed to support his family. Thus, Bette Davis saw a mother work at various jobs until she learned photography and became moderately successful at it. In high school, Davis decided to become an actress and after graduating spent some time at the Robert Milton-John Murray Anderson School of the Theater in New York. By 1930, at the age of 22, she was on her way to Hollywood under contract to Universal Studios. Once in Hollywood, the path was stormy but Davis's determination kept her going.

American Film, First Stages, Trade, technique of business, Pictures

During the first decades of the 20th century American movies have become a major industry, a new art growing out of science and the older arts, and a powerful social agency peculiar to modern times. Born in the laboratory, organized as a medium of expression, exploited for the entertainment of the masses, the motion picture has developed through the co-operation of scientist, artist, and business man. Each has contributed to the rise of the film, shaping its character and strengthening its effectiveness.

The years 1896-1903 saw the genesis of the movie. At first a minor commercial commodity, the motion picture groped toward a larger future--a broad business base, a technique of its own, and a mass audience. By 1903 it had achieved in some measure all these aims.

It was on April 23, 1896, that the moving picture as we know it today was seen for the first time in America. On the following day The New York Times described its première at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York:

When the hall was darkened last night, a buzzing and roaring were heard in the turret and an unusually bright light fell upon the screen. Then came into view two precious blonde young persons of the variety stage, in pink and blue dresses, doing the umbrella dance with commendable celerity. Their motions were all clearly defined. When they vanished, a view of the angry surf breaking on a sandy beach near a stone pier amazed the spectators. . . . A burlesque boxing match between a tall, thin comedian and a short, fat one, a comic allegory called "The Monroe Doctrine," an instant of motion in Hoyt's farce "The Milk White Flag," repeated over and over again, and a skirt dance by a tall blonde completed the views, which were all wonderfully real and singularly exhilarating.

The wonder aroused by the new invention was general. People regarded its performance as miraculous. Everyone was startled by the lifelike umbrella dance, awed at the sight of waves breaking on the screen, amused by the reproduction of vaudeville comic routines, won by the skirt dancers. "An object of magical wonder," rhapsodized W. K. L. Dickson, an associate of Edison, "the crown and flower of nineteenth century magic."

Moving pictures had, in fact, already existed for some time in another, cruder form. Penny arcades had been featuring peep-show cabinets at which one person at a time, paying his penny, could revolve a drum and give a motion picture effect to fifty feet of tiny pictures that passed before his eyes. A popular form of cheap amusement, this peep show had suggested to its owners that, if many people at one time could watch the moving pictures, greater profits could be made. What was needed was a machine to throw the pictures onto a large screen. The development of the projector made such a feat possible and established motion pictures as a new kind of group entertainment.

When the projected "wonderfully real" motion pictures at Koster and Bial's created an enthusiastic stir, other vaudeville theatres throughout the country rushed to present this latest of novelties. Wherever shown, movies won immediate popularity. Lasting only a minute or two, their movement made them a "marvelous" sight, evoking awe and admiration for their faithfulness to "true-life action." Horses jumping over hurdles, Niagara Falls with its torrents plunging to rocky depths, trains rushing headlong across the screen, cooch-girls dancing, vaudeville acrobats taking their falls with aplomb, parades, boats and people hurrying or scurrying along-any isolated bit of movement became part of the movies' repertory. Before long motion pictures had become an accepted feature on variety programs, and were occasionally gaining notice in print. Tucked away in newspaper vaudeville columns would appear such items as "The Vitagraph surprised its admirers by exhibiting colored pictures which were marvelously true to life."
Toward the end of 1900 a single event sharply revealed the strong popular appeal and commercial value of movies. Vaudeville managers had combined into a trust to keep down the wage scale of actors. To meet the challenge, actors organized into a union, called "The White Rats" after the London actors' organization, and the union called a strike. Caught unawares, many vaudeville theatres closed. Others, determined to keep open at all costs and beat the strike, began to feature moving pictures. For the first time programs consisting solely of movies were offered to the theatrical public. To the theatre managers' great astonishment, people came --and came again. Before long the vaudeville trust declared the motion picture to be its surest weapon against "the dissolution, bankruptcy and humiliation" engendered by the strike.
Its success as a scab for vaudeville was convincing evidence of the movie's own appeal. This first substitution of movies for vaudeville anticipated by a quarter of a century the eventual near-disappearance of vaudeville itself. But the vaudeville managers lacked the imagination to take advantage of their new opportunities; it was the arcade owners who were to develop the money-making possibilities of the new medium.

Most movies had hardly advanced beyond their first attempts and continued to show similar subjects with the same reproductive technique. As the initial fascination and wonder of the audiences waned and the strike ended, managers of the better-class vaudeville theatres either abandoned the novelty entirely or presented it at the end of their programs, so that the people who did not care to see it could leave. Movies became disdained throughout the theatrical world as "chasers."

The penny-arcade owners, who had done good business with the peep-show cabinets, had constantly tried to obtain projectors and films. But in the attempt to keep it exclusive equipment had been sold only to vaudeville theatres; equipment was, besides, scarce and expensive. When the vaudeville managers sought to sell their pro- jectors and stocks of films despite the movies' successful reception by the public during the actors' strike, arcade owners eagerly bought them. In the rear of their amusement parlors they closed off a section, filled it with rented chairs, and set up a screen for their exhibitions. They charged ten cents admission--less than vaudeville prices--and advertised "animated moving pictures."

People were at first suspicious of the darkened, partitioned area of the arcades and doubted that a real movie show would be offered at such a cheap price. Thomas L. Tally, an arcade owner in Los Angeles, thought up a scheme to convince prospective customers that his offering was genuine. He cut a hole through the partition so that people could see for themselves, before paying admission, that movies were actually being shown on a screen. The ruse worked; news of it spread, and the practice was adopted widely. Moving pictures became before long the most popular attraction in the arcades, arousing even greater enthusiasm and proving to have a far more lasting success here than in the vaudeville theatres.

The patrons of the amusement parlors were of a poor class and had little theatrical knowledge or critical judgment. They were spellbound by the jerky shadows that mysteriously evolved into a scene of a foreign land, shouted with genuine fear as the screen showed a train hurtling toward them, and were speechless at the sight of President McKinley's inauguration. The sheer impressiveness of the motion on the screen, the intrinsic eloquence of pictures which even a child could appreciate, captured their imaginations. The simplicity of movies made literacy unnecessary for understanding or enjoyment, and the cheap price put this new entertainment within the means of most wage-earners. The result was that movies became established as a cheap form of amusement for the masses; the ground had been broken for the broad base on which motion pictures were henceforth to be built.

Heroes and Villains in Soviet Films, 1923-1950

The ethnic nationality and socio-economic class ascribed to villains in Soviet films have in general coincided with those of real enemies under attack by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In addition, screen villains have usually been depicted as motivated by social goals in the realm of political power. Soviet film heroes, on the other hand, as a rule shared the ethnic nationality and socio-economic class of Communist Party members and their allies. They were portrayed as strong, active and capable of resistance to the villains. As Communist control over Soviet film content stiffened with the passage of time, the Party periodically required changes in the characterizations of film heroes and villains to keep pace with new developments in the domestic and foreign policies of the Bolshevik regime. Quantitative content analysis of Soviet films provides evidence that these demands have guided film-makers in the U.S.S.R. for many years.

For purposes of content analysis a sample of heroes and a sample of villains in Soviet films have been classified as to their ethnic nationality, socio-economic class, motivation, age, and sex. Motivation was divided into goals, in terms of a personal-social dichotomy, and into areas such as politics, economics, romantic love, family, and culture. Classification was based on total judgments which considered all clues pertaining to heroes and villains. The units chosen for analysis were complete full-length feature films produced between 1923 and 1950.

Practically all Soviet films discussed in available English-language publications were included in the two samples, provided that an adequate description of their content was obtainable. The titles of over 400 Soviet films were found by perusal of books, magazines and newspapers in the English language, but information about the villains depicted was available for only 130 films, and about heroes for only 240. The representativeness of these samples cannot be determined. It is estimated, however, that they are based on about 10 and 20 per cent, respectively, of all feature films produced in the Soviet Union during the period 1923-1950.

Most categories of socio-economic class for villains and heroes are common to both lists.

The term used to identify a category usually represents a cluster of related occupations and social classes. The category "specialists on violence" includes both legal specialists, such as police, armed forces, frontier guards, detectives, and armed secret agents, and illegal specialists, such as bandits, gangsters, kidnapers, assassins, guerrilla fighters, saboteurs, and arsonists. Fliers are classified here only when identified as members of the armed forces; otherwise they are placed in the category of "aviators."

The category "politicians and administrators" also includes unarmed agents occupied in political espionage or agitation. The term "capitalists and members of the petite bourgeoisie" is broadly interpreted as comprising bankers, factory owners, landowners, storekeepers, and persons engaged in commerce on a private basis. The designation "workers and employees" is given to construction crews, miners, railway and transport workers, municipal employees (except militia and political administrators), secretaries, clerks, and so on. The classification "peasants" includes the so-called kulaks, as well as herdsmen, fishermen and operators of agricultural machinery. The category "artists" is used for painters, actors, singers, and motion-picture directors, and "unemployed and criminals" for juvenile delinquents, prostitutes, gamblers, and so on.

Goals are defined so as to focus on the people affected. The term "personal goal" is applied to motives which aim to affect the character portrayed or a small group of people well known to him. The category "social goals" is reserved for motives intending to affect large social groups, such as the population of a particular nation, "the workers of the world" or all mankind. All motives are rated as personal or social, depending on which goal received greater emphasis in a given film.

Areas of motivation used in this analysis are: "politics," including motives pertaining to power, diplomacy, nationalism, war, communism, and so on; "economics," motives concerned with commerce, production, construction, technology, profiteering, graft, piracy, and so forth; "culture," those connected with education, science, the arts, communication, and recreation; "romantic love," those involved in flirtation, love, courtship, and sexual relations; and "family," motives pertaining to married life, children and domestic activity. The residual category "other areas" includes motives of religion, social prestige, health, and so on.

Hollywood's Movie Star System: A Historical Overview

In addition to being a social phenomenon, which reflects a particular ideology, the Hollywood star system is a business strategy designed to generate large audiences and differentiate entertainment programs and products, and has been used for over seventy years to provide increasing returns on production investments. As a marketing technique and business strategy, the system was first used in the theater industry. Between 1910 and 1948 Hollywood borrowed and expanded the star system and stock company approaches from the stage; and through the simultaneous exhibition of films throughout the world, the industry eventually established movie studio stables of stars and earned profits well in excess of those of the largest theatrical companies.

Significant historical changes in the status of movie stars have paralleled decisive technological, economic, and social changes that have affected the American film industry as a whole, such as the coming of sound, the Great Depression, and the rise and fall of movie attendance. The contractual terms and salaries for movie stars have also been affected by the same factors. In the highly competitive and expanding market that existed between 1910 and 1920, the most popular silent-movie stars eventually obtained contractual terms that equalled and possibly exceeded their individual contributions to box-office success, and some of them also became involved in film production themselves, although the development of sound and its demand for experienced stage and radio performers ended the careers of many silent film stars. Those working during the early 1930s, when movie attendance declined and industry power was concentrated in the hands of a few studios, were placed in a poor bargaining position, and studios began exercising near autocratic control over the star system.

The Paramount antitrust decrees in the late 1940s resulted in a shift from a mature oligopoly/ monopoly, or semicompulsory cartel, involving the Big Five studios ( Warner Bros, Loew's/ MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Twentieth Century-Fox) and the Little Three ( Universal, Columbia, and United Artists), to a bilateral oligopoly with six major distributor/ producers and a dozen nationwide theater circuits today. This shift created a slightly more competitive market that benefited the most popular movie stars. Unfortunately, the decline in movie attendance and the rise in production costs, which also occurred during this period, left many less popular contract players unemployed, as stock companies disbanded. In the 1950s and 1960s, although many of the more popular stars remained under studio contract, they also obtained more liberal terms than existed during the studio period, sometimes receiving a percentage of the profits or becoming directly involved financially in film production for both tax advantages and artistic control. During the 1960s and 1970s the absence of studio control forced Hollywood increasingly to rely upon other media, such as television and popular music, to cultivate stars who could then be exploited by the film industry. Eventually some scholars and executives began to question the validity of the star system, embracing instead the "auteur" approach, which suggested that the previous success of a director ensured box-office success better than did the supposed popularity of movie stars.

Lights, camera, action! It's time to write a movie

Lights, camera, action! It's time to write a movie. Eight students sit on stools before a large television. The room darkens and the gripping opening scenes of the film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg, 1989), fill the screen. A student describes the scenes. His voice rises and falls with the crescendo of the film's actions. This student and his classmates are Writing a Movie. They are showcasing their talents in reading and writing as they perform for their parents and members of their school community.

Writing a Movie is a variation of Readers Theatre. The Literacy Dictionary defines Readers Theatre as "A performance of literature, as a story, play, poetry, etc. read aloud expressively by one or more persons, rather than acted" (Harris & Hodges, 1995, p. 206). To use Readers Theatre, a teacher and students select a script to read and dramatize. The students choose parts and practice reading their lines. The rereading done in rehearsals leads to fluency.
The performer's goal in Readers Theatre is to read a script so expressively that the audience can visualize the action (Martinez, Roser, & Strecker, 1999). Writing a Movie works in reverse because the visual input is already present. To write a movie, students view a short film segment (5 to 10 minutes) and write a script in which they describe the scene. The exciting music of the film's soundtrack can play in the background as the students read their script expressively.

Action works best

Film segments that have a great deal of action and little or no dialogue work best for this project. I found particular success using this technique when I was asked to work with a group of eight students, ages 10 to 12, with learning disabilities. Their instructional reading levels ranged from grade 2 to grade 4. These students had not found success in typical school settings, and they approached literacy instruction with great resistance. Their teacher informed me that they preferred group projects because they enjoyed the support offered by their classmates and felt less pressure when they worked as part of a team. I used the Writing a Movie technique to grab the attention of these students and build motivation for writing and reading.
I searched for an action-packed, highly visual adventure film for my group of eight students. The 10-minute opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg, 1989) matched the interests and needs of this group. In the opening scene of the movie, Indiana Jones is depicted as a teenager on a Boy Scout camping trip. During the trip, Indiana Jones sees robbers stealing a gold cross from a cave, and he faces several perilous situations as he tries to recover the treasure from the robbers. The young adventurer jumps onto a moving circus train, falls into a snake pit, battles a hungry lion, races across the tops of moving train cars, and escapes from robbers on horseback. Those 10 minutes of film provide tremendous action for students to describe in their writing and in their oral reading presentation.
My students decided to write the Indiana Jones script as a group effort. We planned to use a Language Experience Approach to record sentences dictated by the students. We placed the television and videocassette recorder (VCR) next to the chalkboard and began. I played a brief portion of the film and asked the students to describe what was happening in that scene. A student raised his hand and gave the opening sentence, "Indiana Jones and another Boy Scout saw robbers steal gold cross from the cave." I wrote that sentence or the chalkboard. We continued to watch chunks of the film. After showing each portion, I stopped the videotape and asked the students to describe the segment they had just seen. At times the student offered sentences that clearly described the scene. When a student's description was vague or confusing, I asked probing questions to help the student clarify his or her ideas. We rewound the film, looked at the scene again, and asked the entire group to help us describe the scene clearly. Because our script was a group project, we worked for consensus.

The students sharpened their writing skills as we wrote the script together. We had to constantly stop and start the videotape to clarify points and look for details in the film. The students wanted to be certain that they described the film accurately. When the script was written, we played the 10-minute segment again in its entirety. This time I read the script as the students watched the film. They then made revisions in sections where they felt that their script did not match the film.

As the students made revisions to the script, their conversation showed that they had begun to think of their audience. They made comments such as, "The audience won't get it. You've got to explain that better." The first sentences dictated by the students were often dry retellings with few descriptive words or phrases. In later revisions, the students added colorful words to bring excitement to their script.

Practice makes perfect

When the script was finished, we were ready to assign parts and begin rehearsals. At that point I was able to step back and appoint a director for our project. As I worked with the students I noticed one boy, Kyle (all children's names are pseudonyms), who seemed to have the respect of his classmates. The students followed Kyle's lead, whether it was positive or negative. I decided to use Kyle' s influence upon his classmates to heighten their interest in reading and writing.
Kyle guided the class in dividing the script into eight parts, one for each student. The students were given a few moments to read their parts silently, and then we played the videotape. Kyle kept a steady eye on the film and signaled each student when it was his or her turn to read. During the first reading, the students' attention was focused upon word recognition and there was little expression in their reading. As the boys and girls worked, they realized that they needed a great deal of practice in order to pace their words with the film. We scheduled time for the students to practice reading their script with the videotape. The section of the film we chose already contained dramatic background music. We felt that it added excitement to the performance, so we let the original audio portion of the film play in the background as the students read the parts they had written.

There were many rehearsals in which the students practiced reading their script with the video-tape. At the start of each rehearsal, Kyle took charge and arranged the students in a semicircle near the television and VCR. As practice continued, the students became increasingly supportive of one another. They made positive suggestions on phrasing and the addition of descriptive words and phrases.

When the students finally felt that the performance was ready, they decided to share it with other classes in the school. The excitement generated by the film and the powerful oral reading made the presentation a success. That performance served as a model for other classes, two of which were motivated to duplicate the project. One class wrote a script for the opening scene of the film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg, 1982). The other class wrote a script in which they described the beautiful introductory scenes of the Disney film, The Lion King (Allers & Minkoff, 1994).

Benefits of Writing a Movie

Writing a Movie offered several benefits for the students. After writing the script, there was an authentic reason for the students to engage in repeated readings. They had to practice for their performance. Studies have shown (Dowhower, 1987; Samuels, 1979) that repeated readings can lead to improved word recognition, comprehension, and fluency. Writing a Movie encouraged repeated readings in an age-appropriate, purposeful manner.

As they practiced and revised their script, my students added new words to their reading vocabulary. They needed to use precise words to convey meaning to their audience. The boys and girls discovered that vocabulary, timing, and expression were very important considerations when reading for an audience.

In working with these students, I found that comprehension as well as fluency improved as we wrote the script and matched our reading to the film. Twelve-year-old Maria had strong word-recognition skills but difficulty with comprehension. She had trouble stating the main idea of a text she read or a film she saw. The Writing a Movie technique provided visual cues that helped focus her attention. As the children practiced their parts, I saw Maria's gaze shift from the script to the film.

When each part was read, Maria looked at the film. As the class wrote and revised the script, Maria made suggestions that showed she understood the story. She made the connection between the written word and the action on the screen. When it was her turn to read, she waited for just the right moment. Her timing and expression showed that she understood the main idea of the film. After participating in this activity, Maria was able to read the script fluently and discuss the scenes with her classmates.

To write a movie, the students had to summarize the action on the screen. As I worked with Kyle and his classmates, I helped them identify the most important actions in each scene. Superfluous details were eliminated because the script had to be relatively short to fit the time constraints of the film segment. Consequently, our script became a summary of each scene.
Fluency develops when students engage in meaningful repeated readings. In some classrooms, repeated reading becomes a dry, expressionless activity because the students do not have a purpose or an audience for their rereading. During Writing a Movie rehearsals and performances, students reread for a purpose and receive valuable feedback from teachers, classmates, and members of the community.

Writing a Movie uses films to develop fluency and helps students understand the reading and writing connection. Students learn to summarize a scene from a film, write a script, and read with expression and flair. Writing a Movie brings drama to the classroom and inspires students to read and write for an audience.

Source: The Reading Teacher

References

Allers, R., & Minkoff, R. (Directors). (1994). The Lion King [Motion picture]. United States: Disney Studios.
Dowhower, S.L. (1987). Effects of repeated reading on second-grade transitional readers' fluency and comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 22, 389-407.
Fleming, V. (Director). (1939). The Wizard of Oz [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Studios.
Harris, T.L., & Hodges, R.E. (1995). The literacy dictionary: The vocabulary of reading and writing. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Houston, J. (Director). (1982). Annie [Motion picture]. United States: Columbia Tri-Star.
Martinez, M., Roser, N., & Strecker, S. (1999). "I never thought I could be a star": A Readers Theatre ticket to fluency. The Reading Teacher, 52, 326-334.
Samuels, S.J. (1979). The method of repeated readings. The Reading Teacher, 32, 403-408.
Spielberg, S. (Director). (1982). E.T.: The extra-terrestrial [Motion picture]. United States: Universal Studios.
Spielberg, S. (Director). (1989). Indiana Jones and the last crusade [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Studio.
SUGGESTED FILMS FOR WRITING A MOVIE
Annie (Spielberg, 1982)
It's a hard knock life for Annie and her fellow orphans. Students can describe the opening scene in which Annie and the other orphans are forced to clean the orphanage from top to bottom.
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg, 1982)
As the film opens, a spaceship lands and E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, steps out to explore the earth. Suddenly, the spaceship leaves the earth and E.T. is left behind. In their script, students could describe the terror and abandonment felt by E.T. in those opening moments of the film.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg, 1989)
The first 10 minutes of this film are titled with action. Students can describe young Indiana Jones's adventure.
The Lion King (Allers & Minkoff, 1994)
The opening "circle of life" scene in which members of the animal kingdom leap across the savannah, is a wonderful segment for students to describe. Students can expand their vocabulary by using proper terminology for the scenes. Words such as savannah herd, and stampede can be introduced. When reading their scripts, students will have to blend their words with the music. This will require extra attention to timing, but it is a valuable skill.
The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939)
There are many excellent scenes to describe in this classis film. Students could describe Dorothy's trip along the yellow brick road as she meets the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion. The tornado scene in which Dorothy's house is whisked to Oz also offers a great deal of action to be described.
Hoffner teaches at Holy Family University (Grant and Frankford Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19114-2094, USA).

Hollywood and the U.S.A.

THE antropologists sees any segment of society as part of a whole; he views Hollywood as a section of the United States of America, and both in the larger frame of Western civilization. The problems of the movie industry are not unique to it. But some characteristics of the modern world have been greatly exaggerated in Hollywood while others are underplayed. Hollywood is therefore not a reflection, but a caricature of selected contemporary tendencies, which, in turn, leave their imprint on the movies. It is a three-way circular interaction between Hollywood, U.S.A. and movies.

Many people would agree with the characterization of our society by the poet W. H. Auden as "The Age of Anxiety." The present generation has known two world wars and is worried about the possibility of a third, even more devastating. We won the last war and are probably the strongest nation, and yet we are insecure in our relations with former enemies and allies. Our country is prosperous and we have demonstrated an enormous capacity for production, but we are worried about a possible recession and unemployment. We live in a fast changing world but have lost faith in our belief that change is always for the better, and that progress is inevitable. We are not so sure of the happy ending.

Man has become increasingly lonely. Although people live in close physical contact, their relationships have become more and more depersonalized. We have a sense of being with people, and yet do not feel in any way related to them. In cities we are accustomed to having strange people beside us in street car, bus, or uncomfortably close in the subway. The technique of business and many other organizations, in trying to personalize their selling relationships, such as by announcing the name of employees to customers, really fools no one. The fact that the name of the post office clerk, the bank teller or the person who handles complaints in the department store, is posted, does not really influence their relationship with customers. The market place is still basically impersonal. Over the radio, we listen to the voices of strangers relating intimate domestic stories or giving us their opinions about the latest national or world event. All these factors give an illusion of companionship which, however, only increases the feeling of being alone. This loneliness is particularly striking when we compare modern to primitive man with his web of personal relationships within his clan. From birth to death he was tied through reciprocal duties and responsibilities to his clan kindred. Clan membership could not be lost and was as fixed for the individual as was his sex. He belonged to his group through basic biological ties and isolation was rare.

Many other factors contribute to modern man's anxiety. The traditional American belief that anyone, by working hard and industriously, may rise in the social hierarchy and become rich and successful is being questioned. There is considerable evidence that the American worker realizes that social mobility is decreasing. Workers increasingly believe that hard work no longer counts for as much as it did and that opportunities for advancement are restricted. Many employees do not even understand the immediate aspects of their work situation. A study made at an electric company, which had an unusually good relationship with its employees, showed that there was much that the worker did not understand about his job, even including the method of payment. The author thought that this lack of understanding caused a feeling of exasperation and sense of personal futility on the part of the workers. Modern man lives in a world which is difficult to comprehend. He is prosperous or unemployed in recurring economic cycles about which economists talk in learned words of cause and effect. But the average man sees only the effect, and is confused as to the causes.

In Hollywood there is far more confusion and anxiety than in the society which surrounds it. Even in its most prosperous periods when net profits were enormous, far surpassing those of other businesses, everyone was scared. Now, when diminishing foreign markets, increasing costs of production, competition with European pictures, and changing box-office tastes threaten the swollen profits of past prosperity, fear rises to panic. Anxiety grips everyone from executive to third assistant director. The happy endings of at least 100 per cent net profit for the studio and a relatively long period of employment at high salaries for employees, are becoming less common. Yet, although this is well known, many individuals still cherish the fantasy for themselves. In the movies the happy ending is still almost universal. Perhaps the people who make the movies cannot afford to admit that there can be another kind of ending, and many of those who sit in the audience prefer this fantasy, too. But an increasing number are becoming dissatisfied with the so obviously contrived nature of these endings. The neat and unrealistic movie solution to all problems is neither satisfying nor entertaining.

Attitudes stem from the past and change slowly. In a rapidly changing society such as ours, some attitudes born out of a past situation continue under new conditions, even when inappropriate. Today there are people who will still believe in the laissez-faire economy of the frontier days and are hostile to planning designed for a country which no longer has a frontier. But many who stubbornly cling to the old laissez-faire thinking are uneasy lest they fight a losing battle, while many of those who plan are afraid that the planning may go too far. Neither side is really very sure of itself. In Hollywood the lack of planning and extemporizing has been carried to extremes probably not known even on the frontier, and greater certainly than in any contemporary industry. Even more important, extemporizing without a plan has long been regarded by many as a necessary and inherent part of movie making. However, the proper accompaniment, the frontier self-confidence and courage in taking chances, is very rare in Hollywood. The distinguished director-producer William Wyler appeals for . . . " '. . . men of courage' in Hollywood to reach out for a wealth of picture material which the industry has shunned so far." He continues, "We need men of courage in high places who will not be intimidated or coerced into making only 'safe' pictures -- pictures devoid of any ideas whatsoever." Too often he has bunked up against a situation where the top men were forced to decide between two stories and asked the question, "Which is the safest?" Mediocrity in films is the direct result of playing it safe.

From script to movie - it is the director's job

Whether the script is assembled or written, it is the director's job to translate it into a film. This is a key operation, for it is concerned with fusing techniques from the silent films with the latest technological developments and combining the unique characteristics of the movie medium with elements from theater and literature. These are not easy problems.

In any society, changes in technology and the introduction of new ideas are often accompanied by conflict and tension, since they require modifications not only of knowledge, but also of social organization, of attitudes and behavior. A familiar example is the Industrial Revolution, when machines replaced hand work. Back in prehistoric times, iron tools, when first introduced into a primitive society which had not gone beyond digging sticks and stone axes, were not always easily or quickly accepted. Many people did not know how to use the new tools efficiently, others did not like them, and makers of the old implements feared a loss of prestige. Gradually, the natives learned how to use the new tools and attitudes changed to one of acceptance. Only sentimentalists, in anthropology or in the movies, long to return to the earlier forms of primitive life or of films. Even if it wanted to, Hollywood could not go back to the more "pure" movie form which existed before the invention of the talkies. The real problem is not of a return to the past, but of integration of old and new. The question then is, which elements in the Hollywood social system help this integration and which retard it?

Movies introduced a new art, the essence of which is the manipulation of movement in time and space with a camera. Cutting, that is, the assembling of the film in balanced sequences, is one of its important skills. It was the director who first learned this. He was all-important; the producer or writer was either absent or insignificant, and actors were far less important than today. The director did everything: planned the story, directed the actors, manipulated the camera and cut the film, as well as taking care of such details as designing the costumes and sets. "Film Author" was not an inappropriate title for him in those days. He constantly experimented with the camera, shooting from different angles; then, later, he used a number of cameras, placed in various positions -- on the floor, near the ceiling, and midway. The camera can seem to become the actor; the audience then sees only what the actor -- and the camera -- is looking at. In the cutting room the director selects the most effective "takes." If he likes none of them, he can combine bits from three or four into one. It is also in the cutting room that the tempo for telling the story and the rhythm of the movie are set. Just as the same musical notes played in two-quarter, threequarter or four-quarter time express different moods, so, by cutting a sequence into many segments, a tense mood of expectancy can be obtained, while fewer and longer segments will produce the opposite one of tranquillity. An actor walking across a room can be taken in one long shot which is not particularly histrionic. But if the same shot is broken into many segments and each step the man takes is seen separately, it becomes highly dramatic.

In the development of the silent films, inanimate objects, or "props," were useful in helping to tell the story; this trend reached its apex at the end of the silent era. The symbolism of rain beating on a windowpane, the close-up of a hand crushing a letter, two chairs placed cozily by a fire, a large pile of unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink, could be used as effectively as actors, and sometimes even more so.

While the saying that the camera does not lie is true, behind the camera are the men who manage it and who can create, if they are skilled, an emotional effect, without the actor necessarily portraying that emotion. If, for instance, an untalented actress in the past or today is unable to express frightened surprise, the director can take different shots of her face full face, profile, and finally a close-up of her eyes; and then, by cutting from one to the other, he can produce the emotional effect which the actress was unable to register. Or, a director may turn the camera on an actor's back and show it sagging or stiffening and produce the impression he was unable to get from his face. If the actors do not carry a romantic scene well, the director can shoot from them to a landscape bathed in a full moon and thus increase the romantic atmosphere. The hand of an actor tearing up a girl's photograph may express more poignantly the breaking of a love relationship, than the expression on his face.

Popular Culture Glossary P - Z

Pluralism The belief that two or more ideas, opinions or styles can coexist without necessarily conflicting. In culture, as in politics, pluralism implies a preference for toleration and adaptability rather than rigid adherence to established practice, and is inherently opposed to all forms of authoritarian control.

Pop art Flourishing from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, artworks drawing inspiration from the imagery of consumerism and popular culture.

Pop music Commercially oriented tunes or songs; term used from the 1950s to describe music aimed at the developing youth market.

Popular Of the people; widely appreciated. But popular culture, as used here, also identifies a range of products and entertainment, primarily for leisure consumption, that are produced via industrial processes and said in a market economy; features that distinguish them from folk or vernacular culture.

Prime time Peak viewing hours on television, when the highest rates are charged to advertisers.

Producer In film making, the person responsible for the financial and administrative aspects.

Product variation Also product differentiation; using advertising, packaging and so on to create differences between products of the same type such as cigarettes.

Professional In sport, people for whom playing is their livelihood, or who compete for money prizes.

Prohibition The years 1920-33 in the United States, when manufacturing, selling or transporting alcoholic drinks for general consumption was forbidden by law.

Psychedelic Resembling the distorted visual and sound effects caused by hallucinogenic drugs.

Public service broadcasting Non-commercial use of radio and television, generaııy supported by government funding, frequently broadly educational in character.

Punk An anarchic youth movement in music and fashion which arose in Britain in the mid-1970s.

Ragtime Tightly composed piano jazz, which combined syncopation with march forms, dating from the late 19th century.

Ratings In television or radio, a system of measuring a program's success, which is based on assessing audience size.

Realism A 19th-century movement in the arts which strove to depict accurately the worlds it represented, and to show things as they actually existed. A1though the feasibility of this goal was questioned by modernism, the accusation that melodrama, for example, is not "realistic" has remained one of the principal arguments for dismissing popular culture from serious examination and appreciation.

Retro-chic The revival of fashions from an earlier era.

Rhythm & blues Also r & b; an up-tempo musical evolution from the blues, widely popular as dance music by the 1940s; bands usually featured a tenor saxophone;see also rock 'n' roll.

Rock 'n' roll Popular dance music originating in the 1950s as an offshoot of rhythm & blues; most pieces have a 12-bar blues structure, and a heavily accented rhythm.

Romance In popular culture, the representation of heterosexual love as the predominant subject matter. White popular music frequently depicts the failure of romantic love, romantic narratives more usually conclude with a happy ending that marks the foundation of a new nuclear family.

Sitcom A situation comedy; humor based on everyday events and the interaction of a small group of characters.

Soap opera Serialized radio or television fiction dealing melodramatically with the daily traumas and of ten highly charged love-lines of a group of characters; so called because originally sponsored by American soap manufacturers.

Soul music Commercially successful black American music of the 1960s on, which combined gospel with blues styles.

Status symbol Any obvious sign of a person' s wealth or social prestige.

Streamlining Fluid shaping, which increases performance by reducing water- or air-resistance; in the 1930s it was employed as a style on a wide range of objects.

Street fashion Avant-garde styles, which originate on the city streets and not in fashion salons.

Swing Smooth and rhythmical, dance-oriented orchestral jazz, popular from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, usually arranged for big bands.

Syncopation The stressing of normally unaccented beats, in music such as jazz.

Syndication The sale of a story or program for simultaneous release by a number of different media outlets.

Thriller A book, play or film that creates excitement or suspense; especially one dealing with mystery or crime.

Tin Pan Alley Until the 1950s, the composers and publishers of the popular music industry in the USA.

Underground Term adopted in the 1960s to describe anti-establishment or counter-cultural beliefs and activities.

Vaudeville Variety shows or revues, featuring singers, dancers, comedians and acrobats.

Vernacular culture Like folk culture, the functional and artistic productions of people outside their involvement in the economic sphere; those things, from music to clothes to houses, that people make for themselves.

Popular Culture Glossary G - P

Genre The common term given to a particular type or group of paintings, books, films or musk, distinguished from others by their specific style or content: eg Western films.

Gospel music A style of sacred singing which developed in the Protestant churches of black America; the main song is often freely improvised, and accompanied by a chorus of chanting and clapping.

Haute couture High-quality fashion; the clothes designed and made by couturiers.

Hedonism The doctrine that pleasure is the sole and the proper aim of human action.

High-tech A movement in architecture and interior design dating from the 1970s, which employs industrial objects and imagery.

Hillbilly music The traditional songs (largely of European origin) of rural communities in the southern United States; first recorded in the 1920s, usually to the accompaniment of a banjo, fiddle or guitar.

Hippy Colorfully dressed in flowing ethnic styles, this anti-establishment group in 1960s society succeeded the beatniks as rebels against middle-class values.

Icon Originally a religious image to be revered, now used to refer to an established and immediately recognizable image to which considerable cultural or symbolic weight is attached: eg to refer to John Wayne as "Icon of American masculinity".

Iconography A system of grouping of conventional visual signals by which audiences identify the genre, period or other classification to which an object in popular culture belongs: eg the clothes and settings specific to the Western film.

Ideology The system of beliefs, perceptions and feelings in a particular culture, much of it so deeply ingrained in the forms, structures and myths of that culture that people regard it as common sense.

Jazz Any of the various 2Oth-century styles of rhythmical, syncopated musk, mainly instrumental and often improvised; the black American musicians of New Orleans are usually credited with its origination. See also bebop, boogie-woogie, ragtime, rhythm & blues, swing.

Jazz age The decade between the end of World War i and the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Kitsch A German term for "vulgar trash"; something considered blatanHy slick, pretentious or sentimental.

Leisure Time spent not working, and the activities that occupy that time.

Lifestyle The way a person or a group chooses to live, expressed in opinions, behavior, home environment, and so on.

Market economy One in which resources are allocated according to supply and demand, uncontrolled by government regulation.

Mainstream The dominant or chief trend of opinion in society.

Mass media Communication systems such as radio, television and newspapers, which reach large numbers of people.

Materialism Devotion to the acquisition of material possessions, in preference to inner fulfilment.

Media The different technological means of communication: the printed word, mechanical and electronic forms of reproduction.

Melodrama A form of dramatic production which exaggerates emotions, particularly those concerned with romance. The dominant mode of most popular fiction, including Hollywood's.

Merchandising The particular selling techniques brought to bear in advertising and marketing a product.

Mersey beat Musical style combining elements of folk music and rock 'n' roll; it originated in the late 1950s in the northern English port of Liverpool and its most famous exponents were the Beatles.

Modernism A movement across art-forms beginning in the late 19th century, which rejected traditional assumptions of order and value in favor of doubt, relativism, and a self-conscious concern with the formal organization of the artwork.

Monopoly The exclusive control or possession of something;the effective domination of a market or trade.

Myth A story that a culture tells to account for a contradiction at the centre of its existence; the Western myth, for instance, tells the story of the bringing of "civilization" to America through the extermination of its indigenous peoples.

Narcissism The excessive (and often anxious) concern with self, to the exclusion of the social; believed by many to be a particular malady of Western society ("the Me generation") in the later 20th century.

Neo-realism An Italian film movement of the 1940s and early 1950s characterized by realistic, almost documentary-like, portrayal of contemporary social problems.

Network In radio or television, a group of affiliated broadcasting stations.

New Look A romantically feminine fashion introduced by the designer Christian Dior in 1947; busts were exaggerated, waists were tiny, and, in contrast to wartime economies, skirts were extravagant1y full and long.

New Wave Initially, an innovative movement in French cinema among directors who entered the industry in 1959-62. The term has since be en used also to describe surges of creative film making in other countries.

Nickelodeon In the USA, an early moving picture theater;from the admission price of a nickel (5 cents).

Nuclear family The minimal family unit in 20th century Western culture, of husband, wife, and children.

Offbeat Unusual or unconventional.

Permissive society One that is sexually and morally tolerant; used to typify the 1960s, when a number of moral and social conventions were relaxed.

Planned obsolescence Changing the appearance or performance of an everyday commodity, such as a refrigerator or a motor car, to encourage consumers to buy new models before the old ones have worn out.

Popular Culture Glossary

Alienation The sense of estrangement and lack of meaningful connection between the individual and his or her surroundings, thought by many to be the defining condition of modem existence.

Amateur In sport, someone who does not compete for money. The definition has broadened this century, as athletes who are funded by educational colleges or governments may still be considered amateurs for selection purposes.

Anti-establishment Opposed to rightwing or conventional values and opinions, typically those reflecting tradition and authority; see also Counter-Cultural.

Apartheid The policy of racial segregation, enforced by the South African government, whereby the country's white minority dominates and exploits its non-white majority.

Applied arts The design or decoration of functional objects.

Art deco Style of decorative art fashionable in the 1920s and 193Os, which takes its name from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et lndustriels Modernes (Paris, 1925); typically expressed by geometric or stylized shapes.

Art nouveau A decorative style that flourished from the 1890s to the outbreak of World War i; a sinuous line based on plant forms was characteristic.

Avant-garde The vanguard; those who create or support innovation or experimentation in any field, but particularly in the arts.

Bauhaus Founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in 1919 (and closed by the Nazi party in 1933), a school of architecture and applied arts, which attempted to marry fine design with the commercial and technical requirements of industrial production.

Beat generation A Term coined by American novelist Jack Kerouac, to identify an anti-establishment element in US society of the late 1940s and 1950s.

Bebop Also bop; a jazz style which flourished in the 1940s and 195Os. Compared to earlier jazz, bebop's rhythms were more subtle and complex; melodic improvisation was stressed.

Blues "A state of mind and a music which gives voice to it", the blues evolved from the folk music of black Americans. Usually slow and melancholy, and with a 12-bar structure, most blues are sung laments on living and loving.

Boogie-woogie A style of blues piano, at the height of its popularity in the 193Os. Fast and energetic, it featured a rolling left-hand bass pattern.

Cable television Transmission via cable, commonly paid for by the user.

Chain store One of a group of shops under the same company name, ownership and management.

Consumer society One that sets very high value on the consumption of goods and services.

Convention The agreed or customary method by which something is represented; for example, that "white" is "good" and "black" is "bad".

Counter-cultural Opposed to the mainstream, different to the usual or the expected, and of ten subversive; see anti-establishment, hippy.

Cover version In popular music, a remake of an earlier recording, often adapting the musical style to contemporary taste.

Cultural imperialism Spreading or imposing a foreign culture (usually white, European or American) and its values at the expense of an indigenous culture.

Culture Often assumed to refer only to what is called "high culture" in this book, culture is here used to indicate a particular way of life, and the non-utilitarian objects through which people living that way of life identify themselves. This sense is most easily recognized in the term subculture, which describes the culture of a distinguishable smaller group.

Decorative arts The creation of ornaments and other decorative objects, such as pottery, furniture, carpets; an applied art.

Director In film production the person responsible for staging the script and orchestrating actors performances, usually seen as the most important creative role.

Diskjockey Also DJ; someone who introduces and plays recorded music (especially popular music) on radio or television, or in a discotheque.

Disco music From "discotheque", a musical style characterized by insistent thumping bass patterns; enormously popular in the late 1970s.

Disposable income The part of a person' s income left over after tax has been deducted.

Documentary Factual depiction of actual events or real peoples' lives, in a film or in a radio or television program.

Entertainment Commercial leisure activity, produced by professional performers for sale to an audience, who consume it for pleasure, relaxation or amusement. Usually expected to be undemanding of its audience, entertainment, in such forms as cinema, music, literature and television has become a major industry in the 20th century.

Feminism The belief that women are men's equals, and that society should embody that equality.

Film noir A term coined to describe Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s, which portrayed the dark underworld of crime and corruption.

Flapper A young woman of the 1920s, often one who defied social conventions. Flappers cut their hair short and wore short skirts.

Folk music Traditional songs, dance or music; in the 1960s applied to the work of Bob Dylan and others who revived traditional forms and wrote new words to old ballads to express contemporary social consciousness.

Franchise Permission to sell a company's goods or services, usually within a particular geographical area, under that company's name.

Futurism A movement in the visual arts, music and literature, which originated in 1909 with the publication of the Italian poet F.T. Marinetti's Futunst Manitesta. Its adherents made a cult of speed and the machine.

Generation gap A lack of communication and understanding between people of different age-groups.

Valentino, Rudolph 1895-1926 Italian-born film star

After four years as a Hollywood bit-part player, he won the lead in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and was instantly a star. To his American female audiences he represented exotic sensuality, mystery and illicit eroticism in a potent compound of passion and melancholy. His subsequent box-office hits were The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922) and Monsieur Beaucaire (1924). News of his death met with unequaled fan hysteria.

Brando, Marlon 1924-2004 American actor

A Method actor, schooled at the Actors' Studio, his first stage success was on Broadway, with A Streetcar Named Desire. His naturalistic film performances in The Men (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata!(1952) and On the Waterfront (1954) won admirers and detractors. No one could deny his charisma and young audiences saw him as a icon of their generation. His own non-conformity (and age?) made finding parts difficult in the sixties but The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris (both 1972) confirmed his comeback.

Bow, Clara 1905-65 US film actress

Winning a fan-magazine beauty contest took her to Hollywood, but her break came in 1925 when the producer she was under contract to joined Paramount. Molded by the studio publicity machine with her swinging bob and cupidbow lips, she became the ultimate flapper: vibrant, liberated. It (1927) confirmed her status, but scandal, a shift in taste, mental instability and the coming of sound quickly put an end to her career.

Boone, Pat 1934- US singer and actor

The hottest property on disc after Presley in the late fifties, he was the safer face of rock 'n' roll. Wholesome, softspoken and religious, his wins on TV talent shows earned him a recording contract with Dot Records. He made 13 singles which sold over a million, including Ain't That a Shame (1955), Friendly Persuasion and Remember You're Mine (both 1956), and Love Letters in the Sand (1957).

Bogart, Humphrey 1899-1957 US actor

Unlikely star material - a slight, tight-lipped man with a lisp - he was Hollywood's antihero: self-reliant, cynical, sardonic. He made a hit on Broadway as the gangster in The Petrified Forest (1935), transferring successfully to film. Five years of gangster roles followed.

In 1941 he had his next big chances in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon: his great popularity continued until his death and revived in the sixties. Credits include Casablanca (1943), The Big Sleep (1946), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947) and The African Queen (1952).

Robert Rodriguez to direct Barbarella

Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror, Sin City, Spy Kids, El Mariachi) will direct Barbarella, a new motion picture adaptation of the classic science-fiction comic book series, it was announced today by producers Dino and Martha De Laurentiis. Universal Pictures will distribute the film, which will be released worldwide in 2008.

Barbarella tells the story of a female mercenary who roams across the universe in a distant future, undertaking missions that require her physical fearlessness, ingenuity and sensuality. In travels that span galaxies known and unknown, Barbarella will challenge tradition, startle the senses and take audiences on an epic adventure of discovery and wonder. Barbarella made her debut in 1962 in a French graphic magazine written and illustrated by Jean-Claude Forest, and her adventures have been published around the world. The first film version, starring Jane Fonda and also produced by Dino De Laurentiis, was released in 1968.

“Dino De Laurentiis came to me and said: ‘Barbarella is a world where you are completely free to unleash all your fantasies, creativity and imagination—where the possibilities are limitless,’ ” commented Robert Rodriguez. “I love this iconic character and all that she represents, and I’m truly excited by the challenge of inviting a new audience into her universe.”

“Barbarella is the ultimate science-fiction adventure heroine: smart, strong and sexy, ” said Dino De Laurentiis. “In our vision, the future is female, and I can’t wait to introduce Barbarella to a new generation of moviegoers.”

Rodriguez is working with writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who are developing a completely original adventure for Barbarella. Purvis and Wade co-wrote the phenomenally successful Casino Royale and have recently finished work on the next installment in the James Bond franchise, Bond 22.

“When we decided to take Barbarella on again, ” noted Martha De Laurentiis, “we wanted the film to play as a big, legitimately exciting adventure in space, but we also know that the character of Barbarella is grounded in a very specific reality. Balancing those aspects requires a very deft hand. With Robert directing and Neal and Robert writing, we feel like we have the dream team in place. ”

Forget "Godfather IV" anyway...

Movie executives at Paramount scrapped an idea to wrap up The Godfather movies with a fourth film - because they refused to pay an ailing Mario Puzo. Director Francis Ford Coppola offered to help the dying author pen the screenplay for a final film for free, but penny-pinching studio bosses still refused to greenlight the idea.

Ford Coppola, who initially balked at the idea of directing sequels to his 1972 masterpiece, admits he was so desperate to help Puzo before he died in 1999 that he offered to co-write the screenplay for no charge.

He recalls, "He and I cooked up an idea for what there would be for The Godfather IV and we went to Paramount... and we said, 'Look, Mario is not well. Hire him to write this Godfather IV script, I will help him, do it for nothing...' Mario was very concerned to leave his kids some money and they just never made the deal... Mario died and it was heartbreaking."

Universal sets Nicole Kidman for horror film

Actress to produce Colombian remake

Universal Pictures has acquired remake rights to the Colombian horror film "Al final del espectro," and will develop it as a starring and producing vehicle for Nicole Kidman.

Juan Felipe Orozco, who helmed the original, is attached to direct the remake. Fernley Phillips ("The Number 23") is writing the script.

Kidman will produce through her Blossom Films banner, teamed with Vertigo Entertainment partners Roy Lee and Doug Davison and Rick Schwartz. Latter was a co-producer of "The Departed" and worked with Kidman as exec producer of "The Others" and "Birthday Girl."

Plan is for Kidman to play a woman who, after a tragedy, is encouraged by her father to take refuge in a fancy apartment building. She becomes a shut-in, and begins to see a ghost. Vertigo's Lee and Davison exec produced "The Invasion," as well as "The Eye" remake that stars Jessica Alba for Lionsgate. They're producing "A Tale of Two Sisters" at DreamWorks and are prepping the Screen Gems remake of the unreleased Spanish language horror film "Rec."

Tea Leoni wanders into 'Town'

Gervais, Kinnear co-star in Koepp's rom-com

Tea Leoni will star alongside Ricky Gervais and Greg Kinnear in writer-director David Koepp's "Ghost Town" for DreamWorks and Spyglass Entertainment.

Gavin Palone is producing the romantic comedy, set to begin production this October in Gotham. Par will distribute worldwide.

Story revolves around a misanthropic dentist (Gervais) who dies for seven minutes during a colonoscopy. Recovering, he can see the dead and is bothered by the ghost of a businessman (Kinnear) who wants the dentist to break up the impending marriage of the ghost's wife, played by Leoni.

Leoni is in theaters June 22 with John Dahl's dark dramedy "You Kill Me," starring alongside Ben Kingsley and Luke Wilson. Previous credits include "Fun With Dick and Jane," "Deep Impact" and "Hollywood Ending." The latter two were distribbed by DreamWorks.

The fourth "Indiana Jones" movie began filming in Hawaii

The fourth "Indiana Jones" movie began filming on the Big Island with Hollywood powerhouses Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

The movie, which hasn't been named yet, will be filming over the next three weeks along the Hamakua Coast north of Hilo. Other scenes have been shot in New Haven, Conn.

Studio officials aren't talking about the movie's Big Island invasion or even revealing the title, rumored to be "Indiana Jones and the City of Gods" or simply "Indiana Jones IV."

"They're insisting on using 'The Untitled Genre Project' as a title, putting us in an awkward position," said Donne Dawson, Hawaii's film commissioner who confirmed the production's presence on the Big Island.

The film, 18 years after release of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," will again feature Ford as the wisecracking, whip-snapping adventurer. The first Indiana Jones movie, "Raiders of the Lost Arc," started filming in 1980.

Spielberg is directing the movie, as he did the first three films of the franchise. The producer is Frank Marshall and the executive producer is Kathleen Kennedy.The movie started production in Deming, N.M., and it will be distributed by Paramount Pictures for an expected May 2008 release. Its budget is reported to be $125 million.

Shooting is scheduled at several Big Island spots, including a waterfall near the coast and a secluded piece of Shipman Estate property near Keaau.

Spielberg's company, DreamWorks, also is filming "Tropic Thunder" on Kauai.Ben Stiller stars in the $100 million comedy about actors in a war movie who unexpectedly face real fighting.

Other actors cast in the new "Indiana Jones" movie include Shia LeBeouf, Cate Blanchet, Jim Broadbent, John Hurt and Ray Winstone. It wasn't clear how many of them would be on the Big Island for filming.