The Films Of Delmer Daves

Delmer Daves (1904–1977) was an American screenwriter, director, and producer known for his dramas and Western adventures, most notably Broken Arrow and 3:10 to Yuma. Despite the popularity of his films, there has been little serious examination of Daves’s work. Filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier has called Daves the most forgotten of American directors, and to date no scholarly monograph has focused on his work. In The Films of Delmer Daves: Visions of Progress in Mid-Twentieth-Century America, author Douglas Horlock contends that the director’s work warrants sustained scholarly attention. Examining all of Daves’s films, as well as his screenplays, scripts that were not filmed, and personal papers, Horlock argues that Daves was a serious, distinctive, and enlightened filmmaker whose work confronts the general conservatism of Hollywood in the mid-twentieth century. Horlock considers Daves’s films through the lenses of political and social values, race and civil rights, and gender and sexuality. Ultimately, Horlock suggests that Daves’s work—through its examination of bigotry and irrational fear and depiction of institutional and personal morality and freedom—presents a consistent, innovative, and progressive vision of America.

From Destination Tokyo (1943) to The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1965), Delmer Daves was responsible for a unique body of work, but few filmmakers have been as critically overlooked in existing scholarly literature. Often regarded as an embodiment of the self-effacing craftsmanship of classical and post-War Hollywood, films such as Broken Arrow (1950) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957) reveal a filmmaker concerned with style as much as sociocultural significance. As the first comprehensive study of Daves's career, this collection of essays seeks to deepen our understanding of his work, and also to problematize existing conceptions of him as a competent, conventional and even naive studio man.

From Destination Tokyo (1943) to The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1965), Delmer Daves was responsible for a unique body of work, but few filmmakers have been as critically overlooked in existing scholarly literature. Often regarded as an embodiment of the self-effacing craftsmanship of classical and post-War Hollywood, films such as Broken Arrow (1950) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957) reveal a filmmaker concerned with style as much as sociocultural significance. As the first comprehensive study of Daves's career, this collection of essays seeks to deepen our understanding of his work, and also to problematize existing conceptions of him as a competent, conventional and even naAve studio man.

Focusing on twenty-first century Western films, including all major releases since the turn of the century, the essays in this volume cover a broad range of aesthetic and thematic aspects explored in these films, including gender and race. As diverse contributors focus on the individual subgenres of the traditional Western (the gunfighter, the Cavalry vs. Native American conflict, the role of women in Westerns, etc.), they share an understanding of the twenty-first century Western may be understood as a genre in itself. They argue that the films discussed here reimagine certain aspects of the more conventional Western and often reverse the ideology contained within them while employing certain forms and clichés that have become synonymous internationally with Westerns. The result is a contemporary sensibility that might be referred to as the postmodern Western.

In The Films of Walter Hill: Another Time, Another Place, Brian Brems explores how, as action emerged as a full-fledged genre of cinema, Walter Hill established his position in the genre, first as a screenwriter and then as a director. Hill, Brems argues, helped merge the thematic and stylistic concerns of the Western and film noir into a new action cinema, establishing a reputation for mythic, highly-stylized storytelling driven by a relentless pace. Through analyses of Hill’s filmography, this book demonstrates his consistent use of the architecture of classical storytelling to help codify the language of the action movie. These observations are supported by extensive conversations with Walter Hill and several of his on-screen collaborators, including Lance Henriksen, Sigourney Weaver, David Patrick Kelly, James Renmar, and William Sadler. Ultimately, Brems positions Hill as a key American film artist, whose work has inspired countless imitations.

A writer finds wealth, fame, and sorrow in midcentury Manhattan in “a tremendous novel . . . full of wisdom and pain” by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author (Los Angeles Times). Arthur Youngblood Hawke, an ex-Navy man, moves from hardscrabble rural Kentucky to New York, hoping to make his mark on the literary world. His first novel becomes an instant hit, and he is toasted by critics and swept along on a tide of celebrity. But as Hawke gives himself over to the lush life that gilds artistic success—indulging in an affair with an older married woman and a flirtation with his editor, dabbling in real estate developments as his second novel brings him massive wealth and even bigger opportunities—he soon finds himself in a self-destructive downward spiral. Inspired by the life of Thomas Wolfe, and spanning from the Manhattan publishing world to Hollywood to Europe, Youngblood Hawke is both a riveting saga of postwar glamor and a poignant tale of one man’s rise and fall. “A big, powerful, exciting novel . . . Wouk has a tremendous narrative gift.” —San Francisco Chronicle “As searing and accurate a picture of New York in the late 1940s and 1950s as Bonfire of the Vanities was of its period. . . . And icing the cake are some marvelous Hollywood sections, including the best agent-in-action-on-two-telephones scenes ever captured in print.” —Los Angeles Times

For more than a century the cinematic Western has been America's most familiar genre, always teetering on the verge of exhaustion and yet regularly revived in new forms. Why does this outmoded vehicle--with the most narrowly based historical setting of any popular genre--maintain its appeal? In Late Westerns Lee Clark Mitchell takes a position against those critics looking to attach "post" to the all-too-familiar genre. For though the frontier disappeared long ago, though men on horseback have become commonplace, and though films of all sorts have always, necessarily, defied generic patterns, the Western continues to enthrall audiences. It does so by engaging narrative expectations stamped on our collective consciousness so firmly as to integrate materials that might not seem obviously "Western" at all. Through plot cues, narrative reminders, and even cinematic frameworks, recent films shape interpretive understanding by triggering a long-standing familiarity audiences have with the genre. Mitchell's critical analysis reveals how these films engage a thematic and cinematic border-crossing in which their formal innovations and odd plots succeed deconstructively, encouraging by allusion, implication, and citation the evocation of generic meaning from ingredients that otherwise might be interpreted quite differently. Applying genre theory with close cinematic readings, Mitchell posits that the Western has essentially been "post" all along.