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Page 1 of 5

ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks
  • Edited by R. Barton Palmer, Homer B. Pettey
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2025
    Print publication:
    01 February 2023
  • ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks highlights the accomplishments of one of postwar America's most important and successful directors, with an emphasis on the 'literary' aspects of his career, including his work as a screenwriter and adaptor of such modern classics as 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof', 'Lord Jim', and 'The Brothers Karamazov'.

  • 4 - Deadline—U.S.A. (1952): A Fox Film of Fact

  • Edited by R. Barton Palmer, Clemson University, South Carolina, Homer B. Pettey, University of Arizona
  • Book:
    ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2025
    Print publication:
    01 February 2023, pp 44-62

  • Summary

    Richard Brooks achieved quick success as both a screenwriter and a novelist, but when he turned to directing he found the going much tougher initially. His first two projects as director, the sub-Hitchcockian thrillers Crisis (1950) and The Light Touch (1951), were sourced in women's magazine fiction, the rights to which had previously been purchased by M-G-M, then ruled by the legendary Louis B. Mayer, with whom Brooks had signed the long-term contract that would decisively shape his early career. Because he was an experienced screenwriter, M-G-M was willing to grant him this limited control over story, thinking that he would get the most out of what he had been given. Shot and then completed with no notable difficulties, Crisis and Touch demonstrated that Brooks could see to more or less scheduled conclusions projects that turned out to be somewhat suspenseful and entertaining, with characters who are far from unengaging. He ably directed the star performers (Cary Grant and Stewart Granger) in the lead roles; in Touch he oversaw effectively the substantial contributions of the established headliner George Sanders and sensational newcomer Pier Angeli.

    For whatever reason, however, Brooks proved unable in both cases to remedy (or at least mask) effectively the weaknesses of what he adapted for the screen. Commenting on the myriad narrative problems in the “pulp magazine story” screened in Crisis, Bosley Crowther offered the director a backhanded compliment: “it is remarkable that Mr. Brooks has been able to get any substance of even passing consequence on the screen.” This judgment is perhaps a bit harsh since it slights the film's effective staging of the crise morale, à la Graham Greene, endured by Cary Grant's surgeon, Dr. Eugene Ferguson. On vacation with his wife in Latin America, he has been kidnapped to perform a life-saving operation on a brutal dictator, Raoul Farrago (José Ferrer). Helen Ferguson (Paula Raymond) has in turn been abducted by Farrago's political opposition, who tell him that her life is forfeit if Ferguson does not let his patient die. True to his oath, Ferguson does his best, but Farrago dies anyway, and later Helen is released. Director and star found themselves as part of a story that, if compelling, at numerous points could have made better sense. Miscasting might have been part of the problem.

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Edited by R. Barton Palmer, Clemson University, South Carolina, Homer B. Pettey, University of Arizona
  • Book:
    ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2025
    Print publication:
    01 February 2023, pp 1-13

  • Summary

    A committed intellectual with a strong streak of independence, Richard Brooks acceded to the director's chair after spending a number of years as a screenwriter, first at Universal and Warners, then at M-G-M, where he became acquainted with producer Arthur Freed during the making of Any Number Can Play (1949, Mervyn Leroy), for which he wrote the adapted screenplay. Brooks would eventually sign a long-term contract with Metro. Impressed by Brooks, Freed encouraged him to make the move to directing, promoting the idea with head of studio Louis B. Mayer. Mayer eventually agreed, even though he reportedly discouraged Brooks from taking a position that he disingenuously dismissed as less important than that of screenwriter: “Anyone can direct, but not everyone can write.’ A friendship with actor Cary Grant, then signed to star in the M-G-M project that Brooks eventually wrote and directed as Crisis (1950), helped with this “promotion.”

    The erstwhile screenwriter was also encouraged to refocus his career by Freed, who convinced Mayer that Brooks was well qualified by experience and temperament to take charge of projects rather than simply writing the scripts for them. This path to the director's chair was thoroughly traditional: a fortunate mix of unexpected opportunities, considerable talent, and a forceful personality. It also did not hurt that Brooks was not shy about having something to say, as he proved by writing The Brick Foxhole (1945), one of the best ex-serviceman WWII novels. The book is an acerbic and wide-ranging indictment of the destructive tensions in American society uncovered by the forced togetherness of military life. Though it deals only with the experiences of men stationed stateside, it is otherwise very much in the tradition of the better-known works by James Jones (From Here to Eternity), Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions), Leon Uris (Battle Cry), and Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead).

    In addition to writing scripts for some forgettable productions (such as Swell Guy [1946], based on a Gilbert Emery play), Brooks learned much about the craft of directing by working closely with hands-on producer Mark Hellinger on The Killers (1946, uncredited) and Brute Force (1947), for which he received a screen credit. He collaborated with John Huston on the script for Key Largo (1948), adapting the Maxwell Anderson play, and as a result spent a good deal of time on set. During the production he struck up a close friendship with Humphrey Bogart, an experience that taught him a good deal about screen acting and the director's role in shaping performance.

  • 4 - The Small Adult Film: A Prestige Form of Cold War Cinema

  • Edited by Homer B. Pettey, University of Arizona
  • Book:
    Cold War Film Genres
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    24 April 2021
    Print publication:
    01 May 2018, pp 62-78

  • Summary

    Pressured by its upstart televisual rival (the new medium began full commercial operation in 1948), the American cinema in the initial decades of the Cold War found some success in a generally declining marketplace by exploring two production types that pushed the industry in quite opposite directions. Big-budget event films (the antecedent of contemporary tentpole [major] productions) made the most of then innovative wide-screen processes and color film stock and, to give an impression of “largeness,” they also featured an expanded roster of name players and a running time so extended an intermission was often required. Small-scale, black-and-white, realist projects rivaled the similar international art films then doing profitable business in specialized urban venues. Both these forms of alternative cinema, which enjoyed growing reputations for being serious and prestigious releases, were, in the language of the exhibition trade, “sure seaters” or certain to fill auditoriums week in, week out (see Wilinsky).

    It is no coincidence that the U.S. trend in small adult film production picked up steam in the early 1950s precisely when this niche end of the exhibition business began to enjoy a substantial boom owing to the unexpected popularity of foreign releases, especially from Italy. A significant change in audience taste was taking place, and there was a reaction among U.S. exhibitors (who promoted venues for screening art films from abroad) and producers who catered to this new fashion in their own way and in financial and institutional circumstances different from those under which foreign filmmakers operated (see Balio). This was the very same period when the social-problem film became an insistent, and prestige-claiming, presence on the nation's screens (see Cagle). Unfortunately, the prominent place that the social-problem film rightly claims in histories of the period has obscured the significance of small adult filmmaking, with which it shares some common features even if there are fundamental differences between the two domestic prestige (as opposed to entertainment) types, as this chapter will attempt to outline.

    In contrast to the international art cinema, which was largely an auteurist phenomenon, small adult releases were usually literary adaptations, with their production linked closely to more outré Broadway and publishing fashions, a trend that can be traced to Elia Kazan's screening of Tennessee Williams's Broadway smash production, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) (See Palmer/ Bray).

George Cukor
  • Hollywood Master
  • Edited by Murray Pomerance, Barton R. Palmer
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    07 October 2017
    Print publication:
    07 July 2015
  • A critical analysis of the films and career of George Cukor. George Cukor: Hollywood Master is the first book to focus on the career of director George Cukor, one of classic Hollywood's most important figures, with films such as The Women , Adam's Rib , Born Yesterday , Gaslight , and A Star is Born to his credit. The various essays in this volume, all written by prominent experts in the field, offer critical discussions of every feature film Cukor directed and include a rich trove of valuable information about their production histories. This is the first book devoted to one of the most beloved figures from the American cinema's golden age.

  • 15 - Barrymore Does Barrymore: The Performing Self Triumphant in The Great Profile

  • Edited by Murray Pomerance, Steven Rybin, Minnesota State University, Mankato
  • Book:
    Hamlet Lives in Hollywood
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 June 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2017, pp 183-194

  • Summary

    Produced by Twentieth Century-Fox, The Great Profile (1940) showcases the last significant screen performance of John Barrymore who, for comic effect, plays a thinly disguised John Barrymore bearing the very theatrical name of Evans Garrick. Yet the intriguing way in which he here constructs a version of his older and in-decline self has never drawn the critical attention it well deserves. This is both understandable and regrettable. The Great Profile takes for its title a sobriquet that Barrymore had enthusiastically adopted earlier in his career, marking it as autobiographical, which must have been a calculated marketing decision on the part of the studio. And the film refers more or less directly to recent events in his life as he slipped from stage and screen eminence into what some of his admirers regarded as alcoholic degradation and embarrassing incompetence in handling his personal affairs.

    Yet Barrymore does more in this film than register on celluloid all of the warts of his currently failing self—career in jeopardy, latest marriage on the rocks, bankruptcy threatening because of huge sums of money owed to creditors, and his health on a downward spiral as a result of constant overindulgence in drink, leading to “benders,” memory blackouts, and the DTs. A one-dimensional autobiographical approach to The Great Profile of course reflects the most fundamental of category errors, confusing art and life, while failing to acknowledge that Barrymore here constructs a slanted fictional version of what he had become even while (as an actor with not just one but two bodies like any other) he remains legible as “himself,” that is, as a presence in full control of what he shows to moviegoers. Acting out marital discord is very different from enduring and participating in it, as Barrymore would have been able to point out. In other words, the film dramatizes, even as it exemplifies, Barrymore's performing self, imaged here triumphant over unpromising circumstances in a vehicle that was confected for him by a major studio. Evans Garrick offered a strong contrast to the less than worthy roles he had recently been offered by Hollywood in productions such as Hold That Co-ed (1938).

  • 2 - Fritz Lang Remakes Jean Renoir for Hollywood: Film Noir in Three National Voices

  • from PART I - GENRES AND TRADITIONS
  • Edited by Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London, Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Melbourne
  • Book:
    Transnational Film Remakes
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    08 March 2017, pp 36-53

  • Summary

    A commonplace of criticism devoted to the classic American film noir (c.1941– 58) has been that this post-war series is essentially a transnational phenomenon, with its style, themes, and characteristic narrative patterns emerging from a complex interplay among several native and European traditions, both literary and cinematic (see Schrader 1972: 8–10 and Palmer 2016: chs 4–5). Acknowledged as the most significant of these are Weimar Expressionism and the Neue Sachlichkeit; French poetic realism and Surrealism; American postwar semi-documentarianism; and the different genres of popular literature that are usually, not without distortion, bundled together under the rubric of hardboiled fiction, whose principal authors, including James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich, were associated directly or indirectly with Black Mask magazine, constituting something like an informal school (see Nolan 1987: Introduction).

    Already amply demonstrated by scholars, of course, is that even more complex forms of transnationalism define post-classic noir, as well as its ‘branches’ in many other national cinemas; this filmic development, like classic noir itself, has a literary reflex, evidenced in the worldwide popularity of the English-language roman noir (successor to the hard-boiled tradition) and its imitations in other cultures such as Nordic Noir (for global noir, see Pettey and Palmer 2014; for Nordic Noir, both cinematic and literary, see Nestingen 2008). Understandably partial to explanations that emphasise strictly filmic developments, historians of classic noir have often tended to underestimate the importance of ‘dark fiction’ of various kinds and national origins for the development of the series, a blindness to which this essay offers a partial corrective.

    In the aesthetic mixing that resulted in the emergence of classic noir, three national voices made for an interesting harmony that, as we shall see, cannot be reduced to a simple division between visual style/art design, where the French and German high art movements make their influence felt in motif and technique, and themes drawn from American popular culture that provide these films with character, setting, and narrative. Hollywood's absorption of noirish releases from 1930s French cinema speaks to the transauthorial creation of noirness as a repertoire of themes, characters, and narrative patterns upon which subsequent productions in the series continued to draw. Indicating a resonance across different cultures and artistic traditions, this deep transnationalism interestingly forecasts the emergence of noir traditions in other industries as the series went global in the second half of the twentieth century.

Michael Mann - Cinema and Television
  • Interviews, 1980-2012
  • R. Barton Palmer, Steven Sanders
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 September 2016
    Print publication:
    03 July 2014
  • This reader is the first to bring together a selection of Mann's own interviews where he reflects on his film and television productions. The sixteen interviews provide historical context, interpretation and evaluation of the auteur's work. They encompass his entire career as a feature filmmaker and television producer/director as he and others reflect on his themes, working methods, artistic development and career achievements. The book aims to open up Mann's body of work, making it available for comparison with the work of his contemporaries, and to provide fresh insights into his film and television work. A substantive introductory essay, chronology and filmography provide additional bases for understanding the interviews, essays and work of this major filmmaker.Key Features* The first reader on Michael Mann *Includes three interviews originally published in French periodicals and translated for this volume *Open up Mann's body of work, making it available for comparison with the work of his contemporaries

International Noir
  • Edited by Homer B. Pettey, R. Barton Palmer
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    11 November 2014
  • Examines the influence of film noir on visual narrative and technique in global cinematic traditions.Following World War II, film noir became the dominant cinematic expression of Cold War angst, influencing new trends in European and Asian filmmaking. International Noir examines film noir's influence on the cinematic traditions of Britain, France, Scandinavia, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and India. This book suggests that the film noir style continues to appeal on such a global scale because no other cinematic form has merged style and genre to effect a vision of the disturbing consequences of modernity. International noir has, however, adapted and adopted noir themes and aesthetic elements so that national cinemas can boast an independent and indigenous expression of the genre. Ranging from Japanese silent films and women's films to French, Hong Kong, and Nordic New Waves, this book also calls into question critical assessments of noir in international cinemas. In short, it challenges prevailing film scholarship to renegotiate the concept of noir. Ending with an examination of Hollywood's neo-noir recontextualization of the genre, and post-noir's reinvigorating critique of this aesthetic, International Noir offers Film Studies scholars an in-depth commentary on this influential global cinematic art form, further offering extensive bibliography and filmographies for recommended reading and viewing. Key Features * Examines noir's influence on film narrative and technique in several different national cinemas *Covers British, French and Japanese noir as well as the influence of noir on Scandivavian, Chinese and Korean cinema *Includes chapters on neo-noir and post-noir films

Film Noir
  • Edited by Homer B. Pettey, R. Barton Palmer
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    11 November 2014
  • This book traces the development of what we know as film noir from the proto-noir elements of Feuillade's silent French crime series and German Expressionism to the genre's mid-twentieth century popularization and influence on contemporary global media. By employing experimental lighting effects, oblique camera angles, distorted compositions, and shifting points-of-view, film noir's style both creates and comments upon a morally adumbrated world, where the alienating effects of the uncanny, the fetishistic, and the surreal dominate. What drew original audiences to film noir is an immediate recognition of this modern social and psychological reality. Much of the appeal of film noir concerns its commentary on social anxieties, its cynical view of political and capitalist corruption, and its all-too-brutal depictions of American modernity. This book examines the changing, often volatile shifts in representations of masculinity and femininity, as well as the genre's complex relationship with Afro-American culture, observable through noir's musical and sonic experiments. Key Features * Traces the history of film noir from its aesthetic antecedents through its mid-century popularization to its influence on contemporary global media * Discusses the influence of literary and artistic sources on the development of film noir * Includes extensive bibliographies, filmographies and recommended noir film viewing * Concludes with a reflective chapter by Alain Silver and James Ursini on their own influential studies and collections on film noir criticism

  • Traditions in World Cinema

  • Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati
  • Book:
    French-language Road Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 June 2016, pp ix-x

  • Summary

    Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted to the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or undervalued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general interest readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study more specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically oriented approaches. Both textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations of the industrial, cultural, and socio-historical conditions of production and reception.

    The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German Expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established (the Israeli persecution film, global found footage cinema). Other volumes concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, stylistic or thematic, and the groupings may, although they need not, be popularly identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial arts cinema, Italian Neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films is not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European Magical Realist cinema, Palestinian cinema).

    Textbooks and monographs include:

  • • An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films under examination

  • • A concise history of the regional, national, or transnational cinema in question

  • • A summary of previous published work on the tradition

  • • Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural and socio-historical conditions of production and reception

  • • Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious application of relevant film theoretical approaches

  • • Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies)

    • Monographs may additionally include:

  • • Discussion of the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange in light of current research and thinking about cultural imperialism and globalisation, as well as issues of regional/national cinema or political/ aesthetic movements (such as new waves, postmodernism, or identity politics)

  • • Interview(s) with key filmmakers working within the tradition.

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