Examines the many forms of cinematic "badness" over the past one hundred years, from Nosferatu to The Talented Mr. Ripley.

In the late 1960s, the collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system led in part, and for less than a decade, to a production trend heavily influenced by the international art cinema. Reflecting a new self-consciousness in the US about the national film patrimony, this period is known as the Hollywood Renaissance. However, critical study of the period is generally associated with its so-called principal auteurs, slighting a number of established and emerging directors who were responsible for many of the era's most innovative and artistically successful releases.With contributions from leading film scholars, this book provides a revisionist account of this creative resurgence by discussing and memorializing twenty-four directors of note who have not yet been given a proper place in the larger history of the period. Including filmmakers such as Hal Ashby, John Frankenheimer, Mike Nichols, and Joan Micklin Silver, this more expansive approach to the auteurism of the late 1960s and 1970s seems not only appropriate but pressing a necessary element of the re-evaluation of 'Hollywood' with which cinema studies has been preoccupied under the challenges posed by the emergence and flourishing of new media.

Murray Pomerance, venerated film scholar, is the first to take on the 'cheat' in film, where 'cheating' constitutes a collection of production, performance, and structuring maneuvers intended to foster the impression of a screen reality that does not exist as presented. This usually calls for a suspension of disbelief in the viewer, but that rests on the assumption that disbelief is problematic for viewership, and that we must find some way to “suspend” or “disconnect” it in order to allow for the entertainment of the fiction in its own terms. The Film Cheat explores forty-five aspects of the 'cheat,' analyzing classic films such as Singin’ in the Rain and Chinatown, to more contemporary films like The Revenant and Baby Driver, with Pomerance engaging his encyclopedic knowledge of film history to point out numerous instances of suspensions of disbeliefs. Whether or not Gene Kelly is actually dancin' in the rain, or if Elliott is really flying on his bicycle carrying E.T., these cheats are what make movie magic. Elegantly weaving the narrative for one to dip into at random or to read from cover to cover, Pomerance turns things upside down so that the audience actually finds pleasure in the cheat itself, pleasure in the disbelief. To see the elegant fake, the supremely accomplished simulacrum is a pleasure in its own right, indeed one of the fundamental pleasures of cinema.

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"A witty, provocative, and necessary re-evaluation of the phenomenon known as Jerry Lewis. I myself have loved and despised Jerry, often both at the same time; I needed this book to tell me why."
---David Cronenberg

"These original, varied approaches are the heftiest appreciation of Lewis in English... Recommended."
--"Booklist"

The one thing everybody knows about Jerry Lewis is that he is beloved by the French, those incomprehensible hedonistic strangers across the sea. The French understand him, while in the U.S. he is at best a riddle, not one of us. Lewis is someone we take profound pleasure in excluding, if not ridiculing.

Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film is the first comprehensive collection devoted to one of the most controversial and accomplished figures in twentieth-century American cinema. A veteran of virtually every form of show business, Lewis's performances onscreen and the motion pictures he has directed reveal significant filmmaking talents, and show him to be what he has called himself, a "total filmmaker." Yet his work has been frequently derided by American critics.

This book challenges that easy reading by taking a more careful look at Lewis's considerable body of work onscreen in 16 diverse and penetrating essays. Turning to such films as"The Nutty Professor," "The Ladies Man," "The King of Comedy," "The Delicate Delinquent," "Living It Up," "The Errand Boy," "The Disorderly Orderly," "Arizona Dream," and "The Geisha Boy," the contributors address topics ranging from Lewis's on- and offscreen performances, the representations of disability in his films, and the Europeanobsession with Lewis, to his relationship with Dean Martin and Lewis's masculinity. Far from an out of control hysteric, Enfant Terrible! instead reveals Jerry Lewis to be a meticulous master of performance with a keen sense of American culture and the contemporary world.

Contributors include: Mikita Brottman, Scott Bukatman, David Desser, Leslie A. Fiedler, Craig Fischer, Lucy Fischer, Krin Gabbard, Barry Keith Grant, Andrew Horton, Susan Hunt, Frank Krutnik, Marcia Landy, Peter Lehman, Shawn Levy, Dana Polan, Murray Pomerance, and J. P. Telotte.

Murray Pomerance offers an illuminating account of one of Hitchcock's most intruiging and successful films, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring James Stewart and Doris Day. Through a close reading of the film alongside analysis of its complex production history, Pomerance's analysis highlights its darkest nuances, and its themes of musicality, gendered power, and cultural strangeness. He proposes that, far from being a merely charming escapade, the film tells a strange story of doubling, spiritual presence, and the intricacies of social organisation.

The development of young masculine sexuality is still a cultural taboo of sorts, and until now there has been little scholarship available that discusses aspects of boyhood and its relation to cinema--in particular, the process whereby masculinities are socially, historically, economically, aesthetically, and psychologically created in male coming-of-age as depicted onscreen. Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth scrutinizes a broad corpus of films about boyhood within a cross-genre, trans-historical, cross-authorial, and cross-cultural framework. Unlike the filmic investigations before it, this book is not restricted to examining boys as agents of violence, aggression, and withdrawal; or as routinely glassed agents of romance or victims of comedic ridicule. Where the Boys Are is divided into three sections: Archetypes and Facades includes essays that examine historically central typifications of boyhood, the most accessible categories for seeing and understanding boy characters; essays in Bonds and Beautifications analyze the ways boys establish images of themselves and identify with one another in affiliation or love; and essays in Struggles and Redefinitions explore the way boys are depicted in film as aligning themselves in relation to people, forces, ideas, and situations. Using the most current and diverse critical methods, Where the Boys Are is a crucial resources for film scholars and students at any level, and is also the perfect companion to Gateward and Pomerance's Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood (Wayne State University Press, 2002).

A provocative, contemporary anthology examining the construction of girls in modern cinema.

From the Wizard of Oz to Lolita, from the Heathers to the Spice Girls, images of girlhood have been projected on the silver screen in myriad ways. Whether a girl is taught that "there is no place like home" or is seeking adventure on her own terms, whether she is a seductress or a nerd, a babysitter or a murderer, films have depicted society's problematic expectations of girls together with the dreams, anxieties, and tensions experienced by girls themselves. In examining the construction of girlhood from many angles, this collection of essays not only captures the richness of meaning behind "girl films, " but also explores the recent resurgence of youth-oriented cinema and the relationship of young female viewers to that medium.

The twenty essays approach the construction of girlhood from a variety of perspectives, including reception, production, star images, and textual analyses, while exploring such topics as star power, the Riot Grrrl movement, coming of age, and loss of innocence. Among the characters given special attention are those in Gidget, Crooklyn, Titanic, Freeway, and Girls Town. Written for general and academic readers, this work offers a lively, unprecedented discussion of gender in youth-oriented films.

Global awareness of autism has skyrocketed since the 1980s, and popular culture has caught on, with film and television producers developing ever more material featuring autistic characters. Autism in Film and Television brings together more than a dozen essays on depictions of autism, exploring how autistic characters are signified in media and how the reception of these characters informs societal understandings of autism. Editors Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer have assembled a pioneering examination of autism's portrayal in film and television. Contributors consider the various means by which autism has been expressed in films such as Phantom Thread, Mercury Rising, and Life Animated and in television and streaming programs including Atypical, Stranger Things, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Community. Across media, the figure of the brilliant, accomplished, and "quirky" autist has proven especially appealing. Film and television have thus staked out a progressive position on neurodiversity by insisting on screen time for autism but have done so while frequently ignoring the true diversity of autistic experience. As a result, this volume is a welcome celebration of nonjudgmental approaches to disability, albeit one that is still freighted with stereotypes and elisions.

A thrilling tale of anxiety and moral extremity, Marnie (1964) cemented Alfred Hitchcock's reputation as a master of suspense and the visual form. Murray Pomerance here ranges through the many tortuous and thrilling passages of Marnie, weaving critical discussion together with production history to reveal Marnie as a woman in flight from her self, her past, her love, and the eyes of surveilling others. Challenging many received opinions - including claims of technical sloppiness and the proposal that Marnie's marriage night is a 'rape scene' - Pomerance sheds new light on a film that can often be difficult to understand and accept on its own terms. Original and stimulating, this BFI Film Classic identifies Marnie as one of Hitchcock's masterpieces, highlights the film's philosophical and psychological sensitivity, and reveals its sharp-eyed understanding of American society and its mores.

John Barrymore's influence on screen and stage in the early twentieth century is incalculable. His performances in the theatre defined Shakespeare for a generation, and his transition to cinema brought his theatrical performativity to both silent and sound screens. This book, a collection of fifteen original essays on the film performances and stardom of John Barrymore, redresses this lack of scholarship on Barrymore by offering a range of varied perspectives on the actor's work. Looking at his performances and influence from the perspectives of gender studies, psychoanalysis, queer studies and performance analysis, Hamlet Lives in Hollywood represents a major attempt by contemporary scholars to come to terms with the ongoing vitality of John Barrymore's work in our present day.

In Cinema, If You Please, Murray Pomerance explores our ways of watching film in light of socially organized forms of pleasure that date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wedding the notion of pleasure in film viewing to the history of pleasure in the West, the book considers pleasure gardens and promenading; the history of oil painting and its display; the passion for travel and exposure to the exotic and strange; and forms of musical repetition and restatement. With in-depth studies of films like Vertigo, The Passenger, A Matter of Life and Death, Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, Call Me By Your Name and Blow-Up, this ground-breaking book draws the reader into the past and the present at once, joining an understanding of personal and visual delight to their cultural and historical roots.

In the late 1960s, the collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system led in part, and for less than a decade, to a production trend heavily influenced by the international art cinema. Reflecting a new self-consciousness in the US about the national film patrimony, this period is known as the Hollywood Renaissance. However, critical study of the period is generally associated with its so-called principal auteurs, slighting a number of established and emerging directors who were responsible for many of the era's most innovative and artistically successful releases. With contributions from leading film scholars, this book provides a revisionist account of this creative resurgence by discussing and memorializing twenty-four directors of note who have not yet been given a proper place in the larger history of the period. Including filmmakers such as Hal Ashby, John Frankenheimer, Mike Nichols, and Joan Micklin Silver, this more expansive approach to the auteurism of the late 1960s and 1970s seems not only appropriate but pressing -- a necessary element of the re-evaluation of 'Hollywood' with which cinema studies has been preoccupied under the challenges posed by the emergence and flourishing of new media.

Presents a critical analysis of the films and career of George Cukor. Though many of his films are celebrated as classics, Cukor has yet to receive his proper due from academic critics. The film maker's interest in the various forms of indoor cinema lacked the generic focus of Ford's westerns and Hitchcock's thrillers, which were championed by the Cahiers critics in the 1950s. His style was theatricality writ large, a successful transference to the screen of what he had learned from his stage career, including the outsized, often flamboyant handling of emotionality. Ultimately, Cukor was much more than a man of the theatre who happened to spend most of his career making films. With ten original essays by leading film scholars, this volume celebrates Cukor's filmmaking career and supplies a hitherto missing chapter in the history of classic Hollywood. One of the first scholarly books to critical evaluate the work of George Cukor; Covers his work in theatre and his early films as well as his later work and emphasis on Cukor and performance.

The family unit has been a central theme in movies since the earliest days of the medium-- whether as a locus of domestic bliss, a dysfunctional source of drama, a collection of comic personalities or an inferno of repressed feelings. This new anthology brings the subject into sharp focus, collecting a range of multidisciplinary perspectives that attempt to directly penetrate the questions raised by the role of the family onscreen. Discussing a wide range of contemporary and classic films, from "House of Strangers" (1949) and "Mary Poppins" (1964) to "Superstar" (1987), "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001) and "Brokeback Mountain" (2005), this study addresses the nature of family values in cinema, and the 'family' nature of the Hollywood production system itself. With a wealth of historical background and contemporary analysis, this volume is a penetrating view of the oldest and most influential social institution as imagined for the screen.

Director Michael Curtiz was the mastermind behind some of the most iconic films of classical Hollywood—Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Sea Hawk, White Christmas, and Mildred Pierce, to name only a few. The most prolific and consistently successful Hollywood generalist with an all-embracing interest in different forms of narrative and spectacle, Curtiz made around a hundred films in an astonishing range of genres: action, biopics, melodramas/film noir, musicals, and westerns. But his important contributions to the history of American film have been overlooked because his broadly varied oeuvre does not present the unified vision of filmmaking that canonical criticism demands for the category of “auteur.” Exploring his films and artistic practice from a variety of angles, including politics, gender, and genre, The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz sheds new light on this underappreciated cinematic genius. Leading film studies scholars offer fresh appraisals of many of Curtiz’s most popular films, while also paying attention to neglected releases of substantial historical interest, such as Noah’s Ark , Night and Day, Virginia City, Black Fury, Mystery of the Wax Museum, and Female. Because Curtiz worked for so long and in so many genres, this analysis of his work becomes more than an author study of a notable director. Instead, The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz effectively adds a major chapter to the history of Hollywood’s studio era, including its internationalism and the significant contributions of European émigrés.

What actors do on-screen is a fascination for audiences all over the world. Indeed, the cultural visibility of movie stars is so pronounced that stardom has often been regarded as intrinsic to the medium's specificity. Yet not all great cinematic performances are star turns, and so, what really makes a cinematic performance good, interesting, or important has been a neglected topic in film criticism. This two-volume set presents detailed interpretations of singular performances by several of the most compelling actors in cinema history, asking in many different and complementary ways what makes performance meaningful, how it reflects a director's style, as well as how it contributes to the development of national cinemas and cultures. Whether noting the precise ways actors shape film narrative, achieve emotional effect, or move toward political subversion, the essays in these books innovate new approaches to studying screen performance as an art form and cultural force. This second volume focuses on international cinema, and includes case studies of key performances from actors like Ingrid Bergman, Gael Garcia Bernal, Nikolai Cherkassov, Alec Guinness, Setsuko Hara, Isabelle Huppert, Peter Lorre, Madhubala, Anna Magnani, Toshiro Mifune, and Choi Min Sik, amongst many others.

What actors do on-screen is a fascination for audiences all over the world. Indeed, the cultural visibility of movie stars is so pronounced that stardom has often been regarded as intrinsic to the medium's specificity. Yet not all great cinematic performances are star turns, and so, what really makes a cinematic performance good, interesting, or important has been a neglected topic in film criticism. This two-volume set presents detailed interpretations of singular performances by several of the most compelling actors in cinema history, asking in many different and complementary ways what makes performance meaningful, how it reflects a director's style, as well as how it contributes to the development of national cinemas and cultures. Whether noting the precise ways actors shape film narrative, achieve emotional effect, or move toward political subversion, the essays in these books innovate new approaches to studying screen performance as an art form and cultural force. This volume focuses on American cinema, including case studies of key performances from actors like Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Whoopi Goldberg, Cary Grant, Oscar Isaac, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Sidney Poitier, Gena Rowlands, Peter Sellers, Kristen Stewart, and Ethel Waters, amongst many others.

Michelangelo Antonioni, who died in 2007, was one of cinema's greatest modernist filmmakers. The films in his black and white trilogy of the early 1960s - "L'avventura," "La Notte," "L'eclisse" -are justly celebrated for their influential, gorgeously austere style. But in this book, Murray Pomerance demonstrates why the color films that followed are, in fact, Antonioni's greatest works. Writing in an accessible style that evokes Antonioni's expansive use of space, Pomerance discusses "The Red Desert," "Blow-Up," "Professione: Reporter (The Passenger)," "Zabriskie Point," "Identification of a Woman," "The Mystery of Oberwald," "Beyond the Clouds," and "The Dangerous Thread of Things" to analyze the director's subtle and complex use of color. Infusing his open-ended inquiry with both scholarly and personal reflection, Pomerance evokes the full range of sensation, nuance, and equivocation that became Antonioni's signature.

In Cinema, If You Please, Murray Pomerance explores our ways of watching film in light of socially organized forms of pleasure that date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wedding the notion of pleasure in film viewing to the history of pleasure in the West, the book considers pleasure gardens and promenading; the history of oil painting and its display; the passion for travel and exposure to the exotic and strange; and forms of musical repetition and restatement. With in-depth studies of films like Vertigo, The Passenger, A Matter of Life and Death, Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, Call Me By Your Name and Blow-Up, this ground-breaking book draws the reader into the past and the present at once, joining an understanding of personal and visual delight to their cultural and historical roots.