English 4950: Cool Old Movies

Spring 2019

Grady

First Longer Essay Assignment—DUE MONDAY MARCH 11

An 1800- to 2000-word essay (typed, double spaced, 12-point font) on one of the topics below is due, via email submission, on Monday, March 11; extensions must be requested by 5PM Saturday, March 9. Essays should be typed and double-spaced in a 12-point font, and of course they should have a strong, identifiable thesis that is carefully supported with evidence drawn from relevant films. Don't make mistakes with the evidence--that is, don't reconstruct from memory what you think happened in a particular scene; review the films as necessary. Do not mistake “its” and “it’s.”

1. Design your own topic related to the films that we've seen and the topics we've discussed. Please provide me with a detailed paragraph describing your topic by Wednesday, March 6. .

2. Measure Laura Mulvey’s claims about women as objects of “the gaze” and men as “bearers of the look” against at least three of the films we’ve seen this term.

3. Do endings matter? There are at least two ways to frame this question:

(a) endings are always predetermined in some way—they correspond to the expectations of a particular genre, or to the need for closure that the industrial organization of Hollywood filmmaking imposes on movies—so what’s interesting about movies is their middles, where possibilities are raised and rules are bent and experiments with character are conducted, before the inevitable happy/tragic conclusion is imposed.

(b) Hollywood movies are not experimental at all but fundamentally conservative, and the function of the predictable endings of genre films like westerns or melodramas is precisely to demonstrate that experimentation and rule-bending are dangerous things indeed.

4. Film critic William Paul writes of Ninotchka, "That the film finally sides with no ideology is not so much a mark of cynicism as a clearsighted understanding of the paradoxical nature of all beliefs" (Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy [Columbia University Press, 1983], p. 216). But of course there's another way to explain the film's generally evenhanded treatment of communism and capitalism that has to do with what Maltby and Craven call Hollywood's "commercial aesthetic," the industry's tendency to produce films that subordinate complex ideological conflicts to much more simple romantic (or violent or spectacular) events that satisfy the demands of the medium rather than more abstract philosophical considerations. Write an essay about the way the “clash of cultures” is dealt with in Ninotchka (or in another studio-era film of your choice).

4a. Pursue this topic, but include in your discussion the 1937 film Tovarich (on Canvas), in which exiled Russian aristocrats (played by Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer) are the heroes rather than the villains.

5. The "watch still more movies" option: Stars, like genres, are in a sense "pre-sold" to their audiences, who know what to expect from a movie star because of the persona that star develops over a series of films. Do a bit of historical reconstruction and produce an account of the kind of persona certain stars would have been known for circa 1939: at this point in the semester your candidates would be Errol Flynn, Greta Garbo, and Bette Davis. See at least three of your star's movies before trying to characterize the persona: for Flynn, you could add Captain Blood (1935) The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) or The Sea Hawk (1940) to Dodge City; for Garbo, you could supplement Ninotchka with Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933) or Camille(1937); for Davis, add Jezebel (1938), Of Human Bondage(1934), or Dangerous (1935) to Dark Victory. (Note: this topic will recur later in the term, with different stars.)

6. Discuss the way women are represented--singly or in groups--and what they represent in at least three Western films.

7. Westerns often prominently feature lawmen--sheriffs, marshals, deputies--and the establishment of "law and order" on the wild frontier is frequently a thematic preoccupation of such films, especially of the “progressive” type. At the same time, though, there regularly seems to be a gap between "the Law" and justice: oftentimes we find scoundrels working according to the letter of the law, and heroes having to go outside the law in their pursuit of justice. Discuss this gap, and what Westerns try to do to close it, referring to at least three films.

8. Other possibilities: an extended mise-en-scene analysis, connecting frames to themes (i.e., moving a step beyond the first essay); taking up one of the critical assertions found in Maltby or the class powerpoints; genre analysis arising from the additional work you’ve done on westerns, comedies, or melodramas; the operation of the Production Code as visible (or, really, invisible) in one or more films we’ve seen.