Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik take as their starting point the remarkable diversity of comedy's forms and modes - feature-length narratives, sketches and shorts, sit-com and variety, slapstick and romance. Relating this diversity to the variety of comedy's basic conventions - from happy endings to the presence of gags and the involvement of humour and laughter - they seek both to explain the nature of these forms and conventions and to relate them to their institutional contexts. They propose that all forms and modes of the comic involve deviations from aesthetic and cultural conventions and norms, and, to demonstrate this, they discuss a wide range of programmes and films, from Blackadder to Bringing up Baby, from City Limits to Blind Date, from the Roadrunner cartoons to Bless this House and The Two Ronnies. Comedies looked at in particular detail include: the classic slapstick films of Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin; Hollywood's 'screwball' comedies of the 1930s and 1940s; Monty Python, Hancock, and Steptoe and Son. The authors also relate their discussion to radio comedy.

Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik take as their starting point the remarkable diversity of comedy's forms and modes - feature-length narratives, sketches and shorts, sit-com and variety, slapstick and romance. Relating this diversity to the variety of comedy's basic conventions - from happy endings to the presence of gags and the involvement of humour and laughter - they seek both to explain the nature of these forms and conventions and to relate them to their institutional contexts. They propose that all forms and modes of the comic involve deviations from aesthetic and cultural conventions and norms, and, to demonstrate this, they discuss a wide range of programmes and films, from Blackadder to Bringing up Baby, from City Limits to Blind Date, from the Roadrunner cartoons to Bless this House and The Two Ronnies. Comedies looked at in particular detail include: the classic slapstick films of Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin; Hollywood's 'screwball' comedies of the 1930s and 1940s; Monty Python, Hancock, and Steptoe and Son. The authors also relate their discussion to radio comedy.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203131975

Hollywood Comedians, The Film Reader brings together key writings on one of the most consistently popular genres of Hollywood cinema. Despite the cult reputations enjoyed by star performers such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen, comedians and the contexts within which they worked have not always received their due in scholarly discussions of cinema culture. Hollywood Comedians, The Film Reader seeks to fill this gap, combining distinguished work on comedian comedy produced since the early 1980s together with more recent material that explores the genre's contemporary revival.
This reader provides a comprehensive guide to a range of comedians, contexts and issues: from the silent films of Chaplin and Keaton to the early sound comedy of Mae West and the Marx Brothers, and from the gender dynamics of Hope and Crosby, Lucille Ball and Jerry Lewis to contemporary comedians such as Jim Carrey and Chris Rock. In addition to exploring issues of genre, narrative, stardom and performance, the reader also traces how comedian films manage representations of otherness that are defined through ethnicity, race, class, gender and the body.
Articles are grouped in thematic sections, each exploring a central issue to the study of comedian comedy, and featuring an editor's introduction outlining the context of issues and debates. Sections include:
*Genre, narrative and performance
*Approaches to silent comedy
*Sound comedy, the vaudeville aesthetic and ethnicity
*Comedian comedy and gender
*Post-classical comedian comedy

Taking issue with many orthodox views of Film Noir, Frank Krutnik argues for a reorientation of this compulsively engaging area of Hollywood cultural production. Krutnik recasts the films within a generic framework and draws on recent historical and theoretical research to examine both the diversity of film noir and its significance within American popular culture of the 1940s. He considers classical Hollywood cinema, debates on genre, and the history of the emergence of character in film noir, focusing on the hard-boiled' crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain as well as the popularisationof Freudian psychoanalysis; and the social and cultural upheavals of the 1940s. The core of this book however concerns the complex representationof masculinity in the noir tough' thriller, and where and how gender interlocks with questions of genre. Analysing in detail major thrillers like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and The Killers , alongside lesser known but nonetheless crucial films as Stranger on the Third Floor, Pitfall and Dead Reckoning Krutnik has produced a provocative and highly readable study of one of Hollywood most perennially fascinating groups of films.

Hollywood Comedians, The Film Reader brings together key writings on one of the most consistently popular genres of Hollywood cinema. Despite the cult reputations enjoyed by star performers such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen, comedians and the contexts within which they worked have not always received their due in scholarly discussions of cinema culture. Hollywood Comedians, The Film Reader seeks to fill this gap, combining distinguished work on comedian comedy produced since the early 1980s together with more recent material that explores the genre's contemporary revival.
This reader provides a comprehensive guide to a range of comedians, contexts and issues: from the silent films of Chaplin and Keaton to the early sound comedy of Mae West and the Marx Brothers, and from the gender dynamics of Hope and Crosby, Lucille Ball and Jerry Lewis to contemporary comedians such as Jim Carrey and Chris Rock. In addition to exploring issues of genre, narrative, stardom and performance, the reader also traces how comedian films manage representations of otherness that are defined through ethnicity, race, class, gender and the body.
Articles are grouped in thematic sections, each exploring a central issue to the study of comedian comedy, and featuring an editor's introduction outlining the context of issues and debates. Sections include:
*Genre, narrative and performance
*Approaches to silent comedy
*Sound comedy, the vaudeville aesthetic and ethnicity
*Comedian comedy and gender
*Post-classical comedian comedy

This book brings together key works by pioneering film studies scholar Steve Neale. From the 1970s to the 2010s Neale's vital and unparalleled contribution to the subject has shaped many of the critical agendas that helped to confirm film studies' position as an innovative discipline within the humanities. Although known primarily for his work on genre, Neale has written on a far wider range of topics. In addition to selections from the influential volumes Genre (1980) and Genre and Hollywood (2000), and articles scrutinizing individual genres - the melodrama, the war film, science fiction and film noir - this Reader provides critical examinations of cinema and technology, art cinema, gender and cinema, stereotypes and representation, cinema history, the film industry, New Hollywood, and film analysis. Many of the articles included are recommended reading for a range of university courses worldwide, making the volume useful to students at undergraduate level and above, researchers, and teachers of film studies, media studies, gender studies and cultural studies. The collection has been selected and edited by Frank Krutnik and Richard Maltby, scholars who have worked closely with Neale and been inspired by his diverse and often provocative critical innovations. Their introduction assesses the significance of Neale's work, and contextualizes it within the development of UK film studies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/YRCC6901

The concept of ""un-Americanism"", so vital to the HUAC crusade of the 1940s and 1950s, was resoundingly revived in the emotional rhetoric that followed the September 11th terrorist attacks. Today's political and cultural climate makes it more crucial than ever to come to terms with the consequences of this earlier period of repression and with the contested claims of Americanism that it generated.""Un-American"" Hollywood reopens the intense critical debate on the blacklist era and on the aesthetic and political work of the Hollywood Left. In a series of fresh case studies focusing on contexts of production and reception, the contributors offer exciting and original perspectives on the role of progressive politics within a capitalist media industry.Original essays scrutinize the work of individual practitioners, such as Robert Rossen, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and Edward Dmytryk, and examine key films, including ""The Robe"", ""Christ in Concrete"", ""The House I Live In"", ""The Lawless"", ""The Naked City"", ""The Prowler"", ""Body and Soul"", and ""FTA"".