Gestures of love
Subtitle: romancing performance in classical Hollywood cinema
By: Steven Rybin
Series: The SUNY Series, Horizons of cinema; SUNY series, horizons of cinema
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 261
ISBN-13: 9781438465517
Subjects: Motion pictures; Production and direction; History; Motion picture acting; Love in motion pictures
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-255) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: The actor's heartbeat; title: Part one: Screwball love; title: Love's final irony: John Barrymore and Carole Lombard in Twentieth century; title: Wicked jaws, lanky brunettes: Myrna Loy and William Powell in The thin man and Libeled lady; title: "You look so silly": Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Sylvia Scarlett, Holiday, Bringing up baby, and The Philadelphia story; title: Part two: noir amour; title: Love's possession: Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Laura; title: Wooing bogie, courting Bacall: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To have and have not, The big sleep, Dark passage, and Key Largo; title: Part three: Love and melodrama; title: Lipstick on a teacup: performance in Vincente Minnelli's The cobweb and Tea and sympathy; title: Hudson, Bacall, Stack, Malone: love and gesture in Douglas Sirk's Written on the wind; title: Coda: Modern love.