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This book examines the Chinese presence in Hollywood cinema, focusing on the proliferation of Hollywood and Hollywood-inflected films featuring ethnic Chinese stars such as Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li, Chow Yun-fat, and Jackie Chan, in works directed by the likes of John Woo, Wayne Wang, Wong Kar-wai, and Zhang Yimou. It analyzes how these Chinese cinemas have ridden the wave of Hollywood appeal, which is part of Chinese cinema's contemporary transnationalization. It also reveals three main streams of cinematic traditions and discourses that intertwine to create the present cultural climate: firstly, Hollywood's adventurism within the Chinese cinematic traditions; secondly, the racist structures of classic and contemporary Hollywood stereotypes of the Chinese; and thirdly, the Asian-American cinematic response of survival and intervention.

This introductory chapter argues that the existing literature on classical Hollywood could roughly be divided into two sets. On the one hand, there were those scholars who had analyzed the whole period arguing for continuities and similarities in most domains, from production to plot structure, from stylistic procedures to viewing experience, and so forth. On the other hand, critical work on Hollywood cinema had more often approached the topic by selecting a specific genre and period and making a statement about the peculiar relations between aesthetics and ideology. Often focusing on a specific genre, many investigated especially 1940s and 1950s Hollywood cinema in relation to cultural, artistic, and social dynamics. Indeed, for four decades, film noir, the woman's film, and melodrama have been the locus of such innovative research—from the theory of the “progressive text” in the early 1970s to “cinema and modernity studies” during the last twenty years or so.

This chapter examines the debate over the validity of the Chinese government’s Hollywood import policy and the symbolic meaning of Hollywood movies. It investigates the main discourses and arguments of the three major interpretive communities and discusses how the debate involves theoretical arguments about cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity. The chapter teases out China’s unique yet ambivalent perspective on globalization, contributing new insights into the role of the postsocialist state in the global-local interplay. The author contends that China’s debate over Hollywood cinema actually serves as a reference for the Chinese people to make sense of their own modernization process and national identity. The entire debate, in fact, reflects China’s quest for a new, modern national identity and how the Chinese can draw on the American experience to build a modern China.

This chapter attempts to delineate the generic and aesthetic differences between film melodrama in Third Reich and classical Hollywood cinema, and to a lesser extent, between German and Italian Fascist film. Hollywood cinema's greater emphasis on the communicative codes of mise-en-scène, dynamic editing, and camera movement was countered in Nazi cinema with a greater stress on bodily displays and a theatrical acting style that subordinated the intimacy of the face in close-up to the authority of the actor's voice and scripted dialogue. Subtle formal and narrative differences in the Nazi melodrama also encouraged a more aggressive form of voyeurism than was common in the Hollywood melodrama. Instead of the masochistic aesthetic of many Hollywood melodramas, therefore, the Nazi melodrama distinguished itself by its formally encoded appeals to spectatorial sadism and by the masculinity of its pathos.

Incomparing and contrasting Perry’s media influence with that of another famous director, Paul Reinsch concludes the collection by reframing the media discourse around Tyler Perry’s work and career to consider him alongside a comparable media mogul: George Lucas. What might the creator of Star Wars and the creator of Madea possibly have in common (aside from a possible penchant for high fantasy)? In closely analyzing the critical reception, aesthetics, and ideologies of Perry’s For Colored Girls(2010) and Lucas’s Red Tails(2012), Reinsch exposes how each filmmaker ultimately negotiates a particular nostalgia for Classical Hollywood Cinema while also maintaining a particular intrusiveness.

Serious scholarly attention to Gunga Din(1939) has largely been neglected as allegations of condescending and one-dimensional depictions of its Indian characters have disrupted its reputation as one of the greatest epics of the studio era.However, George Stevens’ adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem extends its source text’s colonial ambivalence to American anxieties stemming from the death rattle of Manifest Destiny and the traumas of the Great Depression. Seizing upon the popularity of late Victorian Empire narratives, Hollywood integrated its own ideology into a final product that was a hybrid of imperial narrative and American western. This chapter argues that the film’s loose resemblance to its source material demonstrates a fissure in the American valorization of British culture. Gunga Din completely dismantles Kipling’s poem, recreating it as an example of a uniquely American form: the seamless studio system product that led to Hollywood’s international dominance in cultural production. While the politics of the adaptation resemble textual strategies of resistance common in postcolonial texts, the film’s retention of colonial literature’s representations of its native characters addresses an America beginning to assert a distinct national culture while positioning itself as a future imperial power in the tradition of the faltering British Empire.

This chapter will analyse Duvivier’s career in Hollywood. He was first invited to Hollywood by MGM in 1938 to direct The Great Waltz, and then moved to America shortly after the German occupation of France in 1940. He directed four films there during this period, including Lydia (1941) and The Impostor (1944), a loose remake of La Bandera (1935). The chapter explores the various techniques and themes that Duvivier developed during this period, and looks at the critical reception of his films in both French and American trade journals. The chapter also poses the question of whether a distinctively French cinematic sensibility can be recalibrated within the confines of the Classic Hollywood Cinema (CHC) tradition. Duvivier adapted to a different set of professional and commercial imperatives that enabled him to transcend infrastructural barriers and impose a distinctly French style on the American film industry.

Storytelling creates aesthetic pleasure by cuing viewers to resolve separate narrative elements. Hollywood generally makes the resolution process fairly easy by following time-tested storytelling principles, especially principles of clarity and causality, that increase the viewer’s processing fluency and result in calm pleasure. Some Hollywood movies, however, exhilarate our aesthetic experience by straining our ability to resolve their stories. Pleasure is most exhilarated when cognitive activity is athletic and resolution distant but still tangible. Using abductive reasoning processes—or what cognitive psychologists term “insight”—viewers are able to resolve disunities in Hollywood narratives and even repair incongruities in story logic. As long as a movie does not put so much strain on our cognitive resources, reasoning capacity, or imagination that we are unable or unwilling to resolve a movie’s separate narrative elements, then pleasure is liable to intensify with the degree of difficulty at resolution.

In “Continuity and Change in Hollywood’s Representations of American-Asian Relations in War and Peace” Toplin examines Japanese, Chinese, and to a lesser extent, Korean characters in American films from the 1930s to the 2000s to reveal a “pattern of flexibility and quick adjustments” corresponding primarily but not exclusively to geopolitical shifts. The chapter explores how depictions of Japanese characters radically shifted after Pearl Harbor and again after the American Occupation of Japan. Toplin also traces shifting characterizations of Chinese characters. During much of the 1930s and 1940s Hollywood portrayed them as hearty hard-working peoples who eked out a living from an unforgiving land; after the “Loss of China” and the outbreak of the Korean War, they suddenly became tyrannical Communists who heartlessly massacred their enemies and were hell-bent on destroying the Free World.

This chapter examines the freak show silent films of Lon Chaney, the so-called Man of a Thousand Faces. It argues that the revival of the freak-garde in film occurs amid revolutionary changes in the medium of cinema and the opportunities they presented for new models of subjectivity. It outlines the landscape of Hollywood cinema during the 1920s when the film industry erupted in experimentation due to technological innovations. It argues that these experiments unhinged sound and image from one another in the cinematic spectacle, which resulted to radical instability. It highlights films featuring Chaney such as The Unholy Three and The Unknown and analyzes their disintegration of the senses which leads to the liberation of repressed desires and rogue subjectivities.

This introduction traces the negative reputation of the ‘happy ending’ in film studies’ discourses on Hollywood cinema, analyses the distinction between a cliché and a convention, establishes some of the concepts most frequently associated with this convention (e.g.: homogeneity, closure, ideological conservatism, ‘unrealism’), and lays out the ways in which the book will interrogate its subject's critical reputation.

The Hollywood ‘happy ending’ is almost universally taken to be inherently ideological conservative, in part because of traditions in literary and film theory that portray narrative closure itself as ideologically pernicious. This chapter approaches the issue of ideology from three angles. Firstly addressing the broad question of popular art's ideological influence itself, it discusses (with particular reference to Before Sunrise [1995]) what potential the concept of the final couple might be said to have for structuring viewers’ real-life romantic relationships. Secondly, it takes up the question of the ideological effects of closure, particularly as they relate to the model of the self-consciously artificial ‘happy ending’ made especially famous by much critical work on the films of Douglas Sirk. The chapter concludes by addressing several historically-distinct endings taken from what is often considered an innately ‘conservative’ genre, the romantic comedy. The chapter concludes by arguing that the ideological significance of the final couple will tend to rest less on the convention's mere presence than in the particulars of its presentation.

This chapter shows that classical norms were not fixed rules or structures, but set particular boundaries within which innovation could take place. In essence, classical film style rejected formal techniques that were purposely disruptive or jarring to the audience. While it is sometimes implied that classical norms emerged simultaneously with the studio system, it is important to note that the aesthetic principles of classical Hollywood cinema preceded the studio system. The development of film style in this sense (classical norms) did not emerge in the very same historical instant as the mode of production that gave it institutional shape (the studio system). Instead, the relation between the two would develop a gradual symbiosis, such that classical norms would become synonymous with the studio system as it emerged more fully after the First World War. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Mass-produced Photoplays: Economic and Signifying Practices in the First Years of Hollywood’ by Janet Staiger, which examines how production practices in the early 1910s influenced the way that films were developed and made.

The assumption that the Hollywood ‘happy ending’ is inherently ‘unrealistic’ is extremely prevalent. Chapter 3 examines the association of happy endings with ‘unrealism’ in two main ways. Firstly, it treats ‘unrealism’ as an effect of an artistic convention's excessive familiarity, and considers the traditionally close conceptual relationship between the final couple happy ending and fictional narrative in general, suggesting that this persistent association has often motivated films (such as Pretty Woman [1990]) to cast doubt upon the authenticity of their own happy endings. Secondly, partly via a discussion of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), the chapter asks whether there is something innately ‘unrealistic’ in the convention of the romantic happy ending itself, probing the issue of the relationship between the disordered, ‘open’ nature of life and the necessarily finite and ‘closed’ nature of narrative – particularly as this matter informs the basic tension between ending and beginning that lies at the heart of the final couple.