In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity

Taking issue with many orthodox views of Film Noir, Frank Krutnik argues for a reorientation of this compulsively engaging area of Hollywood cultural production. Krutnik recasts the films within a generic framework and draws on recent historical and theoretical research to examine both the diversity of film noir and its significance within American popular culture of the 1940s. He considers classical Hollywood cinema, debates on genre, and the history of the emergence of character in film noir, focusing on the hard-boiled' crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain as well as the popularisationof Freudian psychoanalysis; and the social and cultural upheavals of the 1940s. The core of this book however concerns the complex representationof masculinity in the noir tough' thriller, and where and how gender interlocks with questions of genre. Analysing in detail major thrillers like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and The Killers , alongside lesser known but nonetheless crucial films as Stranger on the Third Floor, Pitfall and Dead Reckoning Krutnik has produced a provocative and highly readable study of one of Hollywood most perennially fascinating groups of films.

Humor & Entertainment

Krutnik, Frank

Movies

Routledge

Popular Film and Television Comedy (Popular Fictions Series)

How is comedy related to its institutional context? Neale and Krutnik, in this wide-ranging discussion of the genre, propose that comedy always involves deviation from aesthetic and cultural conventions and norms.

Neale, Steve

Popular Film and Television Comedy

Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik take as their starting point the remarkable diversity of comedy's forms and modes - feature-length narratives, sketches and shorts, sit-com and variety, slapstick and romance. Relating this diversity to the variety of comedy's basic conventions - from happy endings to the presence of gags and the involvement of humour and laughter - they seek both to explain the nature of these forms and conventions and to relate them to their institutional contexts. They propose that all forms and modes of the comic involve deviations from aesthetic and cultural conventions and norms, and, to demonstrate this, they discuss a wide range of programmes and films, from Blackadder to Bringing up Baby, from City Limits to Blind Date, from the Roadrunner cartoons to Bless this House and The Two Ronnies. Comedies looked at in particular detail include: the classic slapstick films of Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin; Hollywood's 'screwball' comedies of the 1930s and 1940s; Monty Python, Hancock, and Steptoe and Son. The authors also relate their discussion to radio comedy.

For more than half a century Jerry Lewis has cultivated multiple and contradictory self-images: the idiot kid, the Las Vegas showman, the auteur-director, the telethon philanthropist, the elder statesman of American show business. His work has provoked extremes of critical adulation and hostility on both sides of the Atlantic. 
Frank Krutnik discusses Lewis's partnership with Dean Martin in the late 1940s and early 1950s, exploring how their performances elaborated on a wartime theme of male bonding. Examining such early '60s solo works as The Bellboy, The Nutty Professor, and The Patsy, Krutnik probes the ways in which Lewis both dismantled the conventions of film comedy and manipulated his public identity. Charting the decline of Lewis's film career and his simultaneous rise to fame as the emotional powerhouse of the Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon, Krutnik also traces Lewis's attempt to create a serious, adult image to replace that of the aging "kid."

INVENTING JERRY LEWIS (Smithsonian Studies in the History of Film and Media)

Smithsonian

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Books by Krutnik, Frank

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Krutnik, Frank. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity

In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity

Popular Film and Television Comedy (Popular Fictions Series)

Popular Film and Television Comedy

In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity

In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity

Popular Film and Television Comedy (Popular Fictions Series)

INVENTING JERRY LEWIS (Smithsonian Studies in the History of Film and Media)