Lauded by his peers, Van Heflin won a place in the hearts of cinemagoers with his portrayal of a resolute homesteader in George Stevens' timeless classic Shane. But there was far more to this superlative actor than one role. He impressed in all genres and could convincingly portray every kind of character from a heel to a hero and each shade in between. This first full-length work about him provides a full commentary of all his films with insights into his life as a sailor and his stage career. The aim is to restore him to his rightful place among the gallery of stars of Hollywood's Golden Age to whose luster he added a stage craftsman's unique talent. He first caught the public attention as the sensitive drink-addicted friend of gangster Johnny Eager for which he won the Academy Award and contributed notable performances in a string of terrific noirs, dramas and westerns. He was especially memorable as the psychotic cop in Joseph Losey's masterpiece The Prowler but equally at home as the doubtful executive in Negulesco's smart satire Woman's World. A restless spirit whose heart never left the sea he learned early on about life and human motivations sailing the oceans of the world; this undoubtedly informed his natural acting instinct. A versatile risk-taking actor he was never concerned with popularity or comfortable with the trappings of stardom. However he brought to every role a rare emotional intensity which made all his portrayals real and ensured they should live for all time.

If you've ever wondered what it's like to soar through space like a leaf on the wind in a Firefly spaceship, this is the manual for you. The Firefly-class transport ship was originally created by the Allied Spacecraft Corporation, but since the Browncoats' Independence War, it has become a favourite among smugglers on the Rim worlds. The aircraft's many nooks, crannies, and hidden compartments give it an incredible cargo capacity, and its speed and small size make it the perfect getaway vehicle. The many secrets of Serenity are revealed in this fascinating crew-created owner's manual, which features in-depth technical specifications and insightful commentary from the entire crew. Designed as an in-world crew-made manual for the ship, this book will allow fans of Firefly and Serenity to explore the iconic Firefly-class Series 3 ship in a whole new way.

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of film theory with interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. The third book in the series, Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled, offers a concise introduction to Critical Race Theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Spike Lee's critically acclaimed 2000 film Bamboozled. The most common approach to issues of "race" and "otherness" continues to focus primarily on questions of positive vs. negative representations and stereotype analysis. Critical Race Theory, instead, designates a much deeper reflection on the constitutive role of race in the legal, social, and aesthetic formations of US culture, including the cinema, where Bamboozled provides endless examples for discussion and analysis. Alessandra Raengo's Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled is the first to connect usually specialized considerations of race to established fields of inquiry in the humanities, particularly those concerned with issues of representation, capital, power, affect, and desire.

To say that children matter in Steven Spielberg's films is an understatement. Think of the possessed Stevie in Something Evil (TV), Baby Langston in The Sugarland Express, the alien-abducted Barry in Close Encounters, Elliott and his unearthly alter-ego in E.T, the war-damaged Jim in Empire of the Sun, the little girl in the red coat in Schindler's List, the mecha child in A.I., the kidnapped boy in Minority Report, and the eponymous boy hero of The Adventures of Tintin. (There are many other instances across his oeuvre). Contradicting his reputation as a purveyor of 'popcorn' entertainment, Spielberg's vision of children/childhood is complex. Discerning critics have begun to note its darker underpinnings, increasingly fraught with tensions, conflicts and anxieties. But, while childhood is Spielberg's principal source of inspiration, the topic has never been the focus of a dedicated collection of essays. The essays in Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg therefore seek to address childhood in the full spectrum of Spielberg's cinema. Fittingly, the scholars represented here draw on a range of theoretical frameworks and disciplines-cinema studies, literary studies, audience reception, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, sociology, and more. This is an important book for not only scholars but teachers and students of Spielberg's work, and for any serious fan of the director and his career.

Over the past forty years, American film has entered into a formal interaction with the comic book. Such comic book adaptations as Sin City, 300, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World have adopted components of their source materials' visual style. The screen has been fractured into panels, the photographic has given way to the graphic, and the steady rhythm of cinematic time has evolved into a far more malleable element. In other words, films have begun to look like comics. Yet, this interplay also occurs in the other direction. In order to retain cultural relevancy, comic books have begun to look like films. Frank Miller's original Sin City comics are indebted to film noir while Stephen King's The Dark Tower series could be a Sergio Leone spaghetti western translated onto paper. Film and comic books continuously lean on one another to reimagine their formal attributes and stylistic possibilities. In Panel to the Screen, Drew Morton examines this dialogue in its intersecting and rapidly changing cultural, technological, and industrial contexts. Early on, many questioned the prospect of a ""low"" art form suited for children translating into ""high"" art material capable of drawing colossal box office takes. Now the naysayers are as quiet as the queued crowds at Comic-Cons are massive. Morton provides a nuanced account of this phenomenon by using formal analysis of the texts in a real-world context of studio budgets, grosses, and audience reception.

"Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film" traces the origins of the 1970s family horror subgenre to certain aspects of American culture and classical Hollywood cinema. Far from being an ephemeral and short-lived genre, horror actually relates to many facets of American history from its beginnings to the present day. Individual chapters examine aspects of the genre, its roots in the Universal horror films of the 1930s, the Val Lewton RKO unit of the 1940s, and the crucial role of Alfred Hitchcock as the father of the modern American horror film.

Subsequent chapters investigate the key works of the 1970s by directors such as Larry Cohen, George A. Romero, Brian De Palma, Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper, revealing the distinctive nature of films such as "Bone, It's Alive, God Told Me, Carrie, The Exorcist, Exorcist 2, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," as well as the contributions of such writers as Stephen King. Williams also studies the slasher films of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the Friday the 13th series, "Halloween," the remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and "Nightmare on Elm Street," exploring their failure to improve on the radical achievements of the films of the 1970s.

After covering some post-1970s films, such as "The Shining," the book concludes with a new postscript examining neglected films of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Despite the overall decline in the American horror film, Williams determines that, far from being dead, the family horror film is still with us. Elements of family horror even appear in modern television series such as "The Sopranos." This updated edition also includes a new introduction.

Although precise definitions have not been agreed on, historical cinema tends to cut across existing genre categories and establishes an intimidatingly large group of films. In recent years, a lively body of work has developed around historical cinema, much of it proposing valuable new ways to consider the relationship between cinematic and historical representation. However, only a small proportion of this writing has paid attention to the issue of genre. In order to counter this omission, this book combines a critical analysis of the Hollywood historical film with an examination of its generic dimensions and a history of its development since the silent period. Historical Film: A Critical Introduction is concerned not simply with the formal properties of the films at hand, but also the ways in which they have been promoted, interpreted and discussed in relation to their engagement with the past.

After 45 years, Steven Spielberg's Jaws remains the definitive summer blockbuster, a cultural phenomenon with a fierce and dedicated fan base. The Jaws Book: New Perspectives on the Classic Summer Blockbuster is an exciting illustrated collection of new critical essays that offers the first detailed and comprehensive overview of the film's significant place in cinema history. Bringing together established and young scholars, the book includes contributions from leading international writers on popular cinema including Murray Pomerance, Peter Kramer, Sheldon Hall, Nigel Morris and Linda Ruth Williams, and covers such diverse topics as the film's release, reception and canonicity; its representation of masculinity and children; the use of landscape and the ocean; its status as a western; sequels and fan-edits; and its galvanizing impact on the horror film, action movie and contemporary Hollywood itself.

Nancy Meyers is acknowledged as the most commercially successful woman filmmaker of all time, described by Daphne Merkin in The New York Times on the release of It's Complicated as "a singular figure in Hollywood - [she] may, in fact, be the most powerful female writer-director-producer currently working". Yet Meyers remains a director who, alongside being widely dismissed by critics, has been largely absent in scholarly accounts both of contemporary Hollywood cinema, and of feminism and film. Despite Meyers' impressive track record for turning a profit (including the biggest box-office return ever achieved by a woman filmmaker at that timefor What Women Want in 2000), and a multifaceted career as a writer/producer/director dating back to her co-writing Private Benjamin in 1980, Meyers has been oddly neglected by Film Studies to date. Including Nancy Meyers in the Bloomsbury Companions to Contemporary Filmmakers rectifies this omission, giving her the kind of detailed consideration and recognition she warrants and exploring how, notwithstanding the challenges authorship holds for feminist film studies, Meyers can be situated as a skilled 'auteur'. This book proposes that Meyers' box-office success, the consistency of style and theme across her films, and the breadth of her body of work as a writer/producer/director across more than three decades at the forefront of Hollywood, (thus importantly bridging the second/third waves of feminism) make her a key contemporary US filmmaker. Structured to meet the needs of both the student and scholar, Jermyn's volume situates Meyers within this historical and critical context, exploring the distinctive qualities of her body of work, the reasons behind the pervasive resistance to it and new ways of understanding her films.