Another couple of names to add to the list of Third Wave cinema writers list from a couple of days ago are Peter Stanfield and Tag Gallagher.
Peter Stanfield is a professor at the University of Kent and author of several books, including The Cool and the Crazy: Fifties Pop Cinema with chapters on Korean War movies, juvenile delinquent pix, offbeat music films, hot rod tales, and others. He has also published 'Unamerican’ Hollywood, about the films of the Blacklist era, a book on Hollywood westerns of the ‘30s, Maximum Movies-Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson, and the recent Hoodlum Movies, about the motorcycle gang cycle of exploitation thrillers. I knew the name but the first thing I’ve read is an essay in Steve Neale’s anthology Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, from 2002. “‘Film Noir Like You’ve Never Seen’: Jim Thompson Adaptations and Cycles of Neo-Noir” focuses on the peculiar occurrence of a bunch of Thompson films that appeared almost all at once in the 1990s. That same cycle inspired my book on Film Soleil, but as usual my title does not appear in the bibliography. Nevertheless, Mr. Stanfield has done thorough research and traces the background that led to the Thompson resurgence, before addressing the “meaning” of them and the similar companion neo-noirs, or films soleils, subsequently released. This is an authoritative essay and demands attention. Now I have to read all of Peter Stanfield’s books.
Tag Gallagher has written two superb biographical-critical studies, on John Ford, and on Roberto Rossellini, as well as a series of highly informative video essays on visual style for a string of Criterion Collection DVDs. I was reminded of him just today while flipping through a random issue of Film Comment, from November-December 1998, 20 years ago. The cover feature is Mr. Gallagher’s essay on Douglas Sirk, "White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk," (I think ... the graphic design of the first page is confusing). It’s a piece in which he tries to save Sirk from his “champions,” in a sort of Orwellian manner. They get him wrong. And Mr. Gallagher is here to set them straight. The crux is that Sirk’s champions define Sirk as an ironist who is subverting the melodrama. But Mr. Gallagher both remembers seeing the movies of the ‘50s at the time and being both aware of the elements of the stories that undercut the world of the Eisenhower years, and also being moved by the uplifting endings, which he asserts that Sirk “meant.” Two films on which he concentrates are Summer Storm and A Scandal in Paris, both starring his close friend George Sanders. Mr. Gallagher also isolates a running theme in the films, the role of savior who intervenes in another’s life, surprisingly taken from Sirk’s own experiences, and usually played by Rock Hudson. He finds thematic and autobiographical material in a pair of little regarded Sirk films, All I Desire and A Time to Love and a Time to Die. This is a definitive essay on Sirk, a must-read, and should be widely anthologized.
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