Hollywood director King Vidor (1894-1982) was acknowledged as a master by movie showmen and cinema critics alike, but the range of his films made him impossible to pigeonhole. With The Big Parade (1925), he created the first modern war film and MGM's first major hit. The Crowd (1928) looked at "ordinary people" in city jungles. Hallelujah (1929) was the first all-black major-studio feature. To the Great Depression, Vidor responded with Our Daily Bread (1934), the politically intricate saga of a rural cooperative. Other Vidor films spoke directly to the moviegoing public: that three-handkerchief male weepie, The Champ (1931); and that key women's drama, Stella Dallas (1937). His high-passion postwar melodramas, spurned by contemporary reviewers, have gained champions each year: the epic western Duel in the Sun (1946); Ayn Rand's ultra-right-wing The Fountainhead (1949); and the violent and morbid Beyond the Forest (1949) and Ruby Gentry (1952). This book is the first in-depth story of Vidor's half-century-long career, from his first attempts to rival Hollywood in his home state of Texas through the complex interplay of his independent spirit with "classic" Hollywood's rules about public taste. The title King Vidor, American, celebrates Vidor as a representative man, full of the conflicting generosity and ferocity in the national ethos: with his violent mixture of pioneering optimism and noir torments, of transcendentalism and puritanism, of spiritual verve and physical practicality, of liberal conscience and Social Darwinist savagery, of male dominance and female conciliation. Like Whitman, he contains multitudes. Never narrowly auteurist, this book is a wide ranging integration of film history, political thought, and popular culture.--Adapted from dust jacket.

Follows King Vidor from his childhood, his move to Hollywood, the building of his studio, and his time at MGM.

ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The first book to bring together interviews of master moviemakers from the American Film Institute’s renowned seminars, Conversations with the Great Moviemakers, offers an unmatched history of American cinema in the words of its greatest practitioners. Here are the incomparable directors Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, King Vidor, David Lean, Fritz Lang (“I learned only from bad films”), William Wyler, and George Stevens; renowned producers and cinematographers; celebrated screenwriters Ray Bradbury and Ernest Lehman; as well as the immortal Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini (“Making a movie is a mathematical operation. It’s absolutely impossible to improvise”). Taken together, these conversations offer uniquely intimate access to the thinking, the wisdom, and the genius of cinema’s most talented pioneers.

Killing the Indian Maiden examines the fascinating and often disturbing portrayal of Native American women in film. M. Elise Marubbio examines the sacrificial role in which a young Native woman allies herself with a white male hero and dies as a result of that choice. In studying thirty-four Hollywood films from the silent period to the present, she draws upon theories of colonization, gender, race, and film studies to ground her analysis in broader historical and sociopolitical context and to help answer the question, “What does it mean to be an American?” The book reveals a cultural iconography embedded in the American psyche. As such, the Native American woman is a racialized and sexualized other. A conquerable body, she represents both the seductions and the dangers of the American frontier and the Manifest Destiny of the American nation to master it.

"This is a ground-breaking book. The text is remarkable in its use of MPAA files and studio archives; Weisenfeld uncovers all sorts of side stories that enrich the larger narrative. The writing is clear and concise, and Weisenfeld makes important theoretical interpretations without indulging in difficult jargon. She incorporates both film theory and race theory in graceful, non-obtrusive ways that deepen understanding. This is an outstanding work."—Colleen McDannell, author of Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression

Examines how Hollywood responded to and reflected the political and social changes that America experienced during the 1930sIn the popular imagination, 1930s Hollywood was a dream factory producing escapist movies to distract the American people from the greatest economic crisis in their nations history. But while many films of the period conform to this stereotype, there were a significant number that promoted a message, either explicitly or implicitly, in support of the political, social and economic change broadly associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal programme. At the same time, Hollywood was in the forefront of challenging traditional gender roles, both in terms of movie representations of women and the role of women within the studio system. With case studies of actors like Shirley Temple, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, as well as a selection of films that reflect politics and society in the Depression decade, this fascinating book examines how the challenges of the Great Depression impacted on Hollywood and how it responded to them.Topics covered include:How Hollywood offered positive representations of working womenCongressional investigations of big-studio monopolization over movie distributionHow three different types of musical genres related in different ways to the Great Depression the Warner Bros Great Depression Musicals of 1933, the Astaire/Rogers movies, and the MGM akids musicals of the late 1930sThe problems of independent production exemplified in King Vidors Our Daily BreadCary Grants success in developing a debonair screen persona amid Depression conditionsContributors Harvey G. Cohen, King's College LondonPhilip John Davies, British LibraryDavid Eldridge, University of HullPeter William Evans, Queen Mary, University of LondonMark Glancy, Queen Mary University of LondonIna Rae Hark, University of South CarolinaIwan Morgan, University College LondonBrian Neve, University of BathIan Scott, University of ManchesterAnna Siomopoulos, Bentley UniversityJ. E. Smyth, University of WarwickMelvyn Stokes, University College LondonMark Wheeler, London Metropolitan University