Search Results

This chapter is a case study of the transformation of Oliver Twist into a cultural myth via the screen. It assumes that the text and its mass cultural dissemination are both typical and exceptional in the history of Dickens on screen: like other Dickens's ‘culture‐texts’, Oliver Twist has been popular with large numbers of people, but Oliver Twist is unlike other Dickens texts in the extent to which it has caused political controversy. In particular, the chapter highlights the controversy about anti‐Semitism surrounding David Lean's post‐war adaptation of the novel, which generated an ‘anxiety of influence’ among subsequent directors. It charts the ways in which the cultural myth that is Oliver Twist has metamorphosed in response to trauma in a process of cultural evolution which tells us much about the complex dynamics of mass culture, neither wholly imperialist nor blandly politically correct. The mass cultural repetition of Dickens's moving images, together with the segmentation of the modern cultural marketplace, have made it harder to produce adaptations of his work that achieve the combination of phenomenal mass appeal and the radical political impact which was associated with Dickens—despite accusations of anti‐Semitism ‐ when Oliver Twist first appeared. The chapter maintains that though Dickens's ongoing ability to command extra‐literary attention is arguably radical in itself, many modern adapters of Dickens seem to feel the need to choose between commercial and political Dickens.

This chapter studies the international dimensions of filmmaking, which have been widely ignored by film studies. It identifies the advantages of international filmmaking, and examines Lawrence of Arabia as an international film of the 1950s from the perspectives of the foreign government, national technical crews and extras, and the producer. It shows that Hollywood's film industry has always depended on international production. This chapter also discusses the film's reception, the film's director, David Lean, and one of the non-Western actors, Omar Sharif.

This chapter examines David Lean's letter where he recounts his experiences in searching for possible locations to shoot Lawrence of Arabia. This letter reveals the creative process through which Lean came up with the images in this film. The chapter reviews some of the technological innovations that supported wide-screen processes of the 1960s and how it helped in the filming of the movie. This chapter also studies Peter O'Toole's theatrical training and career, in order to understand his performance in the film, and shows how the desert became a protagonist in the film and Lean's efforts to exert control over it.

David Lean was more than a contemporary of Alfred Hitchcock and Carol Reed. It is usual for admirers to make a critical leap from the post-war success of Brief Encounter and the Charles Dickens' diptych, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist (1948), to the big-budget location shoots produced by Sam Spiegel, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia. Within that period, however, and bridging the gap, are three neglected films in which the English stage and film actress Ann Todd, who became Lean's third wife, is the central female protagonist, if not the focal point of each narrative: The Passionate Friends (1948), Madeleine (1949) and The Sound Barrier (1952). The Passionate Friends and The Sound Barrier gloss the relationship of romance and restraint in post-war Britain echoing Brief Encounter, while Madeleine is a further examination, after Dickens, of the nineteenth-century heritage, this time in bourgeois Victorian Glasgow. If Lean's epic grandeur is connected after 1956 to the end of empire, his troubled romanticism is marooned period-wise after Lawrence of Arabia, in the age of empire.

This chapter provides context for the emergence of Oliver! by analyzing the musical’s development in the framework of various cultural and theatrical movements. Oliver!’s popularity is rooted in the enduring power of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, which had already become ingrained in Western culture from myriad theatrical and cinematic adaptations, including the all-important David Lean film. Bart’s adaptation built off this Dickensian tradition, though it was simultaneously shaped by the development of the postwar English theater through the efforts of the “angry young men” such as John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. Much as Osborne and Wesker moved the English drama away from the upper-middle-class drawing-room comedy, Lionel Bart moved the English musical away from comic opera and operetta and toward a cockney working-class musical tradition. The chapter concludes by tracing Bart’s early career and his work on music-hall style musicals at Unity Theatre and Theatre Workshop.

Geraldine Chaplin emerged as a film star in the 1960s upon her highly publicized appearance in David Lean’s epic film Doctor Zhivago (1965). Accompanying her presence in Lean’s film was public discourse, throughout the United States and Europe, which often framed her as a kind of cosmopolitan hybrid figure. In this journalistic commentary, Chaplin was always split in half between one identity and another: half-British and half-American; half-demure, half-hippie; one part her mother, Oona O’Neill, and one part her father, Charlie Chaplin. Much of this commentary was, indeed, quite cynical in its character, questioning her acting ability in its repeated suggestion that her winning of film roles was solely due to her famous last name. Many of the films she made during this period, in particular the French film Crime on a Summer Morning (released before Zhivago, in 1965) and the British film Cop Out (made shortly after Zhivago and released in 1967) reflect this ambivalence about her talent and distinction, through her small parts as privileged and rather unlikeable rich girls clashing with their wealthy, sympathetic fathers. Her performance in Lean’s film, and others in the 1960s, will be examined alongside privileged moments from her father’s films, including The Kid, and also in relation to the reception of Charlie Chaplin’s films from the Soviet Union after the time period in which Doctor Zhivago is set.

Mankiewicz scores another successful decade with Hart to Hart, Superman II, Ladyhawke and Dragnet. He makes his feature debut as a director on the hit Dragnet. He leaves Warner Brothers and hangs his shingle at Universal. Mankiewicz moves from Jeff Berg and ICM to Michael Ovitz and CAA. He gets fed up with his Legal Eagles experience and wants to go back to ICM. He gets blacklisted for a time by CAA. Mankiewicz visits Africa for the first time through his friend, Stefanie Powers and buys a home in Kenya.

This chapter examines the cinematic representation of the railway station, examining the different ways in which the space and iconography of the station have been used in film to represent cultural integration, transformation and/or friction. The station is both physical space and symbol or metaphor for cultural encounter of all kinds: encounter engendered by travel and tourism, conflict and displacement, memory and identity. One of the very earliest moving pictures, the Lumière brothers’ Arrivée d’un train à la gare de La Ciotat (France, 1896), puts a station at its heart reminding us of the shared origins of both cinema and the modern station in the nineteenth century and presaging the countless filmic representations of the station which would ensue. Via close analysis of David Lean’s seminal ‘station’ film, Brief Encounter (1945) the chapter examines the reasons for this cinematic fascination with the railway station and examines this film’s particular representations of journeys, encounters and identities.

Carol Reed is part of a wider movement in which fugitive film is just one dimension, the historic moment of romantic realism in British film, which is over, we could argue, almost as soon as it has begun. Romantic realism has three main components, all variations on the new mimesis: the wartime documentary series of Humphrey Jennings; the combat drama-documentaries of Reed, David Lean and others; and the wider remit of the fugitive genre which includes at a tangent two of Lean's most popular films, Brief Encounter and Great Expectations (1946). The transformation of romance into realism is, in literary terms, a descent from high to low. The fable is often the instrument of romantic disenchantment used by the disillusioned romantic. Hence that disenchantment is itself romantic, as They Made Me a Fugitive and The Third Man demonstrate. This chapter also looks at Reed's two espionage films The Man Between and Our Man in Havana and considers some of his contemporaries and successors.

Despite being a founding member of her union, Barbara McLean worked sixty-hour weeks. She supervised her male colleagues, had more Academy Award nominations than anyone, and was known as “Hollywood’s Editor-in-Chief.” But McLean—who arguably had more control over her studio’s feature output than all of Twentieth Century-Fox’s directors—was not alone. During the studio system, Hollywood’s top female editors were formidable auteurs, and were unafraid of acknowledging, as Anne Bauchens did in 1941, “Women are better at editing motion pictures than men.” Regardless of their fame within the industry and the syndicated press in the 1930s and 1940s, studio-era Hollywood’s top female editors have become obscure footnotes in Hollywood history. As women and as editors, they are doubly “invisible” in the director-driven agendas of contemporary film criticism. But during the studio system, they were at the creative center of Hollywood filmmaking. This chapter puts them back where they belong.