Gestures of Love considers the viewer’s enchantment with charismatic actors in film as the starting point for closely analyzing the performance of love in movies. Written with a thoughtful adoration for the actors who move us, Steven Rybin examines several of cinema’s most beloved on-screen movie couples, including Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and William Powell, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore, Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, and Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone. Using the classical genres of screwball comedy, film noir, and the family melodrama as touchstones, Rybin places the depiction of romance in films into dialogue with the viewer’s own emotional bond to the actors on the screen. In doing so, he offers rich new analyses of such classic films as
Bringing Up Baby,
The Thin Man,
Twentieth Century,
Laura,
To Have and Have Not,
Tea and Sympathy,
Written on the Wind, and more.
Tabella dei contenuti
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prelude: Little Bursting Bubbles
Introduction: The Actor’s Heartbeat
Part I: Screwball Love
1. Love’s Final Irony: John Barrymore and Carole Lombard in Twentieth Century
2. Wicked Jaws, Lanky Brunettes: Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man and Libeled Lady
3. ‘You Look So Silly’: Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Sylvia Scarlett, Holiday, Bringing Up Baby, and
The Philadelphia Story
Part II: Noir Amour
4. Love’s Possession: Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Laura
5. Wooing Bogie, Courting Bacall: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo
Part III: Love and Melodrama
6. Lipstick on a Teacup: Performance in Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb and Tea and Sympathy
7. Hudson, Bacall, Stack, Malone: Love and Gesture in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind Coda: Modern Love
Works Cited
Index
Circa l’autore
Steven Rybin is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He is the author of
Michael Mann: Crime Auteur and
Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film; the editor of
The Cinema of Hal Hartley: Flirting with Formalism; and the coeditor, with Will Scheibel, of
Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema, also published by SUNY Press.
Altri ebook dello stesso autore / Editore
21.541 Ebook in questa categoria
