Mass-Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture/American Smart Cinema/Hollywood and the American Historical Film (2013)

David W. Marshall, editor Mass-Market Medieval: Essays on Middle Ages in Popular Culture Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Publishers, 2007. p/bk 206 pp. ISBN 978-0-7864-2922-8Claire Perkins American Smart Cinema Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. h/bk 182 pp. ISBN 978-0-7486-4074-4J. E. Smyth, editor Hollywood and American Historical Film London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. p/bk 244 pp. ISBN 978-0-230-23093-4At first glance it seems that three books under review differ widely from one another in terms of content. Marshall's Mass-Market Medieval looks at ways in which medieval history has been reinvented in western popular cultures on film and television as well as in music and tourist sites. Perkins' American Smart Cinema takes close look at recent American film genres beyond mainstream that adopt selfconscious approach to authorship and narrative. J. C. Smyth's American Historical Film comprises series of interventions on relationship between film and history past and present, including work from Roberts Sklar and Robert Rosenstone, David Culbert and Nicholas J. Cull. Interestingly enough, however, all three texts offer fascinating insights into how filmmakers from different backgrounds with different interests - writers, directors, and producers - use past to make sense of present and future. Looking at way they have dealt with this issue over time tells us lot about cultures that shaped their point of view, as well as how they reacted to those cultures.Billy Wilder's Some Pike it Hot (1959), treated by David Eldridge in Smyth collection, offers good example. Although set in 1929, film tells us lot more about late 1950s attitudes towards gender and censorship, as revealed through director's desire to create a 'heterosexual' motivation for transvestism (108). Wilder had had his arguments with PCA (Production Code Administration) in past; in The Seven Year Itch (1956), for instance, he had been forced to remove all suggestions that Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) had committed adultery with The Girl (Marilyn Monroe). Three years later he was in no mood for compromise; hence, to sneak around censors, he set his film in Roaring Twenties and had Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis cross-dress to subvert the moral Puritanism of Production Code [...] and implicitly suggest that it, too, was as discredited as Prohibition (112).In this model 'history' is conceived as self-conscious interpretation of past, revealing lot about interpreters and their preoccupations at specific point in time. This approach can prove very suggestive: Benjamin Earl's piece on tourist sites devoted to King Arthur in Mass-Market Medieval argues that tourism managers have concentrated on idea of 'tradition' in an attempt to attract more visitors. Gift-shops peddle examples of traditional Welsh craftsmanship, while restaurant menus are dominated by traditional Welsh recipes (110-11). This tradition has been deliberately fabricated as part of strategy to maximize sites' commercial potential, as well as to promote cause of Welsh nationalism after creation of National Assembly in Cardiff in 1998. Likewise, Katherine J. Lewis suggests that historical material in British sitcom The Black Adder (1983) - first of four highly successful series - is equally fabricated. Its inspiration comes from mainstream comedies such as Up Pompeii (1969-70), BBC spoof of Roman era starring comedian Frankie Howerd, which was itself inspired by music hall and variety shows of early and mid-twentieth century.Mass-Market Medieval is nothing if not eclectic in its choice of subject matter. Essays on Vikings in hard rock and heavy metal show how musicians appropriate specific images of medieval to emphasize superiority of Nordic races. Another piece on BBC's 2003 reworking of The Canterbury Tales shows how Chaucer was consciously modernized in an attempt to attract 'younger audiences,' even though this strategy apparently deprived source-texts of their strict moral framework (25). …