This volume introduces ways to use film to ease the difficulty of introducing complex literary theories to students. By coupling works of literature with attendant films the author provides instructors with accessible avenues for encouraging classroom discussion. Literary theories covered include psychoanalytic criticism (""The Awakening"" and film adaptations ""The End of August"" and ""Grand Isle""), cultural criticism (""A Streetcar Named Desire"" and the film adaptation of the same name), and thematic criticism (""Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"" and the film adaptation ""Splendor in the Grass""). The work then offers a survey of the image patterns into which film adaptation theories can be grouped and how these theories relate to literary theory.

With McDonalds in Moscow and Disneyland in Paris and Tokyo, American popular culture is spreading around the globe. Regional, national, and ethnic cultures are being powerfully affected by competition from American values and American popular forms. This literate and lively study explores the spread of American culture into international cinema as reflected by the collision and partial merger of two important styles of filmmaking: the Hollywood style of stars, genres, and action, and the European art film style of ambiguity, authorial commentary, and borrowings from other arts. Peter Lev departs from the traditional approach of national cinema histories and discusses some of the blends, overlaps, and hegemonies that are typical of the world film industry of recent years. In Part One, he gives a historical and theoretical overview of what he terms the "Euro-American art film," which is characterized by prominent use of the English language, a European art film director, cast and crew from at least two countries, and a stylistic mixing of European art film and American entertainment. The second part of Lev's study examines in detail five examples of the Euro-American art film: Contempt (1963), Blow-Up (1966), The Canterbury Tales (1972), Paris, Texas (1983), and The Last Emperor (1987). These case studies reveal that the European art film has had a strong influence on world cinema and that many Euro-American films are truly cultural blends rather than abject takeovers by Hollywood cinema.

When the Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935, the company posed little threat to industry juggernauts such as Paramount and MGM. In the years that followed however, guided by executives Darryl F. Zanuck and Spyros Skouras, it soon emerged as one of the most important studios. Though working from separate offices in New York and Los Angeles and often of two different minds, the two men navigated Twentieth Century-Fox through the trials of the World War II boom, the birth of television, the Hollywood Blacklist, and more to an era of exceptional success, which included what was then the highest grossing movie of all time, The Sound of Music. Twentieth Century-Fox is a comprehensive examination of the studio's transformation during the Zanuck-Skouras era. Instead of limiting his scope to the Hollywood production studio, Lev also delves into the corporate strategies, distribution models, government relations, and technological innovations that were the responsibilities of the New York headquarters. Moving chronologically, he examines the corporate history before analyzing individual films produced by Twentieth Century-Fox during that period. Drawn largely from original archival research, Twentieth Century-Fox offers not only enlightening analyses and new insights into the films and the history of the company, but also affords the reader a unique perspective from which to view the evolution of the entire film industry.

While the anti-establishment rebels of 1969's Easy Rider were morphing into the nostalgic yuppies of 1983's The Big Chill, Seventies movies brought us everything from killer sharks, blaxploitation, and teen comedies to haunting views of a divided America at war. Indeed, as Peter Lev Persuasively argues in this book, the films of the 1970s constitute a kind of conversation about what American society is and should be -- open, diverse, and egalitarian, or stubbornly resistant to change.

Examining forty films thematically, Lev explores the conflicting visions presented within ten different film genres or subjects:
-- Hippies (Easy Rider, Alice's Restaurant)
-- Cops (The French Connection, Dirty Harry)
-- Disasters and Conspiracies (Jaws, Chinatown)
-- End of the Sixties (Nashville, The Big Chill)
-- Art, Sex, and Hollywood (Last Tango in Paris)
-- Teens (American Graffiti, Animal House)
-- War (Patton, Apocalypse Now)
-- African-Americans (Shaft, Superfly)
-- Feminisms (An Unmarried Woman, The China Syndrome)
-- Future Visions (Star Wars, Blade Runner)

As accessible to ordinary moviegoers as to film scholars, Lev's book is an essential companion to these familiar, well-loved movies.

From examinations of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, The Literature Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation covers a wide range of films adapted from other sources. The first section presents essays on the hows and whys of adaptation studies, and subsequent sections highlight films adapted from a variety of sources, including classic and popular literature, drama, biography, and memoir. The last section offers a new departure for adaptation studies, suggesting that films about history often a separate category of film study can be seen as adaptations of records of the past. The anthology concludes with speculations about the future of adaptation studies. Several essays provide detailed analyses of films, in some cases discussing more than one adaptation of a literary or dramatic source, such as The Manchurian Candidate, The Quiet American, and Romeo and Juliet. Other works examined include Moby Dick, The House of Mirth, Dracula, and Starship Troopers, demonstrating the breadth of material considered for this anthology. Although many of the essays appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly, more than half are original contributions. Chosen for their readability, these essays avoid theoretical jargon as much as possible. For this reason alone, this collection should be of interest to not only cinema scholars but to anyone interested in films and their source material. Ultimately, The Literature Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation provides an excellent overview of this critical aspect of film studies.

Completing the landmark, award-winning, ten-volume series on the first century of American film, "The Fifties" covers a particularly tumultuous period. Peter Lev explores the divorce of movie studios from their theater chains; the panic of the blacklist era; the explosive emergence of science fiction as the dominant genre ("The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, War of the Worlds"); the rise of television and Hollywood's response to the new medium, as seen in widescreen spectacles ("The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur) and mature Westerns (High Noon, Shane, The Searchers"). The richly detailed text elucidates a number of emerging trends as Hollywood, with its familiar stars and genres, reached out as an industry to the newly acknowledged "teenage" generation with rock and roll films, and movies as diverse as "Rebel Without a Cause and Gidget."