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This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about Hollywood historical films. This book provides commentaries on historical films produced in the U.S. from 1931 to 1942 and argues that a filmic writing of American history flourished in Hollywood during this period. It reviews several historical films including Cimarron, Scarface, and Gone with the Wind.

This chapter examines the historical films produced in the U.S. during the period from 1932 to 1939 about World War 1. During this period, Hollywood's depictions of the war, the impoverishment of the war hero and national decline revealed the frustrating barriers between the American cinema's struggle for historical prestige and the antagonism of censors and critics. Examples of these films include I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, Gold Diggers and The Roaring Twenties.

This chapter examines historical films produced in Hollywood about the life and death of American president Abraham Lincoln made during the period from 1930 to 1941. During this period, Lincoln's presence sanctified whatever theme or subject the historian chose and he generously supported whatever period film a studio happened to create. Lincoln lent authenticity to insignificant scripts, healed any divisive tale of the Civil War and he was a prestigious touch added to secure that elusive critical and box-office appeal. Examples of these films include D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln, Darryl Zanuck and Nunnally Johnson's The Prisoner of Shark Island, and John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln.

This chapter examines the production of historical films in the U.S. that focused on the Hollywood film industry, made during the period from 1939 to 1942. In 1939 Hollywood produced an unprecedented twenty-seven major American historical films. The year was saturated with critical and box-office successes, ranging from adaptations of the classics of English literature, but American historical films far outnumbered any other A-level genre or cycle. Some of the most notable films during this period include Darryl Zanuck's Hollywood Cavalcade, Lewis Jacob's Rise of the American Film and Margaret Farrand Thorp's America at the Movies.

This chapter looks at the 1931 historical film Cimarron. This film was based on Edna Ferber's novel and it was directed by Wesley Ruggles. This chapter suggests that this film pioneered a technique in historical film production which was followed by other films released during the 1930s and early 1940s. Those films during the next ten years would practice Cimarron's techniques of the foreword, the projected text insert, the use of extensive research, and the employment of one dominant screenwriter.

This chapter provides commentaries on the 1932 historical film Scarface. This film was directed by Howard Hawks and was based on Armitage Trail's novel of the same title which was about the life of Chicago gangster Al Capone. This chapter discusses the trend in contemporary crime and fictional gangster film during this period and explains the processes and challenges encountered in the production of Scarface.

This chapter highlights the central role of biographical films in Stalinist cinema. It investigates why Soviet historical films invariably turned into biography, and how they came to occupy the leading place among the genres of historical narrative. The chapter describes the nature and function of biography in the Stalinist political-aesthetic project and reviews some of the successful series of biographical films in Soviet cinema, including Alexander Nevsky, Suvorov and The Ships Storm the Bastions.

This chapter examines the production of historical films in the U.S. during the period from 1933 to 1938. When censorship dismantled the production of historical gangster films, film studios were also unable to produce another award-winning film like Cimarron. Most of the films produced during this period reflect their authors' desire to revise, embarrass, emulate, or add to the work of traditional historians. Their different inabilities to sustain a critical view of the American past indicated a moment of crisis and doubt for historical filmmaking.

The recreation of the ancient world in film has long been a popular area of study amongst classicists, with the main focus being the genre’s alleged disregard for historical fact. The academic view is understandable, but this chapter examines the wider popular audience of the epic film; do they want, or even expect, their films to be historically accurate? Building on a series of audience studies designed to explore audience perceptions of the ancient world in film, the findings offer insight into how historical film is received by the non specialist; the public cinema-goer. Through questionnaires and focus groups based around Gladiator and Centurion, a wide range of audience expectations and beliefs about the genre are revealed which question whether historical epics should be motivated by contemporary influences in an attempt to connect with their viewers. and the extent to which a film should reveal its creative licence. Many of the respondents’ comments give valuable insight into what audiences expect from epics like Gladiator and Centurion.

Nordic cinema since the 2000s has turned to history to a greater degree than before, employing historical subject matter and settings to entertain, show off costumes and tell stories, but also to contribute with images and sounds to what historian Robert A. Rosenstone calls ‘that larger History . . . that web of connections to the past that holds a culture together, that tells us not only where we have been but also suggests where we are going’. This chapter discusses the connections to the past made by the genre of the historical film. By historical film I mean films that create stories that take place in the past and not the present. The main questions are: How do Nordic filmmakers interpret and construct Nordic history? How do Nordic filmmakers engage with the past? And, what constitutes history for current filmmakers in the Nordic countries? I discuss four different feature films, from four different countries, in order to show the scope of the new Nordic historical film and different varieties of engagement with the past.

This chapter examines the historical films produced by David O. Selznick in the U.S. during the period from 1932 to 1937 that focused on Hollywood actors and actress. Selznick worked for MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO Pictures before founding his own Selznick International Pictures. His first film about Hollywood history was about the life and career of Clara Bow titled What Price Hollywood?. Another such film was A Star Is Born. Though it was a self-conscious composite biography, most 1937 viewers associated the character of Norman Maine, a fading alcoholic leading man, to actor John Gilbert who died of heart attack in January 1936.

This chapter examines the historical films produced in Hollywood during the period from 1930 to 1939 which focused on the American Civil War and the Reconstruction. The most notable of these types of films are William Wyler's Jezebel and Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind which was based on Margaret Mitchell's award-winning novel of the same title. This chapter discusses the treatment of American history in these films.

This chapter examines the trend in historical filmmaking in the U.S during the period from 1938 to 1941. This period represents a return of the film industry to epic America. Some of the most notable films produced and released during this period include Stagecoach, directed by John and written by Dudley Nichols, Jesse James, directed by Henry King and written by Nunnaly Johnson and Union Pacific, directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

This chapter examines the production of historical films in the U.S. about World War 1 which were made during the period from 1938 to 1941. Some of the most notable films during this period include The Fighting 69th and Sergeant York. This chapter discusses the increasing competition for film rights and the competition between Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century Fox. It also suggests that despite of the production of prestige World War 1 films, America's unusual and even remote relationship to the war restricted the purely American forays to elliptical examinations of wartime America and the post-war veteran's anonymous struggle for survival.

This chapter discusses hardcore films that, rather than adapting a specific literary text, set the sexual action in the nineteenth century. These films appropriate Victorian costume, customs, imagery, ideology, and other symbolism, revealing the rhetoric of transgression and sexual progressiveness employed by pornography in staging the Victorian for erotic appeal. These films illuminate the complex ways in which pornography and its consumers make use of “the Victorian” as a repressed yet perverse space populated by rigid class and gender distinctions, tantalizing thresholds and doorways ready to be crossed, secret domestic spaces ripe for sexualization, uptight but secretly sexual women, proper but perverse families, and other nineteenth-century sexual goings-on that pornography claims it has the guts to reveal. At the same time, these films situate themselves as heirs to a violent, racist, misogynistic, and pornographic legacy that can be erotically explored via the distancing mechanism of the Victorian.

The release of Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997) constitutes something of a new direction in Hollywood's attitude towards both slavery and its role as public historian. This chapter examines questions of audiences, film reception and the relationship between film and public pedagogy. It argues that a growing number of Hollywood filmmakers have taken it upon themselves to use historical films in order to critically engage with complicated questions about what constitutes ‘America’ domestically and internationally in the post-Cold War world. Amistad's effectiveness in reinscribing American hegemony is predicated not on any kind of heavy-handed, top-down racism, but precisely on its ability to preach and privilege tolerance, acceptance and cultural diversity. In doing so, the film implicitly speaks about the changed and changing nature of cultural and economic power and requires us to develop a new critical idiom to come to terms with concepts such as race, racism, national identity, and multiculturalism. The chapter also discusses the ‘plantation’ movie; the television mini-series Roots, first shown in the United States in January 1977; and public pedagogy versus historical authenticity.