Directory of World Cinema: American Hollywood : American Hollywood [1&nbsp;ed.] 9781841505206, 9781841504155
With its sprawling celebrity homes, the Walk of Fame and the iconic sign on the hill, Hollywood is truly the land of sta...
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ollywoo

mericA

directory of

world

cinema

EDITED by LInCoLn GErAGHTy

Volume 5

directory of world cinema american hollywood

Edited by Lincoln Geraghty

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

Directory of World Cinema

First Published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Publisher: May Yao Publishing Assistant: Melanie Marshall Cover photo: Warner Bros./DC Comics/The Kobal Collection Cover Design: Holly Rose Copy Editor: Heather Owen Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire Directory of World Cinema ISSN 2040-7971 Directory of World Cinema eISSN 2040-798X Directory of World Cinema: American Hollywood ISBN 978-1-84150-415-5 Directory of World Cinema: American Hollywood eISBN 978-1-84150-520-6 Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

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ontent

directory of world cinema American hollywood Acknowledgements 5 Introduction by the Editor

6

Hollywood: A History?

9

The Hollywood Film Industry 12 Stardom 16 Directors 20 Clint Eastwood John Ford DW Griffith Steven Spielberg Westerns 44 Essay Reviews Crime Film Essay Reviews

64

Science Fiction Essay Reviews

88

Horror 108 Essay Reviews Comedy 126 Essay Reviews Historical Films Essay Reviews

146

Musicals 168 Essay Reviews War Films Essay Reviews

188

Drama Essay Reviews

208

Romance Essay Reviews

224

Animation Essay Reviews

242

Blockbusters Essay Reviews

262

Recommended Reading

282

Online Resources

287

Test Your Knowledge

289

Notes on Contributors

292

Filmography 300

KNOWLEDG

Directory of World Cinema

The completion of this book would not have been possible without the help and support of a number of individuals. First of all I must acknowledge my editor May Yao, who showed faith in me taking on and developing this project, Melanie Marshall and all those at Intellect who helped in the production of the finished work. I want to thank all of the contributors who got fully behind this project and endeavoured to meet tight deadlines and respond to editorial feedback with little hesitancy or complaint. Each contributor brings their own insight and approach to the essays and reviews contained within this volume and, as a result, the book is strengthened by their diversity and knowledge. To my colleagues in the School of Creative Arts, Film and Media at the University of Portsmouth who wanted to be involved with the project I offer my gratitude for stepping forward, despite their busy schedules, and volunteering to write their essays and reviews. We routinely discuss and argue about Hollywood film in the classroom and corridor but to put fingers to keyboard and commit our ideas to print is a challenging thing which I must thank you for. Similarly, I want to thank the students I have taught over the years for continuing to make me enthusiastic about film, both teaching it and writing about it. Lastly, I must thank my partner Rebecca Janicker who, as ever, had to put up with me working long hours editing the volume but supported me when I might have lacked energy and faith in finishing it.

Lincoln Geraghty

Acknowledgements 5

Directory of World Cinema

Introduction by the Editor

There is no doubt that Hollywood has been the most popular and successful producer of film throughout the history of cinema. As a result, America continues to be at the centre of global film production, whether directly making films within its borders or financing projects on all continents of the world. Yet, it is also commonplace to hear that Hollywood is under threat, that film is becoming less popular as a form of media entertainment and will soon lose out (if it has not already) to the lure and excitement of the Internet and video games. The recent rejuvenation of 3D cinema, with the likes of Disney and DreamWorks producing more and more films in 3D or converting older ones to be viewed with the aid of glasses, clearly signals that Hollywood is responding to developments in new media technology by returning to methods used when film was previously under threat from television. However, unlike the 1950s and 1970s when ramping up the special effects and increasing blockbuster budgets guaranteed studios success against poor box office receipts, in the last ten years Hollywood has had to concede that audience tastes and viewing habits are now different. To attract people to watch the latest cinema release means it now must look to competing media forms (TV, Internet, video games) for clues as to how people consume the media and it must utilize previously unfamiliar methods of production, distribution and exhibition to remain competitive in a congested entertainment market. In many ways, Hollywood has met some of the challenges to it posed by international markets and technology. The growth of home cinema, VHS in the 1980s through to DVD and Blu-Ray in the 1990s and today, shows that Hollywood films are still consumed in enormous quantities. Sales of special edition boxsets and director’s cut versions of cult classics are booming as cinema fans want to own a piece of Hollywood history and watch it in the comfort of their own living rooms. People are still clearly watching American film, Hollywood is still relevant and entertaining, but audiences now interact with films in so many different ways and forms that trying to gauge the popularity of one film over another is difficult. What bombed at the cinema may excite people on DVD after the extras are added and the director gets to finish the film the way they originally envisioned. However, perhaps what makes Hollywood film so resilient is not how it responds to industrial and technological trends but how it continues to react to and engage with the cultural contexts in which it is produced. Moments of political, national and historical significance in America and the world have provided Hollywood studios, producers and directors inspiration for hundreds of films that have since become barometers for changes in our own society. Hollywood may simply keep us entertained but it also acts as a measure for social and cultural development and as such this volume seeks to analyse and contextualize some of the most iconic examples of film. The introductory essays featured in this volume look at Hollywood from a number of different perspectives: historical, industrial, and cultural. While the authors have each taken a particular position on how Hollywood has evolved, the essays in total clearly indicate the extent to which Hollywood as an idea, as a place, and as a phenomenon has had to adapt to meet the challenges of an ever-changing global film market. Competing with Asia, Europe, Latin America and Australasia, and indeed the growth in popularity of

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independent film, the major Hollywood studios are always looking for ways to recapture popular audiences and entice them into cinemas. With the increase in new technologies used for making its films today, advances in CGI and 3D being the latest, we can see how Hollywood continues to experiment with new techniques and returns to tried and tested methods of capturing the audience’s imagination. Following insights on the industry and its history, essays on specific directors offer more detailed discussions of how films are made and personalities created in Hollywood. Fascinating essays on Clint Eastwood, John Ford, DW Griffith, and Steven Spielberg recognize that directors play a major part in the evolution of film-making in their own right, and that a focus on their production methodologies, recurring themes, and personal biographies can tell us an enormous amount about what makes Hollywood film so popular. The rest of this book is primarily organized by genre. Film reviews are divided into sections, ten of which are recognizable cinematic genres: the Western, comedy, horror, etc. The final two sections of film reviews, animated features and blockbusters, are related more to form and the changing tastes of the movie-going audience and thus contain reviews of films that cross over a multitude of different genres and cinematic movements. All sections begin with an introductory essay that establishes the genre or group of films and highlights the most significant and influential moments in their respective histories. As can clearly be seen in the range of films chosen for inclusion in this first volume on Hollywood cinema, there is great diversity; some films that appear here may not be automatically considered the most popular or standout of their genre – indeed, some films could quite comfortably sit in more than one of the genre categories. However, what the contributors and I have tried to achieve is a more measured analysis of what makes Hollywood cinema still so prevalent and successful today by examining both the major blockbusters and some of the more dramatic and understated films produced over the past hundred years.

Lincoln Geraghty

Introduction 7

Paramount Pictures, 1938, Paramount.

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HOLLYWOOD: A HISTORY?

The History of Hollywood is bound up with the history of America. As a nation growing to become an international superpower during the twentieth century, America took the lead in global politics, manufacturing and business. Likewise, as Hollywood grew to become the leading producer of films in the early part of the century, it defined what makes film popular: the story. Hollywood makes stories, it is after all dubbed the ‘dream factory’, and whether they be complex dramas or spectacular blockbusters, the story is what makes people go out to the cinema, go out and buy the DVD or watch a rerun on TV. A good story, the film’s narrative, will always attract an audience. The following short ‘history’ is about how making stories became the main aim of Hollywood and is, in essence, the reason why Hollywood still reigns supreme; for stories entertain and, whether or not we like to see it in such simple terms, audiences want to be entertained. In the late nineteenth century, film was considered a technological marvel; an attraction to wow an audience and advertise the technical genius of the film-maker. Those who made films, early short recordings of everyday life screened to select audiences, considered the new medium emblematic of scientific advancement rather than a necessarily artistic practice. Louis and Auguste Lumières’s projected images on the wall of the Grand Café in Paris grabbed people’s attention but offered no story to keep it and make it last. Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), a recording of people leaving their workshop, showed that film had the potential to capture attention but their films, a mixture of actualities, scenics, and topicals, only played back images that people could experience for real in the everyday. Alternately, France’s Georges Méliès, a magician and film-maker, saw the potential in film to really challenge the intended audience. His films differed from the actualities made by the likes of the Lumières and were far more fantastical, using camera tricks, magical illusions, stages and props deliberately to confuse the audience – taking them, momentarily, to another world beyond the confines of their daily lives. The use of tinted film, early special effects such as smoke and stop motion, allowed Méliès to create alternate worlds on screen: his Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) and Voyage à Travers l’Impossible (1904) depicted, albeit rather inaccurately, the possibility of life on other planets. His films can be considered paintings that viewers could gaze upon. Both examples of early film-making constitute a period in film history dubbed ‘The Cinema of Attractions’. Méliès, like the Lumières brothers, used the new medium to delight and astonish the audience. For example, A Trip to the Moon may have depicted space travel and extraterrestrial life but what fascinated Méliès even more was the potential for the ‘scenario’ to act as ‘pretext’ for stage effects, tricks, and a ‘nicely arranged tableau’ (Méliès cited in Gunning 1990: 57). In contrast, America’s Edwin S Porter used film to tell a story. With the aid of Thomas Edison’s newly developed camera and projection equipment, his adaptations of American classics such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1903 and variations on the Wild West theme seen in The Great Train Robbery (1903) are examples of narrative becoming central to the film-maker’s art. As audience tastes became more sophisticated film-makers had to develop new ways to keep people engrossed and entertained. Thrilling scenes of daring-do could only entertain for as long as the story that got people to that point was

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interesting and captivating in its own right. As film became more of a business than a form of artistic expression, producers and exhibitors trying to make a profit believed that longer and more engaging stories would pack more people into the nickelodeons and get them coming back for more. Hollywood’s greatest achievement was to take a technological wonder that the Lumières and Méliès experimented with and make it into a money-making form of storytelling. At this point in film history the medium truly became American. The dominance of narrative over spectacle is perhaps central to film becoming the popular form of entertainment it is today. Film clearly had the potential to make some people a lot of money – producers, actors, writers, stars, exhibitors, for example – but for a lone entrepreneur the profit margins were small. What Hollywood did was to make film a business, make it profitable and adaptable to suit differing audience tastes. As cinemas opened up in every town and city across the country, owners cried out for more movies to show. Demand was met by Hollywood, which, by 1911, had established itself as the most suitable location for film production. At the heart of it, the new fledgling studios started to perfect the techniques and methods of making multiple films at the same time. Film production became more like the factory line seen in the American manufacturing industry and the formula that made it work was the adoption of the ‘classical norms’ of film-making. Classical Hollywood Cinema, as we know it today, ‘put emphasis on narrative continuity and the coherent ordering of space’. As a result, the techniques of film-making were linked to ‘a unified mode of storytelling’ (Grainge, Jancovich & Monteith 2007: 74). Making ten films in the same time that it used to take to make one or two drove studios to maximize time and effort. The division of labour on film projects allowed for a team of writers to concentrate on writing scripts, or parts of scripts, that could be taken on by a team of directors who would use the stages and backlots of the studio at the same time but shooting different scenes. Similar plots for similar stories meant also that props and sets could be reused and recycled for different films. Set designers, lighting technicians, cameramen and editors could work on different films contiguously, as the production schedule called for them to join at different stages of production. These deliberate and segmented modes of film-making relied on the adoption of the continuity script which meant films were made according to the availability of location, staff or stage set rather than the order in which each scene came in the story. The linear narrative of the film was brought to life through the editing of footage after it was finally shot, piecing together scenes that perhaps happen at the same time in the story but in different places. Thus narrative film was largely defined by the establishment of production techniques designed to keep costs low and increase output to satisfy audience demand. Due to the nature of the studio system and the classical norms of Hollywood, film-making genres were, and still are, reliable means through which producers could maximize profits and guarantee an audience. Studios set up to make a certain type of film, using the same sets, directors, stars, and writers for example, became known for a particular genre since that was what they made in the most cost-effective fashion. Film genres created expectation on the behalf of audiences, who knew what they wanted to see, that they would get it, and studios fulfilled demand based on a system of factory-line production. Tom Ryall stated that ‘Genres may be defined as patterns/forms/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the film maker, and their reading by an audience’ (cited in Hutchings 1995: 65–6), therefore genres not only offer the primary framework for Hollywood storytelling but they also determine how we ourselves categorize films. This volume is in some ways all about the categorization of Hollywood film, but, in defining what genre a film is and thinking about the relationship between different films of the same genre, we are forced to take notice of the industrial drives that influence the production and reception of individual films.

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Recognizing that genres are bound up with the history of storytelling in film acknowledges both the level at which films are conceived and made industrially and how we, as an audience, are innately familiar with how stories speak to us culturally. For Steve Neale, ‘genres function to move the subject from text to text and from text to narrative system, binding these instances together into a constant coherence, the coherence of the cinematic institution’ (cited in Hutchings 1995: 72). So the history of Hollywood is not one history but an amalgam of histories: a history of spectacle versus narrative, technological change and development, industrial practices, artistic differences, economic forces, and the formation of a set of norms. Out of these histories come the popular and entertaining genres we still enjoy today and the variety of Hollywood films discussed in this book.

Lincoln Geraghty References Grainge, P, Jancovich, M & Monteith, S (2007) Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gunning, T (1990) ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in T Elsaesser (ed), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, London: BFI, pp. 56–62. Hutchings, P (1995) ‘Genre Theory and Criticism’, in J Hollows and M Jancovich (eds), Approaches to Popular Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 59–77.

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Los Angeles/Hollywood, Mgm. Photographed by Neil Setchfield.

the hollywood film industry

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April 2010 was a key month for the student of signs in the cinema. That was the month that the literal Hollywood sign – the 45-feet-tall creation of wood and metal on Cahuenga Peak – was rescued from demolition. The rescue of the sign, facilitated by Playboy owner Hugh Hefner, was truly a symbolic moment. Arnold Schwarzenegger mused that the sign would continue to serve as ‘a symbol of dreams and opportunity’ (Child 2010: para. 3). Essentially, Hefner’s gesture meant that it would continue to do its bit to signify the brand values of Hollywood; to mark a border between the regular world and dreamland. This is important because the American production capital has been under continual threat in recent times. Other people make films; moreover, American-based companies make films elsewhere. At the same time, the digital era, in all its manifestations, is presenting fundamental challenges to Hollywood’s traditional command of the visual image. Hollywood elsewhere Of course, Hollywood has always been a brand, a place built on inspiring images of people, places and, importantly, itself. But, significantly, it is also a place where things (pre-eminently films and TV programmes) are made. So Hollywood is at once a dream land and a dream factory and the two processes are intimately connected; as Nick Roddick described: ... in the entertainment industry carefully fostered and disseminated images are as vital a part of the product as more tangible material manufactures on which that image is built. (Roddick 1983: 4) In other words, Hollywood both fosters and furnishes our dreams. The manufacturing side has been profoundly affected by two main factors: the demands of post-Fordist production (i.e. the disassembling of the old studio systems of film manufacture) and wider processes of globalization. Writing in 1986, Douglas Gomery asserted that ‘Hollywood has come to symbolise [a] particular industrial arena, with ... cavernous sound stages, multi-acre lots and secret special effects’ (Gomery 1986: 8). But the economies of scale and factory methods which characterized the old studio system no longer apply. Today, many aspects of film production are out-sourced and Hollywood companies struggle to compete for work on a global stage. Of particular significance to the stability and self-image of Hollywood has been the ‘runaway’ production: films financed largely by American companies but produced away from the entertainment capital. This is not a new phenomenon. In the immediate postwar era, Hollywood companies filmed overseas as a means of expending their ‘frozen’ profits in foreign lands. In the process, they found that runaway production frequently offered other advantages, including cheaper labour, tax concessions, exotic locations and favourable exchange rates. Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan suggest that such inducements ‘are still very much in evidence today’ (Goldsmith & O’Regan 2005: 9), but the world of runaway film production has become ever-more competitive as nations, and even home states, vie to offer the most attractive deals to American producers. The United Kingdom has been the traditional home to the runaway company, but during the noughties a succession of countries – Canada, New Zealand, Australia and (notably) the Czech Republic – managed to attract big American dollars. Recently, other European companies such as Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria have lured American companies by dint of their depressed economies and attendant ‘cheap labour, materials and facilities’ (Longwell 2008: 9). In addition, further pressure has been exerted on the physical Hollywood studios, and the technicians in their employ, by competition between American states. In 2002, Louisiana and New Mexico both introduced concessions as the means of combating the movement of film production to Canada (New Mexico returns 25 per cent of spend to producers); later, Michigan offered 40-42 per cent tax credits to film companies (Moore 2008: 24). Then, in February 2009, California attempted to entice The Hollywood Film Industry 13

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films back to the West coast by announcing a five-year programme of tax incentives for producers (Diorio 2009: 67). The runaway production has a long and complex history, but the various movements – including the recent internecine conflicts – have all exerted a dissipating effect on the image of Hollywood as the home of the movies. Trends in digital entertainment have weakened the Hollywood brand further, to the point of questioning the very authority of the film image. The digital universe Digital technologies have influenced each of the three phases of the film industry: production, distribution and exhibition. But, for all of the ballyhoo about the ‘digital revolution’ in film production (as marked by developments in CGI and, latterly, 3D technologies), the decisive effects will probably be felt most in the second and third phases. The Hollywood film industry is challenged by convergent technologies because they revise the ways by which we consume, and ultimately relate to, moving images. We can see this if we consider the shifting, and sometimes interlocking, stories of films, DVDs and mobile telephones. In retrospect, the 1980s was a decisive period for Hollywood film culture. That decade saw the growth of the multiplex and the attendant phenomenon of the blockbuster. At the same time, and despite initial fears from the majors, film viewing moved away from the theatre and into the home via bought and rented video tapes. As Richard Maltby has demonstrated, the VCR boom provided the pre-conditions for the subsequent rise of DVD and for the contemporary situation where ‘Movie production has become ... the creation of “filmed entertainment” software, to be viewed through several different windows ...’ (Maltby 2003: 190). It is estimated that DVD sales account for 70 per cent of a film’s profits. Inevitably, the rise of the DVD has led to the reconfiguring of cinema. On John Ellis’s famous terms, cinema-going endures as a public ‘event’ (Ellis 1992: 26), a dynamic alternative to home-based entertainment. But, paradoxically, the success of the DVD has finally led to it becoming the main event, to the point where the film showing becomes virtually a method of pre-selling. In turn, the DVD has provided the pre-conditions for the emergence of other forms of convergent distribution of movies, via the WWW, cable and mobile receivers. Barbara Klinger has written of the Home Theatre as a ‘fortress technology’ which ‘depends on importing the newest and best products from the outside in order to generate ... a selfsufficient, inviolable interior space’ (Klinger 2006: 242). Clearly, DVDs are an essential part of the armoury, but their major asset is their portability and their intimation of control (the fantasy of owning the film). But, then, DVDs are now in a state of decline. In 2008, Digital Entertainment Group reported a 32 per cent decline in overall sales. The Hollywood majors have also been alarmed by the poor performance of Blu-Ray and disappointed by the diminishing returns from View on Demand (VOD) screenings: these net them just 33 per cent of the revenues that they derive from DVD sales (Grover 2009a: para. 2). The above pressures are forcing movies onto increasingly smaller screens. Paramount has expressed a particular interest in distribution and exhibition via the web. Its President of Digital Entertainment, Thomas Lesinski, revealed much about his company’s relationship with the moving image via his observations of February 2009: ou can use the internet to launch a film like you use a movie theatre. The trick will be Y to ramp up electronic distribution without tanking the DVD business. (Grover 2009b: para. 7) The decline of the cinema as a public sphere has been indicated also by recent talk among the majors of near ‘date and time’ (i.e. simultaneous) releases of DVDs with cinema screenings. But the biggest threat to the authority of the movie image probably comes from mobile technologies. Since 2006, the Hollywood majors have all expressed 14 American Hollywood

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a strong interest in exploiting the market for downloaded movies via 3G (Third Generation) mobile telephones. The advantages to the companies are obvious. In June 2006, the Market Intelligence Centre predicted that mobile phone ownership would increase, worldwide, by 33 per cent by 2010 (Koranteng 2006: 22). The new technology also affords companies the chance to establish new download markets on more advantageous terms. In this regard, mSpot announced a deal in October 2009, involving Paramount, NBC Universal and the Weinstein Company, for instant access streaming of films at $4.99 a shot (Netherby 2009: 9, 23). Whither Hollywood? The distribution and consumption of films via digital, mobile technologies threatens to turn movies into basic moving images – the enjoyment predicated on the simple sensation of movement. The President/CEO of Vue Entertainment, Tim Richards, has suggested that there is no market ‘for people to watch an X-inch high King Kong’ (Koranteng 2006: 22). But it really comes down to a question of definitions. As Keyan G Tomaselli and Jonathan Dockney suggest, producers feel an increasing need to woo the ‘Digital Natives’, the people who have grown up with digital technologies and who expect entertainment to be delivered to them on their terms (Tomaselli & Dockney 2009: 130). In this context, and as the modern ‘Event Movie’ suggests, the role of traditional Hollywood cinema is to form part of the inter-textual mix. This essay has been about the image, in its various forms. In particular, it has been about Hollywood and the threats posed to its self-image in the global and digital age. Returning to that sign on Cahuenga Peak, it seems obvious that it functions as a point of stability for an industry that has often had to respond to new challenges. But the genius of Hollywood (to borrow a term coined by Thomas Schatz) really lies in its flexibility – much like the sign, it is well practised in bending with the wind.

Laurie N Ede References Child, B (2010) ‘Hollywood sign is saved by Hugh Heffner donation’, http: //www.guardian.co.uk/film. Accessed 30 April 2010. Diorio, C (2009) ‘California budget provides biz boost’, Hollywood Reporter, 20 February. Tomaselli, KG, & Dockney, J (2009) ‘For the Small(er) Screen: Film, Mobile TV and the new Individual Television Experience’, Journal of African Cinemas, 1: 1, pp. 128–34. Ellis, J (1992) Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, London: Routledge. Goldsmith, B, & O’Regan, T (2005) The Film Studio: Film Production in the Global Economy, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Gomery, D (1986) The Hollywood Studio System, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Grover, R (2009a) ‘Hollywood DVD Sales: Are the Good Times Gone?’, http: //www.businessweek. com/technology. Accessed 13 March 2010. Grover, R (2009b) ‘Hollywood is Worried as DVD Sales Slow’, http: //www.businessweek.com/ technology. Accessed 19 February 2010. Klinger, B (2006) Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies and the Home, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Koranteng, J (2006), ‘Online Onramp’, Hollywood Reporter, 20 June. Longwell, L (2008) ‘Goodbye to All That’, Hollywood Reporter, 30 October. Maltby, R (2003) Hollywood Cinema, London: Blackwell. Moore, S (2008) ‘Forecast calls for high chance of lows as storm clouds gather over Hollywood’, Hollywood Reporter, 14 November. Netherby, J (2009) ‘Paramount, Universal movies hit the mSpot’, Video Business, 10 May. Roddick, N (1983) A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s, London: British Film Institute.

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Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, 1953, 20th Century Fox.

STARDOM

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The influence of ‘stars’ in Hollywood can be traced back to the beginnings of the industry and infrastructure in California. While actors initially had to mime actions and dialogue for silent films, well-known faces quickly became identifiable to audiences – even if theatregoers did not yet know their names. Producer Carl Laemmle acquired ‘Biograph Girl’ Florence Lawrence for his Independent Moving Pictures Company, and knew early on how to manufacture publicity: he created a false rumour that she had been killed in a streetcar accident and, soon after, revealed that she was in perfectly good health and would be starring in one of his films. Newspaper and magazine publicity about stars was also prevalent in the early days of Hollywood, and the scandal involving Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle proved that there was indeed such a thing as bad publicity – and that it could destroy your career. By the time Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and director DW Griffith formed United Artists in 1919 (the first studio to be formed by actors as a means of creative control), audiences had latched onto the idea of a ‘star’ as the most identifiable element of a motion picture, and Hollywood had grown to recognize audiences’ interest in marketing them as such. Chaplin indeed provides an interesting starting point in a brief discussion of how stars can change and grow within the Hollywood system. Chaplin’s long-term reliance on his ‘tramp’ persona onscreen showed how an actor could become a star through an endearing persona and, also, how a star can then utilize their popularity to highlight issues of societal or cultural concern (in Chaplin’s case, the struggles of the poor and underprivileged, drawn from his own childhood). Chaplin’s early successes allowed him unlimited creative and financial freedom to pursue more complex narratives and characters; though he had endeared himself to audiences with early shorts like Easy Street (1917) and features such as The Gold Rush (1925), later films such as The Great Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947) permanently cemented Chaplin’s reputation as one of the great multitalented stars in cinematic history. During the first half-century of Hollywood, actors were often tied to studio contracts, but could be loaned out to rival studios on a film-by-film basis. Early on, the rules were strict: actors often had ‘morality clauses’ in their contracts; male actors were to dress and act dignified; and female actresses were to always look glamorous. The ‘star system’ became a complex methodology as studios and agencies worked together to find, design, promote and protect their ‘perfect’ stars from private drinking problems, affairs, or ‘homosexual tendencies’. Stars, then, became interesting to trace as they transformed themselves throughout changing genres and film-making innovations such as colour and widescreen, weaving their popular faces and mannerisms in and out of shifting iconography and backgrounds. Fred Astaire’s display of dancing talent in films like 42nd Street (1933) was just the springboard for an elaborate series of performance skills he would display much later in his career in films like The Bandwagon (1953), which managed to touch on multiple genres including film noir, the Western and, of course, the musical. By the time Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond uttered ‘I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille’, at the end of Sunset Boulevard (1950), Hollywood’s treatment of stars had reached a whole new level of cultural (and, arguably, academic) profundity. Orson Welles had already established and crippled his own cinematic legacy by directing and starring in Citizen Kane (1942), which offended influential newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst so greatly that Welles’ career never quite recovered – all of his subsequent productions were either severely edited or quashed mid-production due to lack of funding or resources. A career, at once open to all possibilities, was stripped of its potential for legendary status, though, in effect, Welles became legendary by default, achieving ‘star’ status not entirely for his cinematic accomplishments, but for his stunning lack of them. What remains of his legacy on film still causes us to constantly reconsider the motivations, meanings, and manipulations inherent in all of his work – and within the Hollywood industry itself. Marilyn Monroe began life as Norma Jeane Mortenson but her iconic presence in films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and The Seven Year Itch (1955) changed the way Hollywood and the public viewed her (and perhaps women) forever. Sadly, as Monroe began to tone down her self-image and deliver altogether different kinds of performances Stardom 17

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in films like The Misfits (1962), her personal problems had taken over her work; she was fired from what would be her final (incomplete) work, 20th Century Fox’s Something’s Got to Give (1962), which prompted the then Vice President, Peter Levathes, to respond: ‘The star system has gotten way out of hand’. During the 1950s and 1960s, ‘method’ actors began infiltrating Hollywood with new kinds of ‘naturalistic’ performances, including those of Marlon Brando, who made a significant impression starring in a screen adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Brando, and others like Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro, took on unusual acting challenges and expanded their range as their careers progressed. Academically, stars became fertile ground for serious research with the publication of Richard Dyer’s Stars in 1979, which ushered in a new wave of academic interest in the subject and, today, continues to encourage a wide range of scholarship from numerous different industrial, cultural and theoretical angles. Hollywood history has shown consistently that the personal lives of stars do indeed affect how they are perceived and processed within the ‘public eye’. Hugh Grant’s mid-career dalliance with a prostitute in Los Angeles in 1995 did not end his career, but the actor’s quick, uncomplicated public response to the incident is perhaps one of the most honest statements ever made by a star in an attempt to sweep things under the rug: appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno a few days after the incident, he stated: ‘I think you know in life what’s a good thing to do and what’s a bad thing, and I did a bad thing.’ Some stars are not as lucky: after allegedly making anti-Semitic comments during a drunk-driving arrest in 2006, Mel Gibson retreated from the public eye and did not appear onscreen again until 2010’s Edge of Darkness. Soon after, Gibson’s career was again put in jeopardy when his agency dropped him (a highly unusual move) following the public release of recordings of angry phone messages to his girlfriend which contained a series of violent insults and racial slurs. Prominent female stars in contemporary Hollywood have not found it easy, either: Sharon Stone built a career on flashy narratives and characterized controversy, but seemed incapable of distinguishing herself from it, and the media’s coverage of Angelina Jolie’s career often seems driven by her personal tribulations rather than her consistently strong performances. Robert Downey Jr moved effortlessly from 1980s’ pop-movie performances to Academy Award-nominated prestige projects (Chaplin, 1992) to challenging independent dramas (Two Girls and a Guy, 1998) before being sidelined by drug problems and multiple arrests but, after winning the starring role in 2008’s Iron Man and helping to make it a worldwide success, Downey’s career and faith with audiences was restored. Similarly, 1980s’ action star Sylvester Stallone was re-embraced by critics and moviegoers when he bookended his two most famous franchises (Rocky Balboa, 2006 and Rambo, 2008). Of course, Hollywood stars have historically attempted to subvert audience- and industry expectations and ‘play against type’, with uneven results. Frank Sinatra made a serious attempt to take on ‘meatier’ roles by portraying a heroin addict in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which the Motion Picture Association of America at the time refused to certify with a rating, but Sinatra received Oscar and BAFTA nominations for his performance. Despite Orson Welles’ rather unstable private and professional life, no one was quite prepared for his portrayal of corrupt and debauched policeman Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1958), which Welles also directed; the film’s constricted, threatening atmosphere was arguably influenced as much by Quinlan’s girth and characterization as the film’s mise-en-scène. Michael Douglas’ tightly-wound performance in Falling Down (1993) ranks among the actor’s best and most important and, today, the film serves as a surprisingly authentic representation of the complicated racial, cultural and social divides which existed right on Hollywood’s doorstep during the 1990s. Somewhat parallel in nature is Robin Williams’ dark and disturbing performance in One Hour Photo (2002), which is arguably the most layered and distinct indicator of the star’s impressive dramatic talents. Additionally, Hollywood is notable for creating and manufacturing stars from highly unusual backgrounds. Hong Kong martial-arts star Bruce Lee might have permanently changed perceptions of East Asian actors in Hollywood if he had lived beyond his seminal Enter the Dragon (1973), and the accidental death of his only son, Brandon Lee, on the 18 American Hollywood

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set of The Crow in 1993, seemed to tragically snuff out an international star in-the-making. Austrian bodybuilding import Arnold Schwarzenegger began his career as Mr Universe, but successfully transferred his universally-marketable persona to a series of blockbuster Hollywood action films during the 1980s and 1990s, starting with Conan the Barbarian (1982) and The Terminator (1984). While he attempted a variety of mildly-successful comedies and self-referential performances, Schwarzenegger has always been more comfortable delivering what his audience wants. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Schwarzenegger has a fascinating scene where his character struggles to fight his own (re) programming: as the Terminator uncontrollably pursues John Connor, Schwarzenegger’s cybernetic character seems to ‘feel’ an emotional struggle within itself for the first time. The star delivers a telling line of dialogue which seems to acknowledge both the character and the actor’s perceived deficiencies: ‘Desire is irrelevant. I am … a machine!’ Hollywood’s periodic adoption of non-American actors and the continual interest in Bruce Lee’s posthumous ‘presence’ function as a link to Hollywood’s latest fascination: the developing idea of ‘finishing’ or indeed ‘continuing’ a star’s life indefinitely through digital technology. Though film-makers have had to deal with the loss of prominent actors mid-production (and the complicated production problems which ensue therein) for many years, the capabilities of digital visual effects tools to capture the nuances of an actor’s face and performance have given film-makers more interest in finding ways to ‘extend’ a passed/past star’s life on screen. Since the late 1990s, a script called Gemini Man has floated around Hollywood with the intention of casting an iconic presence like Harrison Ford or Sean Connery in a ‘dual’ role of an ageing government assassin who is being pursued by a younger cloned version of himself. The kind of technology needed to accomplish this feat already exists, having been used in films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), which de-aged star Brad Pitt throughout the narrative. Most recently, Terminator Salvation (2009) posited the resurrection of a star who is not quite dead yet. While serving as Governor of California (in Hollywood history, Schwarzenegger and Ronald Regan are just two of the prominent actors that prove Americans do not mind seeing their childhood screen heroes in public office), Schwarzenegger ‘appeared’ in the fourth Terminator film in a brief scene featuring the star/character at the age and shape he was in during the first Terminator feature. The production hired a younger actor with a similar-looking physique for wide shots, and digitally mapped a de-aged version of Arnold’s face over the actor’s head for a few close-ups (Schwarzenegger himself apparently had very little to do with the production other than providing his approval). Of contemporary Hollywood star/performance/subtexts, one of the most interesting of note has arguably been Jim Carrey’s film career. As the comedian graduated from stand-up to television sketch comedy to starring roles in Hollywood features, he smartly and intuitively applied a series of references to his own onscreen history throughout his performances, culminating with The Truman Show (1998) and Man on the Moon (1999). In The Truman Show, Peter Weir directed Carrey to an impressive comedic and dramatic performance as Truman Burbank, who discovers that his entire life has been the subject of a television show. Both anticipating the reality-TV boom and encapsulating the nature of 24/7 celebrity tabloid coverage, The Truman Show works as a multi-allegorical treatise on contemporary notions of stardom, entertainment and Carrey’s own career. In Man on the Moon, Carrey portrayed legendary comedian Andy Kaufman in a performance that covered Kaufman’s entire career, pondered a fabricated death, and questioned just how far a star can go in asking for audiences’ loyalty. In later years, Carrey’s career waxed and waned, but he seems to be one of the rare Hollywood stars not afraid to occasionally take a chance on ‘difficult’ material which many other mainstream stars would pass on for fear of public- or industry rejection. While personalities and styles have significantly changed throughout the long history of movie stardom in America, many irrefutable elements have indeed remained strikingly similar to the cultural mores present at the beginning of the Hollywood industry.

Michael S Duffy Stardom 19

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Clint Eastwood directing Invictus, 2009, Warner Bros.

directors clint eastwood

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With two Oscars for best director, Clint Eastwood is now a Hollywood institution although his success hardly occurred overnight. Towards the end of the studio system he paid his dues as a contract actor, taking uncredited bit-roles in such fare as Tarantula (1955). After Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958), a Western that he described as ‘the lousiest ever made’ (Hughes 2009: xxiv), it would be 1964 before Eastwood appeared on cinema screens again. Moving to television, he was cast as Rowdy Yates in the Western series, Rawhide (1959–1965). The experience piqued Eastwood’s interest in directing, with the regular turnover of directors introducing him to a range of styles that he considers to be his film school. Rawhide brought Eastwood to the attention of Sergio Leone, who was preparing a low budget Spanish/Italian/German Western, then entitled The Magnificent Stranger. James Coburn and Charles Bronson had previously declined the lead but, impressed by the obvious Yojimbo (1961) inspiration, Eastwood signed up. The resulting film, Per un pugno di dollari/A Fistful of Dollars (1964), was a huge success in Europe. However, legal wrangles over the unlicensed Yojimbo influence initially prevented a US release. Eastwood continued his role as Rowdy Yates, returning to Europe during series breaks for two further collaborations with Leone, Per qualche dollaro in più/For a Few Dollars More (1965) and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). When the Dollars Trilogy finally opened in America critical reaction was mixed, but the international profits convinced United Artists to offer Eastwood his first starring role in a Hollywood Western. The result was Hang ‘Em High (1968), an attempt to transfer Eastwood’s European ‘The Man With No Name’ persona to a more conventional American version of the genre. Coogan’s Bluff (1968) followed, notable for transplanting Eastwood’s character into a contemporary urban setting, and for igniting his association with director Don Siegel. Already expressing the desire to directly control his career, Eastwood formed his production company, Malpaso. He developed his own projects while appearing in a variety of genre films, including the musical Paint Your Wagon (1969). Eastwood has long been involved with music. In the early 1960s he released several records to capitalize on his Rawhide success. Much later he formed Malpaso Records and composed themes for his own films, including The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and Mystic River (2003), as well as scoring Grace is Gone (2007). Although renowned for his action roles, Eastwood also demonstrated an enthusiasm for off-beat subjects, reuniting with Siegel for a Southern Gothic drama, The Beguiled (1971). Malpaso’s first fully-fledged production was Eastwood’s directorial debut, the thriller Play Misty for Me (1971). He initiated an approach that he has followed throughout his directing career, developing a reputation for shooting quickly and economically, working with colleagues familiar with his methods. In Misty, for example, he cast his directorial mentor Don Siegel in a supporting role. Initially, Universal questioned Eastwood’s decision to ‘play in a picture where the woman has the best role’ (Schickel 2010a: 88). However, the studio eventually financed Misty, on the understanding that Eastwood would subsequently deliver several commercial productions. This strategy has informed his success, astutely alternating between studio-pleasing films and personal projects. 1971 also saw the release of Dirty Harry, again directed by Siegel. As Eastwood’s biographer Richard Schickel notes, this would be the point ‘when a star becomes a super-star’ (2010a: 93). Life magazine, 23 July, announced: ‘The world’s favourite movie star is – no kidding – Clint Eastwood.’ Throughout the 1970s Eastwood evolved as a film-maker, directing the romantic drama, Breezy (1973), his first feature he did not also star in (although he can be spotted in a Hitchcock-like cameo) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), an allegorical Western for the post-Vietnam era. On screen, Eastwood began to send up his tough-guy image. Against studio advice he co-starred opposite an orangutan in Every Which Way But Loose (1978), producing what was then his most commercially successful film. This broadened Eastwood’s box-office

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appeal and the tactic continued with his own Capraesque Bronco Billy (1980) and even a comic turn in Casper (1995). One of his personal projects, Bird (1988), told the story of Charlie Parker and united Eastwood’s passions for cinema and jazz. It was the first film he directed without starring in since Breezy. Unfortunately, the late 1980s coincided with Eastwood’s least profitable spell. Even a final Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool (1988), failed to attract significant crowds. Of this period, Eastwood claims that there was simply a shortage of quality scripts available on the open market. However, he had been biding his time, holding back the screenplay for what would become Unforgiven (1992): Unforgiven granted Clint Eastwood his freedom. He would continue to cling to genre conventions, of course, but henceforth he would also be given leave – not least in his own mind – to follow his own aspirations wherever they led him. (Schickel 2010a: 211) The Oscar winner was followed by In the Line of Fire (1993), the last occasion that Eastwood would perform for another director. He also served as producer on the Malpaso feature, The Stars Fell on Henrietta (1995). As the twentieth century eased into the twenty-first, Eastwood directed and starred in a number of relatively formulaic thrillers based on successful novels, including Absolute Power (1997) and Blood Work (2002). In 2008 he directed Gran Torino, in what is probably his final onscreen role. It is evident that Eastwood’s interest now lies behind the camera. With films such as Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Changeling (2008) and Invictus (2009), he has embarked on ‘a second career that owes little to what he accomplished in previous decades’ (Schickel 2010b: 34). At an age when many would be slowing down, Eastwood’s recent output has been remarkably prolific. At 74 he became the oldest recipient of the best director Oscar for Million Dollar Baby (2004). His enthusiasm remains unabated, with upcoming productions including the supernatural thriller Hereafter (2010) and a bio-pic of J Edgar Hoover. At this time in his life, directing provides Eastwood with a creative freedom that he clearly relishes: I just feel that I’m enjoying the work now more than I ever have … and I’m at an age when I can take on more challenges than I have in the past because I know more. (Carnevale 2010: para. 4)

Critique As William Holden, star of Breezy, once observed, ‘Clint has done it his way’ (Johnstone 1981: 138). Over the years, Eastwood has conscientiously sought out projects to showcase and evolve his abilities as director and actor. With an impressive list of awards and honours to his name, it is a method that has paid dividends. Having directed over thirty films and produced a body of work that has grossed over four billion dollars for Warner Bros (Schickel 2010b: 39), Eastwood is finally enjoying a critical appreciation to match his popular success. However, it has not always been this way. During the 1970s, as Eastwood’s star was rising, he was the subject of several barbed reviews from the legendary critic, Pauline Kael. Most notoriously, Dirty Harry, probably his best-known screen role, was accused of taking a fascistic position: If crime were caused by super-evil dragons, there would be no Miranda, no Escobedo1; we could all be licensed to kill like Dirty Harry. But since crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology and social injustice, Dirty Harry is a deeply immoral movie. (Kael cited in Johnstone 1981: 83) Such negative reactions have plagued Eastwood throughout his acting and directing careers. But, as with Siegel’s own Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), alternative

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readings are possible. In a sense, Dirty Harry’s genre roots obscure the film’s inherent critical commentary on the protagonist’s behaviour. As Matt Wanat notes, ‘the hero Harry is consistently aligned with the villain’ (2007: 93). The film’s trailer wryly observes that ‘This is a movie about a couple of killers. Harry Callahan and a homicidal maniac – the one with the badge is Harry.’ Echoing High Noon (1952), at the close of the film a disillusioned Callahan throws away that badge. Narratively, it is an acknowledgement that his above-the-law stance is unacceptable. Dirty Harry and Eastwood’s later films open up the age-old debate of authorial intent versus audience interpretation. Writing in his autobiography, Siegel commented: If I do a film about a hard-nosed cop, of course it doesn’t mean I condone all his actions. I find it very difficult to explain my reasons for making a film like Dirty Harry, other than I’m a firm believer in entertainment … Not once throughout Dirty Harry did Clint and I have a political discussion. (Siegel 1996: 373) Nonetheless, Eastwood’s personal politics have long been the subject of critical attention. Although known to be a registered Republican, he is typically enigmatic when expressing his political views: I don’t pay attention to either side … I mean, I’ve always been a libertarian. Leave everybody alone … So I believe in that value of smaller government. Give politicians power and all of a sudden they’ll misuse it on ya. (Dawson 2008: para. 17) Never afraid to take on a cause, he recently contacted the British Chancellor of the Exchequer to appeal the decision to abolish the UK Film Council, an organization that Eastwood states was invaluable to him when shooting Hereafter in London (Piazza 2010: para. 2). He was also involved in a public spat with director Spike Lee. The two clashed over the lack of black soldiers in Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006). Lee saw this as an insulting oversight, while Eastwood responded that since no black soldiers were involved in the Iwo Jima flag-raising, they were not featured prominently in the story. Black troops, however, can be glimpsed in the landing craft sequence, and are evident in historical stills used in the closing credits. With Harry Callahan frequently dispensing justice to black criminals, race has often been a contentious topic in Eastwood’s films. Sensitive to the issue, but leaving himself open to accusations of tokenism, Eastwood has been careful to cast a succession of black and ethnic sidekicks in the Dirty Harry series. One example is African-American actor Albert Popwell, part of the ‘Eastwood repertory company’, who appeared in four of the Dirty Harry films. He graduated from the role of a bank robber in Dirty Harry to eventually playing Callahan’s partner in Sudden Impact (1983). Despite the controversy, Ed Buscombe notes that, throughout his career, ‘Eastwood’s films generally display an easy-going, relaxed attitude about racial difference’ (2004: 44). Gender and family are other themes common to Eastwood. Many of his films feature strong female protagonists. In the Hollywood Reporter, Jean Hoelscher remarked that, ‘Eastwood certainly deserves credit [for] his lack of ego when casting his female leads. He is not afraid to work with excellent women’ (cited in McGilligan 2000: 278). Whether this is indicative of a particular feminist perspective is debatable, yet, as Eastwood has mastered the directorial reigns, his work has gradually displayed a greater maturity, manifesting itself in his portrayal of family. In The Outlaw Josey Wales, Eastwood’s taciturn loner finds himself at the heart of a reconstituted family, as survivors of the American Civil War rebuild their lives. Eastwood’s characters are no longer self-reliant anti-heroes like The Man With No Name or Harry Callahan. In a distinctly more vulnerable representation of masculinity, they are flawed men, haunted by past deeds and seeking redemption. In

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Unforgiven, Bill Munny reluctantly returns to bounty hunting after his attempts at farming fail to provide for his children. War hero Ira Hayes, played by Adam Beach in Flags of Our Fathers, cannot cope with his survivor guilt. Without friends or family to call upon, he internalizes his grief, finally drinking himself into oblivion. These self-doubting characters are far removed from the independent protagonists of Eastwood’s earlier work. The concern for family is also manifest in Million Dollar Baby, where Eastwood’s Frankie Dunn becomes the surrogate father for Hilary Swank’s driven Maggie Fitzgerald. Mystic River relates how a long-suppressed crime wrenches families and communities apart, while Changeling follows a single mother’s desperate search for her missing son. Recalling Dirty Harry, an isolated Christine Collins, played by Angelina Jolie, battles indifferent authorities in her quest for justice. Eastwood’s later output is also remarkable for its bleak streak. Maggie’s fate in Million Dollar Baby is almost unbearable to watch. The final image of Frankie sitting alone in a diner is extremely ambiguous. Has he found peace at last, or is he to be forever tormented by his actions? In Mystic River the wrong man is punished and the culprits apparently escape, save for the stain on their consciences. Although critics inferred that Million Dollar Baby portrayed a pro-euthanasia story, Eastwood resists any attempt to pigeon-hole his intentions: ‘I never thought about the political side of this when making this film. How people feel about that is up to them’ (Thompson 2005: xxv). This multi-faceted, open approach has been evident in Eastwood’s oeuvre almost since the beginning. He was drawn to Hang ‘Em High, because it contemplated how an individual’s experiences could influence personal opinions on capital punishment. This is echoed in Million Dollar Baby: ‘If you had asked Frankie, “Do you believe in euthanasia?”, he’d have probably said no. But that was the circumstances of the moment’ (Dawson 2008: para. 6). However, this trend for ambiguity has led to accusations that Eastwood seeks to ‘have his cake and eat it’ (Buscombe 2004: 75). The simplistic reading of Unforgiven would have it that, after a meticulous build-up that interrogates the destructive nature of violence, the narrative is simply resolved when Eastwood reverts to type, blood-thirstily eliminating his adversaries. But this ignores the prior thoughtful treatise on violence and its impact on both victim and perpetrator. After the brooding preamble, it is difficult to read the final shoot-out as an adrenaline inducing, heroic action sequence. The overriding mood of Unforgiven is one of melancholy. Munny’s return to arms is to be mourned. Writing in the New Yorker, David Denby, admitting that he was once sceptical of Eastwood’s talents, suggests: y giving the Western extra dimensions, and by pushing the moral issues to extremes, B Eastwood had exposed (inadvertently, perhaps) the limits of the genre. ‘Unforgiven’ is both an entertainment and a contradiction, a masterpiece at war with itself. (2010: para. 23) Nonetheless, as Richard Schickel indicates (2010a: 211), with his recent work Eastwood has displayed the confidence to stretch himself beyond genre forms. He has been able to develop this assured authorial voice relatively undisturbed by studio interference because of his ability to deliver efficiently-produced, successful films. After being frustrated by the excesses of big-budget productions such as Paint Your Wagon, he resolved to take direct control of his career. Eastwood was as good as his word, subsequently turning down the James Bond role and the lead in Apocalypse Now (1979). As a director, Eastwood is known for his loyalty and reliance on a regular crew. His current cinematographer, Tom Stern, earned his spurs on the lighting team for his longserving predecessors Bruce Surtees and Jack N Green. His stunt coordinator Buddy Van Horn has worked with Eastwood since Coogan’s Bluff, and has directed three of his star vehicles. Favouring locations over studio-bound productions, Eastwood has a reputation

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for running a disciplined set. Play Misty for Me was completed $50,000 under budget, and within its modest five-week production schedule (Hughes 2009: 102). He has described his admiration for directors such as William Wellman who, during the studio system, had to be efficient and well-prepared. Eastwood certainly recognized this technique in his mentor: ‘If there’s one thing I learned from Don Siegel, it’s to know what you want to shoot and to know what you’re seeing when you see it’ (Siegel 1996: x). Eastwood feels that this approach encourages the most effective performances from actors: ‘If you know the director’s not going to print anything until maybe the eighth time, the first seven times you’re kinda just coasting along … Sometimes that first moment is magic’ (French, 2007). He is known for filming rehearsals, believing that they capture a spontaneity that is lost in multiple takes. Peter Biskind relates a story that, after working with Stanley Kubrick on The Shining (1980), actor Scatman Crothers was so relieved by Eastwood’s single-take approach on Bronco Billy that he ‘nearly burst into tears’ (Biskind 1999: 197). Another of Eastwood’s directorial traits is his fondness for low-key, noir-like lighting. This is apparent in his Westerns, with the shadows cast by hat brims frequently concealing the eyes and motives of characters. This device is evident in one of his favourite films, the cautionary tale of The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Detractors have sniped that this approach is a sign of Eastwood’s reluctance to part with money. Biographer Patrick McGilligan (2000: 198) went as far to as to suggest that Eastwood’s low-key lighting is an attempt to obscure his aging visage. But those who have worked with Eastwood describe the calm atmosphere that he engenders, encouraging a sense of freedom and enthusiasm. Producer David Valdes comments: ‘It’s fun … and everyone realizes we’re not curing brain cancer’ (Biskind 1999: 196). Besides, McGilligan is technically incorrect as low-key, chiaroscuro-style lighting tends to emphasize wrinkles and flaws. More importantly, Eastwood’s dislike of over-lighting is consistent with his deliberately ambiguous approach: ‘I just want a sketch. I don’t want to see everything. The audience will make up what they see’ (Andrew 2008: 22). Perhaps it has only recently become evident but, for Eastwood, the pleasure in film-making lies with his efforts to create the space for a multitude of readings. Noting Eastwood’s recurrent reinterpretations of the archetypal Western, Shane (1953), Stephen McVeigh proposes that Eastwood’s ‘conflictive values’ are indicative of ‘his conscious and precise manipulations and subversions of this essential American meta-narrative’ (2007: 154). Although he may be as resistant to analysis as he is to over-lighting, it is an interpretation that Eastwood appears to recognize in his work: I’m obviously an American Director. Which means that, like my colleagues, my roots are in genre moviemaking. For me, genre conventions add a certain strength to the movies. At the same time they offer the possibility of creating variations on their basic themes, a chance to refresh the film in question, making it new for the audience and for me. (Schickel 2010a: 8)

John Caro Note 1. Under US law, arrested suspects are required to be read their Miranda Rights, informing them of their rights against incriminating themselves and of support from an attorney. In 1964 Danny Escobedo’s conviction for murder was overturned by the US Supreme Court on the grounds that he was not granted access to an attorney.

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References Andrew, G (2008) ‘The Quiet American’, Sight & Sound, 18: 9, pp. 14–22. Biskind, P (1999) ‘Any Which Way He Can’, in RE Kapsis & K Coblentz (eds) Clint Eastwood Interviews, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, pp. 193–206. Buscombe, E (2004) Unforgiven, London: BFI Publishing. Carnevale, R (2010) ‘Invictus: Clint Eastwood Interview’, IndieLondon Online, http: //www. indielondon.co.uk/Film-Review/invictus-clint-eastwood-interview. Accessed 1 August 2010, Denby, D (2010) ‘Out of the West: Clint Eastwood’s Shifting Landscape’, The New Yorker, http: // www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/08/100308fa_fact_denby?currentPage=all. Accessed 5 August 2010. Dawson, J (2008) ‘Dirty Harry Comes Clean’, The Guardian, http: //www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/ jun/06/1. Accessed 4 August 2010. French, P (2007) ‘An Audience with Clint Eastwood: mp3 streaming audio file’, The Guardian, http: //audio.theguardian.tv/sys-audio/Film/Film/2007/02/23/ClintEastwood.mp3. Accessed 3 August 2010. Hughes, H (2009) Aim for the Heart: The Films of Clint Eastwood, London: IB Tauris. Johnstone, I (1981) The Man With No Name: The Biography of Clint Eastwood, London: Plexus. McGilligan, P (2000) Clint: The Life and Legend, London: HarperCollins Entertainment. McVeigh, S (2007) ‘Subverting Shane: Ambiguities in Eastwood’s Politics in Fistful of Dollars, High Plains Drifter, and Pale Rider’, in L Engel (ed) Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director: New Perspectives, Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, pp. 129–56. Piazza, S (2010) ‘Clint Eastwood Makes Plea to Save Film Council’, The Independent, http: // www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/eastwood-makes-plea-to-save-filmcouncil-2047062.html. Accessed 9 August 2010. Schickel, R (2010a) Clint: A Retrospective, New York: Sterling Publishing Co. Inc. Schickel, R (2010b) ‘Clint Eastwood’, The Red Bulletin, pp. 34–39. Siegel, D (1996) A Siegel Film: An Autobiography, London: Faber and Faber Limited. Thompson, D (2005) Clint Eastwood: Billion Dollar Man, London: John Blake Publishing Ltd. Wanat, M (2007) ‘Irony as Absolution’, in L Engel (ed) Clint Eastwood, Actor and Director: New Perspectives, Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, pp. 77–98.

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John Ford, 1939, United Artists.

directors john ford

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John Ford is arguably America’s greatest film director. Certainly, he is the most important contributor to the development of the Western genre. His films are testament to a thoroughgoing familiarity with the American arts and literature, and to a deep commitment to America’s history and political cultures. Yet in interviews he plays the artisan, interested only in the craft of telling a good story. Perhaps reticence about his art (and even a notorious grouchiness as he aged) was a ruse to assuage notoriously-philistine moguls of Hollywood studios and their popular audiences on whom his continuing career depended that he was no threatening intellectual. But his films prove – if there is by now any doubt – that the creation of art as well as profit can be realized in those most commercial of conditions. Ford began working in Hollywood in the 1910s, when it was a burgeoning industry, and throughout its classical period until the 1960s. An elder brother, Frances, was already a film director and Ford worked his way up to that role as his brother’s career waned. (Frances turned instead to acting, often later playing minor roles in his younger brother’s films.) Ford’s first film as director was – prophetically – a Western: the short, The Tornado (1917). Subsequent collaborations were formative, especially in the Western series of 25 shorts with star Harry Carey as their hero, Cheyenne Harry (Ford’s Three Godfathers [1948] is dedicated to Carey’s memory). This was the start of a career association with the Carey family and a repertory of actors – Ford’s ‘stock company’ – fronted by the Western icon, John Wayne, whose career is inseparable from Ford’s. Sadly, few survive of the over sixty shorts and features Ford made during this ‘silent’ period (when films lacked only synchronized sound). Ford’s most mature films were made after the coming of sound, including a moving adaptation of John Steinbeck’s dustbowl novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1940); the Welsh mining village story of How Green Was My Valley (1941), one of the first to use a firstperson narration; and The Quiet Man (1952), a raucous romance set in Ireland. But Ford’s Westerns are a central legacy, not least Stagecoach (1939); Drums Along the Mohawk (1939); My Darling Clementine (1946); a trilogy of cavalry films starting with Fort Apache (1948); Wagon Master (1950); The Searchers (1956); and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). These were immensely popular, enabling Ford to attract funding to intersperse personal projects, like the Irish-themed The Informer (1935), The Rising of the Moon (1957) and The Plough and the Stars (1936), and the first with his own short-lived production company Argosy, The Fugitive (1947), with Graham Green’s whisky priest from his novel, The Power and the Glory, in a Mexican setting. By the time of his death in 1973, Ford had made about 160 feature films, as well as numerous shorts, television programmes and documentaries.

Critique Ford was a populist. In the cultural sense of that term, he believed in the power of mass arts like cinema not only to entertain large numbers but also to connect people to positive human values and sympathies. In the political sense, Ford’s films evidence both the complexities and contradictions of the short-lived Populist movement of the late nineteenth century. Populism favours at least the small-scale over the mass, the common good over the rights of the individual, quality of life over monetary gain and emotional over intellectual connection. These are themes that speak more of pre-urban conditions and, thereby, translate with difficulty in a modern world of mass urban development. Hence the contradictions at the heart of Ford’s art, evident in the complex interplay of his themes and perhaps even in the experimentation with film styles across his career. Ford’s primary social group is the community, in which individuals grow up in extended kinship groups, in neighbourhoods, some to journey away, but – even if only in spirit – always connected. These communities are composed of common folk in a unity of

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common purpose among tolerated differences, whether in frontier town, army unit or itinerant camp. His model was clearly a traditional urban, working-class community. Ford’s own family came from immigrant Irish roots, and a commitment to rural Ireland and Irishness is evident not only in the titles listed above but – peppered with Quincannons and O’Rileys in minor roles – in many of his films. Families have strong leaderships in Ford’s films – in patriarchs who assume the right to rule and matriarchs who gently feminize the rougher edges of their men. (In How Green Was My Valley, the narrating hero looks back upon a childhood in which ‘If my father was the head of the house, my mother was its heart.’) Among younger family members, females are feisty tomboys, prodding in their desired directions their more gauche brothers and lovers. Courtships are always spirited affairs, fraught with misunderstandings but resolved in lasting partnerships. Idealized family and community life permeate his films, and in their building of frontier homes (eg Drums), churches (Clementine has a wonderful celebration in the bare bones of a church) and schools (eg Liberty Valance) serve, over time, to represent the components of an ideal America. Paradoxically, Ford’s heroes tend to be individualists, frequently warriors (Ford’s career spans two World Wars) and nomads who are, therefore, in a shifting, ambivalent relationship to the settled community. They find ‘settling down’ impossible, competing with their sense of personal identity or professional duty, whether during war or in peacetime. Their skills will be essential to the process of building an America worth living in, but they will remain on the margins of the society that benefits. Indeed, they share the tendency of villains – such as those in Wagon Master and Clementine – to disrupt communal rituals like parties, speeches and – in The Searchers – even funerals. At their extreme – without the civilizing influence of women – they become outsiders; we may even doubt the sanity of men who have lost their loves (compare Henry Fonda’s Colonel Thursday in Fort Apache and John Wayne’s characters in The Searchers and Liberty Valance). Ford’s films play community and individual in symbiotic tension, as his heroes struggle between individualism and social duty. None will survive their films whole: in The Wings of Eagles (1957), the battle-weary hero returns home to an accidental fall, which, ironically, paralyses him. Ford’s film method emerges from the contradictions in the relationship between community and individual. Social rituals provide scenes of great emotional weight, whether formal (as in the exhilarating dance sequence of Fort Apache), casual (as in the campfire music of Wagon Master) or domestic (as in the family’s reception of visitors in The Searchers: so full of bustling sociality in an abundance of coffee and doughnuts that we feel all the more the tragedy of their pointless loss in an Indian attack). His films abound with ceremonies associated with the life cycles of birth (Stagecoach has a touching example that returns status to an alcoholic doctor and the prostitute who nurses the baby), marriage (the foundation of frontier life in Drums and cruelly disrupted in The Searchers), and death (none more poignant than the speeches of John Wayne’s cavalry officer over has his dead wife’s grave and then a fallen comrade in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949]). Knockabout comedy defines courtship among young lovers and camaraderie among mature men, frequently indulging in jokes in which gauche adolescents are the victims (as in Ward Bond’s soldier-cum-reverend joshing Patrick Wayne’s naive lieutenant in The Searchers), or turn on the sudden availability of an excess of alcohol (as when John Wayne’s retiring cavalry captain in Yellow Ribbon opens the bar for Victor McLaglen’s sergeant). Ford uses music and song widely on the soundtrack and in the action of his films, emotionally connecting audiences to onscreen communities. He draws on a range of music traditions, evident even in the titles of his films: for instance, traditional in Clementine, military in Yellow Ribbon and ballad in The Searchers. In Rio Grande (1950) there are four original and several traditional songs – especially Irish – all sung both on- and off-screen

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by the Sons of the Pioneers: a close-harmony group that frequently backed singing cowboys like Gene Autry in B Westerns. Ford considered his films as part of and not distinct from the genre’s traditions. Ford’s film style shows ample evidence of experimentation. He undoubtedly learned the craft of commercial film-making through the apprenticeship period of his early career, making so many films so quickly that he came to control his studio-produced films by ‘editing in the camera’, shooting only enough takes in continuity such that studio editors were constrained to edit according to Ford’s intentions. Early on, however, he was influenced by expressionist techniques from German Cinema, lighting to create expressive mood and framing to construct unease in character relations, evident especially in the cinematography of The Fugitive and on the ship-bound The Long Voyage Home (1940). In his Westerns, Ford was among the first to dynamize action through tracking shots alongside action scenes. But evidence of adapting expressionist techniques to American painterly and realist forms can be seen in his classical visual compositions, especially in long takes of groups in the full range of movement across all grounds of the frame. Location exteriors commonly feature in long shots, particularly when set in his beloved Monument Valley in Utah, where the vast scale of the ancient buttes dwarf intricate patterns of nonetheless-valorized human movement. In Fort Apache, preparations for the final battle are shot in magnificent monochrome images of the antagonists, framed against the buttes amidst billowing white clouds. Jim Kitses charts Ford’s changing critical reputation before he and the Western became widely analysed from the 1970s onwards. In the 1930s, Lewis Jacobs noted Ford’s untypical social-realist dramas like The Informer, and Arthur Knight favoured the same style in The Grapes of Wrath. But it was in Britain that Ford’s work came under closer scrutiny, and by critics who were also film-makers: firstly Lindsay Anderson, in the 1950s, who drew attention to Ford’s poetic and humanist interests and, second, Peter Wollen in the 1970s, whose structuralist analysis posed a creative tension in Ford’s films between pairs of thematic opposites (or, in Wollen’s term, ‘antinomies’). The central antinomy is the Wilderness and the Garden, where, initially, the Wilderness represents a barren land, untamed and threatening, and the Garden a cultivated and secure society. But, by the end of his career, the meaning of these terms shifts, reflecting a fundamental change in Ford’s attitude to America’s identify. Early on, Ford’s heroes commit to communities representing an America of nation-building, turning a perceived wilderness into a garden (most clearly in the silent epic, The Iron Horse [1924], dramatized against the building of the first transcontinental railroad). Over the years, that antinomy shifts in meaning until, by the time of Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Ford’s sympathies turn from white society to the Native American community, now threatened by a destructive white intervention. The dream of the Garden of the future is spoiled; the Wilderness of the past is where lost values now lie. If the meaning of community changes over time, so too must the meaning of heroism. Already as early as Stagecoach, John Wayne’s frontier outlaw escapes ‘the blessings of civilization’ into the west of America’s future. But a schematic comparison of Clementine and the later Liberty Valance reveals the change most clearly. In the former, Henry Fonda’s ideal Western hero, Marshal Wyatt Earp, combines with the positive values of Victor Mature’s otherwise consumptive and criminal Easterner, Doc Holiday, to overcome the threat – in the form of the savage Clanton family – to the growing ideal American community that is Tombstone. In Liberty Valance, the role of John Wayne’s Westerner – now representing positive wilderness values – has been displaced by the civilizing forces of James Stewart’s Easterner, not just from the film but also from his position in American history. The dreams of a nation that was to be built are by this time long gone, replaced by sadness at the loss of collective values. Perhaps most telling is the change in relationship between hero and community in Ford’s very last film, Seven Women (1966), in which

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Anne Bancroft fittingly plays Ford’s only female hero. Her hard-as-nails persona informs the supreme personal sacrifice her character makes in order to save a missionary community, among whom are too many unworthy of it. Ford here finds the individual sacrifice unnecessary, the American national cause undeserving. This is why Ford’s most distinctive films are Westerns, the genre that speaks of an American national identity founded in its frontier origins, in the role of heroes in the making of modern communities, and in an ambivalent tension between myth and history. The terms of Ford’s critical intervention at a meeting with his Hollywood peers (which would crucially inform their response to the ‘witch hunts’ of the 1950s’ ‘Red Scare’) was, famously: ‘My name’s John Ford. I make Westerns.’ Few self-identifications are as revealing. Ford not only made Westerns but many great ones too (though, at the time of his declaration, arguably the greatest – The Searchers and Liberty Valance – were yet to come). But in the context in which he so identified himself, to a jury of film-makers who already knew him, respected him, admired his work and needed no introduction of any kind, it was neither frivolous nor idle boast. It was both a cultural statement that claimed value for the commonly-despised popular genre of ‘horse operas’, and a political claim for fair play as the common lot. That Ford should deny discrimination so completely (and with no little personal risk at a time of such paranoia) is ironic, given the undoubted negative representation of Native Americans in so many of his earliest Westerns, and Jane Tompkins’ claim that his films are misogynist. Ford was a traditional man of his time, the first half of the twentieth century, yet also a liberal, who adapted to progressive campaigns as the century advanced. A political conservative he undoubtedly was but, as Gaylyn Studlar argues, his admiration for women, their personal strength and essential social contribution is evident in every one of his films, whose heroes are required to accommodate themselves to feminine values. Ford was also among the first of his generation to respond to the civil rights movement by adjusting roles for black and Mexican actors towards the end of his career, and not least in the dignified leading role of Sergeant Rutledge (1960) for black actor, Woody Strode. Ford’s films examine populist tensions between the rights of the individual and the needs of the community. And through them, his body of work explores changing ideas about both the making and the establishment of what it means to be an American. He was a patriot who saw service in World War II as Commander in the US Navy, and who risked his life in combat conditions to produce three wartime documentaries, like Battle of Midway (1942), for the military cause. Yet his films are also critiques of nationhood, chronicling fault lines in the American dream of national unity. He was committed to the Free Irish cause (the last of three stories in the portmanteau film, The Rising of the Moon, is sympathetic to the escape of an IRA soldier from English imprisonment in Ireland) but everything about his films is in the service of settlement. His films explore these contradictions, not least in the complex relationship between storytelling and history. Ford neither justifies glorious myth over tragic reality, like John Wayne’s Captain Yorke after military defeat in Fort Apache, nor will he simply ‘print the legend’, like the newspaperman when availed of the truth behind the eponymous killing in Liberty Valance. But Ford both exposes and defends the inseparability of myth and history. Ford’s films are supreme combinations of the popular and the critical; they constitute the most distinctive body of work in the major period of cinema history that was classical Hollywood.

David Lusted

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Dw Griffith, 1916, Wark Producing Company.

directors DW Griffith

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David Wark Griffith was born in 1875 in Kentucky, his career heavily conditioned by an upbringing in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, not least the hero-worship of his father Jacob’s role as a Confederate army colonel. Later in life he recounted how his parents always closely directed his childhood studies, impressing upon him certain family traditions, and how his earliest memory was of his father’s sword (Griffith 1971c: 13–14). However, the unexpected death of ‘Roaring Jake’ in 1885 plunged the family into financial hardship, so, although Griffith’s ambition had always been to be a writer, he took on, often out of necessity, a variety of jobs (most notably acting on the stage) before eventually settling into the film industry. Griffith first made his name in cinema as an actor and then a writer, often performing by day and writing scripts at night. He soon became known for both his ingenuity and his industry, in Iris Barry’s words as a ‘human short-circuit’ type (1940: 12), which saw him earn the opportunity to direct films for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, one of the three dominant studios of the time along with Edison and Vitagraph. After a successful beginning with The Adventures of Dollie (1908), Griffith quickly became Biograph’s principal director, making more than 450 films over the next five years at an average of two per week (Stokes 2007: 68). He developed a reputation within the industry for slick professionalism and innovation in such films as The Lonely Villa (1909) and The Lonedale Operator (1911), particularly with regard to his use of formal techniques such as editing. However, Griffith became increasingly frustrated by Biograph’s conservatism, which he saw as stifling his ambitions to create longer works along the lines of the increasingly-popular imported European epics, especially the Italian ‘super-spectacles’ (Cook 1981: 75). When given the chance to direct the first American four-reeler, Judith of Bethulia (1914), Griffith’s perceived ‘reckless extravagance’ (Vardac 1971: 76) led to a parting of the ways with the studio and a move to the Mutual Film Corporation. Freed from Biograph’s restrictions, Griffith made his two most famous films in quick succession: the features The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). The former became a massive success at the box office but aroused great controversy in its depiction of history, particularly the heroic role of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan organization during the ‘Reconstruction’ period in the aftermath of the Civil War. In many ways a response to such criticism, as a thinly veiled attack on censorship, Intolerance featured four parallel stories of injustice throughout history. However, when it failed to match the earlier film’s financial success, Griffith found himself forced to relinquish much of his independence and agree to a contract to fund his work via Adolph Zukor’s film company (later to become known as Paramount), during which time he made a number of generally well-received films such as the war drama Hearts of the World (1918) and the tragic interracial romance Broken Blossoms (1919). However, chafing under the restrictions of the emergent Hollywood studio system, Griffith eagerly embraced the formation of the distribution organization United Artists with fellow box office heavyweights Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. He also briefly reclaimed more independence in 1919 with the creation of his studio Mamaroneck back on the East Coast in New York and the subsequent success of Way Down East (1920), a melodrama of late-nineteenth-century rural life. This decade nevertheless saw a steady decline in Griffith’s fortunes. Despite isolated successes such as the period piece Orphans of the Storm (1921), Griffith had become widely regarded as ‘old-fashioned’, passed in repute by former employees such a Victor Von Stroheim and Mack Sennett (Barry 1940: 30–31). Plagued by financial problems, his career as a director came to a premature end after two unsuccessful sound films in the early 1930s, although he remained sporadically involved in film productions (on an uncredited basis) between then and his death in 1948. His most celebrated leading actor, Lillian Gish, later remarked that it seemed ‘there was no longer any place for

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him’: not being able to make movies ‘the Hollywood way’ meant that he could not make movies at all anymore (Gish 1971: 152–53).

Critique One resonant entry-point to understanding the career of DW Griffith would be to stress the sometimes conflicting twin influences of his upbringing and his ambition. Jay Leyda argues that it would have been a miracle if the director had been able to transcend his background (Leyda 1971: 165). The death of his father when Griffith was only ten inevitably set in stone the son’s hero-worship of the Confederate colonel, as well as ingraining in him the motivation to also make a mark on the world. However, his overwhelming desire to become a writer put him at odds with his mother’s own preferred career path for him in the clergy – a conflict exacerbated when circumstances led the young man to acting, first on the stage and later on the screen. Two incidents seem highly revealing in this regard. Firstly, although at the time Griffith made a living primarily by performing on the stage, on his marriage to fellow actor Linda Arvidson in 1906, he insisted on listing his occupation on the licence as that of ‘writing’ (Stokes 2007: 64). Secondly, it was not until he had firmly established himself as a writer/director at Biograph that Griffith agreed to sign a contract with his real name rather than his stage performing persona ‘Lawrence Griffith’ (Stokes 2007: 71). The progression of his creative life, then, can be seen in terms of an ongoing attempt to reconcile family heritage and professional reward. Given Griffith’s fruitless efforts to become a working playwright and his relative success instead as a stage actor, regarded by his mother as a disreputable and even sinful line of work (Stokes 2007: 62), it seems hardly surprising that, when he finally made it as a reputed film director, he would consistently go out of his way to downplay and disavow his ties to theatre. Along with his infamous claims in a full-page announcement in the New York Daily Mirror in1913 to invention and authorship regarding his Biograph films, this situation has over the years helped obscure the real nature of the director’s inspiration and innovation. There has been widespread acceptance since the 1913 proclamation that Griffith did indeed invent such key aspects of film grammar as the close up, the flashback and parallel editing. However, the director actually introduced no new techniques to film-making; rather, his originality lay in the transformation of how films told stories as part of what Tom Gunning (1994: 6) conceptualizes as a wider industry change from a cinema of attractions (showing) to one of narrative integration (telling). Gunning describes Griffith’s special contribution to this development as ‘the narrator system’: a combination of filmic devices through which he focused on the task of narration (1994: 25). Central to this particular system proved to be an extreme reliance on parallel editing which marked temporal/spatial relations quite specifically in contrast to earlier cinema’s more ambiguous temporality (1994: 26). Griffith’s ‘characterization approach’ in this context provided greater access to characters’ emotions and motivations (1994: 27). Overall, there were three cardinal points to the narrator system: suspense, psychology and morality (Gunning 1994: 28). The third point dovetailed with industrial and sociocultural changes, most notably in the aftermath of the founding of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) as the dominant film studios jockeyed for economic position: he MPPC, responding to growing criticism of the moral impact of the movies by T middle-class ‘progressive’ reformers, declared its intention to produce ‘Moral, Educational, and Cleanly Amusing’ motion pictures. At the back of this lay a general strategy of repositioning the film industry as a ‘higher class’ (and therefore more expensive) form of entertainment that would appeal to ‘respectable’ audiences. (Stokes 2007: 70)

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Given his family and career background, Griffith proved particularly amenable to promoting such a moral discourse – for example in A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909), a prohibitionist attack on saloons. It also fit well with his general desire to disparage the stage in relation to cinema, hence his jump from proclaiming that movies had fewer improprieties (such as nudity) to that they were even less tiring on the eyes (Griffith 1971b: 29) and to the sweeping claim that they were simply ‘better’ than theatre (Griffith 1971a: 32). Part of Griffith’s strategy in this regard involved emphasizing his and cinema’s links with literature rather than theatre per se. It also had the added advantage of valorizing something his father had valued (Stokes 2007: 61). Thus, for example, he claimed cinema to be a novelizing or storytelling rather than a stage form; epic rather than dramatic (Griffith 1971a: 53). He even stressed his specific indebtedness to Charles Dickens in borrowing the ‘cut-back’ and developing it to the ‘story within a story’ and so-called parallel action, with each action heightening the effects of the others (1971a: 52). Such comments encouraged Soviet film-maker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein to posit an even wider argument about Dickens’ extensive influence on Griffith’s film style (1949: 195–255), in the process, according to Russell Merritt, incorrectly attributing to the novelist many of the techniques that Griffith actually borrowed directly from dramatists such as Ibsen and Suderman (Merritt 1981: 9–10). Gunning has also persuasively argued against the widespread notion that Griffith’s role in film history included the simple liberation of film from dependence on the theatre (Gunning 1994: 35). On the contrary, Griffith actually maintained a quite complicated and, at times, fluid relationship with the medium. Rather than rejecting theatre, in practice (if not in proclamation) Griffith navigated within its various traditions in order to develop a version of theatricality as a viable cinematic style for the specific period: round 1906–8, the relation between film and theatre changed. The increased A demand for fiction films and the longer length of such films gave the legitimate theatre a new relevance to film-making. Film began to draw on new theatrical models as well, showing a new awareness of classical and contemporary theatre, although without abandoning melodrama and vaudeville. (Gunning 1994: 37) Ironically, Griffith’s ‘narrator system’ actually arose as a way to translate the new theatricality into a correlative for silent cinema: ‘Narrativity provided the “signifieds” of drama at the cost of deviating from theatrical practice, the “signifiers” of theatre … The elaboration of editing … provided Griffith with a new set of signifiers to fill the void left by the spoken text’ (1994: 40). Not coincidentally, the term and concept of a ‘film director’ also appeared around this time, having originated in late-nineteenth-century theatre to describe a new unifying force which provided a particular point of view. The cinema of narrative integration involved this new figure more heavily in the visualization of a film, thereby finally displacing the old ‘cameraman system’ of production. Here, as elsewhere, Griffith appeared at the cutting edge of emergent film practice. In addition to fusing formal innovation with a new theatrical template and being at the vanguard of a new theatrically-rooted conception of the film director, Griffith drew on his stage background and knowledge consistently throughout his career in other often more mundane ways. Simmon argues that Griffith’s auteurist worldview depended among other things on a particular ‘Victorian’ mix of values drawn from popular agrarianism, the antebellum South and theatrical melodramas. Indeed, his films soon became the ‘unparalleled surviving record of a widely shared vision of life in America, a vision that, insofar as it was depicted in art at all, often found expression in forms more ephemeral than the movies, such as the vaudeville stage’ (Simmon 1993: 3). This characterization clearly helps explain the director’s decision to pay $175,000 for the rights to adapt

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Way Down East, a nineteenth-century melodramatic play hinging on conflict between town and country. However, at the same time it becomes far more difficult to dismiss an overtly-racist film like The Birth of a Nation as merely individual aberrance in any sense of the term. Merritt sees Griffith’s contradictory love/hate relationship with the theatre in overtlyautobiographical terms. He stresses the young would-be playwright’s lingering sense of having failed his family by going on the stage in order to make ends meet (Merritt 1981: 12). Consequently, during his ‘lost’ theatre years, Griffith wrote his most autobiographical work in an attempt to come to terms with unresolved adolescent emotions. His plays show an almost pathological obsession with the fear of humiliating disgrace and the need for forgiveness, with self-dramatization and hero-worship of father figures prominent motifs throughout (1981: 13–16). However, Griffith’s move from the stage to cinema saw an abandonment and/or reversal of such concerns. Whereas the plays feature men in distress who fight for themselves, the Biograph films tend to focus on self-sacrificing heroines protecting someone else. Merritt argues that the films functioned as a form of therapy (1981: 3), as Griffith proactively looked for formulas providing the opportunity to redirect and control autobiographical themes and feelings that had threatened to overwhelm him in theatre (1981: 17). This characterization of the Biograph years is broadly shared by Michael Rogin, who traces four recurrent but unstable themes in these works: weak/repressive fathers, linked with tradition; emergent female sexuality, associated with modernity; imprisoning and vulnerable domestic, interior space; and rides to the rescue. These rescues, in films such as The Lonely Villa (1909), attempt ‘to reassert the contrast between good and evil, the domestic refuge and the menacing invader, male strength and female weakness, but they leave behind traces of a dangerous boundary breakdown’ (Rogin 1994: 261). Rogin argues that Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation generated a deeper system of differences, with the transitional-length film Judith of Bethulia also appropriately providing a transition in terms of content. Here, Blanche Sweet is transformed from a victim needing rescue in The Painted Lady (1912) to the rescuer of Bethulia when she kills Holofernes by decapitating the Assyrian general with his own sword (Rogin 1994: 262). The symbolism regarding the director’s relationship with Biograph is obvious. However, it also recalls the childhood