J. E. Smyth
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039645
- eISBN:
- 9781626740136
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039645.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter five returns to the European war with Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of Kathryn Hulme's The Nun's Story and explores women's perspectives on war and Resistance. Placing Kathryn Hulme's ...
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Chapter five returns to the European war with Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of Kathryn Hulme's The Nun's Story and explores women's perspectives on war and Resistance. Placing Kathryn Hulme's semi-biographical narrative about former nun and UNRRA nurse Marie Louise Habets in the context of the emerging popular and cinematic discourse of the Resistance and the Catholic church's collaboration with the Nazis, the chapter ranges from discussion of the touchy subject of Catholic complicity to Audrey Hepburn's unique commitment to the Belgian war heroine and her story.Less
Chapter five returns to the European war with Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of Kathryn Hulme's The Nun's Story and explores women's perspectives on war and Resistance. Placing Kathryn Hulme's semi-biographical narrative about former nun and UNRRA nurse Marie Louise Habets in the context of the emerging popular and cinematic discourse of the Resistance and the Catholic church's collaboration with the Nazis, the chapter ranges from discussion of the touchy subject of Catholic complicity to Audrey Hepburn's unique commitment to the Belgian war heroine and her story.
Patrick McGilligan
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816680382
- eISBN:
- 9781452948843
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816680382.003.0011
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter discusses some of the films made by George Cukor at the end of the Golden Age, including My Fair Lady (1964), for which Cukor won an Academy Award as best director. My Fair Lady was ...
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This chapter discusses some of the films made by George Cukor at the end of the Golden Age, including My Fair Lady (1964), for which Cukor won an Academy Award as best director. My Fair Lady was produced by the last great studio mogul, Jack Warner, who was determined to recapture Warner Brothers’s glory as well as his own. With a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, it starred Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins. Marni Nixon was chosen to “double” Hepburn’s voice, a decision that devastated the actress. Roughly from 1963 to 1973, Cukor directed three films under his own G-D-C productions: Peter Pan, Nine-Tiger Man, and The Bloomer Girl. Abroad, particularly in France, by the mid-1960s, Cukor’s films were being saluted by film historians and scholars. The influential Cahiers du Cinema, for example, thoroughly admired his work.Less
This chapter discusses some of the films made by George Cukor at the end of the Golden Age, including My Fair Lady (1964), for which Cukor won an Academy Award as best director. My Fair Lady was produced by the last great studio mogul, Jack Warner, who was determined to recapture Warner Brothers’s glory as well as his own. With a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, it starred Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins. Marni Nixon was chosen to “double” Hepburn’s voice, a decision that devastated the actress. Roughly from 1963 to 1973, Cukor directed three films under his own G-D-C productions: Peter Pan, Nine-Tiger Man, and The Bloomer Girl. Abroad, particularly in France, by the mid-1960s, Cukor’s films were being saluted by film historians and scholars. The influential Cahiers du Cinema, for example, thoroughly admired his work.
Maureen Sabine
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823251650
- eISBN:
- 9780823253043
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251650.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
Chapter 3 focuses exclusively on The Nun's Story, a film which still polarizes viewers more than fifty years after its debut. Feminist cultural critics have found it especially hard to sympathize ...
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Chapter 3 focuses exclusively on The Nun's Story, a film which still polarizes viewers more than fifty years after its debut. Feminist cultural critics have found it especially hard to sympathize with the inner spiritual drama of the film's conflicted protagonist Sister Luke or appreciate the all-time great film performance of Audrey Hepburn; and this chapter suggests that their animus stems from political hostility to the nun's struggles with the religious vow of unquestioning obedience. It argues that the nun has internalized an alternative code of obedience deriving from the history of her Catholic family romance, that is to say, her lifelong devotion to a loving and approving doctor father, and her core desire to emulate him professionally. It details the conflict Sister Luke experiences between her original family romance and the Catholic romance of the cloister with its surrogate family structure, and between her professional desire to do the nursing work she loves in the Congo and her religious desire to become the perfect nun her order wants her to be.Less
Chapter 3 focuses exclusively on The Nun's Story, a film which still polarizes viewers more than fifty years after its debut. Feminist cultural critics have found it especially hard to sympathize with the inner spiritual drama of the film's conflicted protagonist Sister Luke or appreciate the all-time great film performance of Audrey Hepburn; and this chapter suggests that their animus stems from political hostility to the nun's struggles with the religious vow of unquestioning obedience. It argues that the nun has internalized an alternative code of obedience deriving from the history of her Catholic family romance, that is to say, her lifelong devotion to a loving and approving doctor father, and her core desire to emulate him professionally. It details the conflict Sister Luke experiences between her original family romance and the Catholic romance of the cloister with its surrogate family structure, and between her professional desire to do the nursing work she loves in the Congo and her religious desire to become the perfect nun her order wants her to be.
John Franceschina
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199754298
- eISBN:
- 9780199949878
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199754298.003.0011
- Subject:
- Music, Dance, Popular
Hermes Pan was hired by Twentieth Century-Fox to stage Cleopatra’s monumental procession into Rome for the film Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor. Finishing business at Choreo Enterprises, Inc., a ...
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Hermes Pan was hired by Twentieth Century-Fox to stage Cleopatra’s monumental procession into Rome for the film Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor. Finishing business at Choreo Enterprises, Inc., a record company Pan established with Fred Astaire, Hermes moved to Rome where he lived and worked for nearly a year. Returning to Hollywood he was hired to choreograph the film version of My Fair Lady directed by George Cukor and starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. He returned to television to stage “Think Pretty” and The Hollywood Palace for Fred Astaire before heading off the Las Vegas with his assistant Jerry Jackson to choreograph the centennial edition of the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana Hotel. At Astaire’s request, Francis Ford Coppola hired Pan to stage the dances for Finian’s Rainbow at Warner Brothers but fired him before the picture was finished.Less
Hermes Pan was hired by Twentieth Century-Fox to stage Cleopatra’s monumental procession into Rome for the film Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor. Finishing business at Choreo Enterprises, Inc., a record company Pan established with Fred Astaire, Hermes moved to Rome where he lived and worked for nearly a year. Returning to Hollywood he was hired to choreograph the film version of My Fair Lady directed by George Cukor and starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. He returned to television to stage “Think Pretty” and The Hollywood Palace for Fred Astaire before heading off the Las Vegas with his assistant Jerry Jackson to choreograph the centennial edition of the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana Hotel. At Astaire’s request, Francis Ford Coppola hired Pan to stage the dances for Finian’s Rainbow at Warner Brothers but fired him before the picture was finished.
Maureen Sabine
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823251650
- eISBN:
- 9780823253043
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251650.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
In her vibrant screen performance as Sister Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's, Ingrid Bergman represented the film nun as a mature modern woman who had chosen the religious life with a “complete ...
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In her vibrant screen performance as Sister Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's, Ingrid Bergman represented the film nun as a mature modern woman who had chosen the religious life with a “complete understanding” of both erotic and spiritual desire. How did this engaging character and her cinematic sisters in later postwar popular film come to be stereotyped as girlish, incomplete, or unimportant characters± Veiled Desires explores this question through a unique, full-length study of nun films over a sixty year period beginning with the 1945 film The Bells of St. Mary's and concluding with Doubt in 2008. It argues for a more complex picture of the film nun as an ardent and active lead character who struggled with a problematic dual identity as a modern women and a religious over the course of the twentieth century. It suggests how beautiful and charismatic Hollywood stars such as Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus (1947) and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Joan Collins in Sea Wife (1957), Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story (1959), Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965), Diana Rigg in In This House of Brede (1975), and Meg Tilly in Agnes of God (1985) called attention to the desires that the veil concealed and the vows of chastity and obedience were thought to repress. In an historically framed and theologically and psychoanalytically informed argument, the book recuperates nun films as a significant genre in Anglo-American cinema. It shows in-depth how they probed the tensions between the selfless and sacrificial desires idealized in religious life as agape and the passionate and aspirational desires valorized in feminist discourse as eros.Less
In her vibrant screen performance as Sister Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's, Ingrid Bergman represented the film nun as a mature modern woman who had chosen the religious life with a “complete understanding” of both erotic and spiritual desire. How did this engaging character and her cinematic sisters in later postwar popular film come to be stereotyped as girlish, incomplete, or unimportant characters± Veiled Desires explores this question through a unique, full-length study of nun films over a sixty year period beginning with the 1945 film The Bells of St. Mary's and concluding with Doubt in 2008. It argues for a more complex picture of the film nun as an ardent and active lead character who struggled with a problematic dual identity as a modern women and a religious over the course of the twentieth century. It suggests how beautiful and charismatic Hollywood stars such as Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus (1947) and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Joan Collins in Sea Wife (1957), Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story (1959), Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965), Diana Rigg in In This House of Brede (1975), and Meg Tilly in Agnes of God (1985) called attention to the desires that the veil concealed and the vows of chastity and obedience were thought to repress. In an historically framed and theologically and psychoanalytically informed argument, the book recuperates nun films as a significant genre in Anglo-American cinema. It shows in-depth how they probed the tensions between the selfless and sacrificial desires idealized in religious life as agape and the passionate and aspirational desires valorized in feminist discourse as eros.
J. E. Smyth
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- March 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190840822
- eISBN:
- 9780190840853
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190840822.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
During the early 1940s, journalists observed that after years of men controlling women’s fashion, Hollywood had become “a fashion center in which women designers are getting to be a big power.” In a ...
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During the early 1940s, journalists observed that after years of men controlling women’s fashion, Hollywood had become “a fashion center in which women designers are getting to be a big power.” In a town where “the working girl is queen,” it was women who really knew how to dress working women. Edith Head’s name dominates Hollywood costume design. Though a relatively poor sketch artist who refused to sew in public, Head understood what the average woman wanted to wear and knew better than anyone how to craft her image as the-one-and-only Edith Head. However, she was one of many women who designed Hollywood glamour in the studio era. This chapter juxtaposes Head’s career with that of a younger, fiercely independent designer who would quickly upstage Head as a creative force. In many senses, Dorothy Jeakins’s postwar career ascent indicated the waning of the Hollywood system and the powerful relationship between female designers, stars, and fans.Less
During the early 1940s, journalists observed that after years of men controlling women’s fashion, Hollywood had become “a fashion center in which women designers are getting to be a big power.” In a town where “the working girl is queen,” it was women who really knew how to dress working women. Edith Head’s name dominates Hollywood costume design. Though a relatively poor sketch artist who refused to sew in public, Head understood what the average woman wanted to wear and knew better than anyone how to craft her image as the-one-and-only Edith Head. However, she was one of many women who designed Hollywood glamour in the studio era. This chapter juxtaposes Head’s career with that of a younger, fiercely independent designer who would quickly upstage Head as a creative force. In many senses, Dorothy Jeakins’s postwar career ascent indicated the waning of the Hollywood system and the powerful relationship between female designers, stars, and fans.
