Golden Age Hollywood

Golden Age Hollywood
FMS 162: Golden Age Hollywood
Spring 2014

Paper 25-7 pages, 12-point font, double spaced, 1” margins. Due to the class drop box June 10.

Classical Hollywood cinema, according to David Bordwell and others, is characterized by an efficient cause-and-effect narrative, driven by the desires of a single protagonist, often involves two lines of action (an A plot and a B plot), and is devoted to verisimilitude. However, in “Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today,” Rick Altman argues that this description does not account for qualities that are common to melodrama and musicals.

Analyze a family melodrama or a musical released by a Hollywood studio between 1930 and 1957 to demonstrate that Hollywood films of the studio era were not as monolithic in their approach to narrative as Bordwell, Ray, MacCabe and others have argued.

In your paper, you will identify three or more qualities associated with the family melodrama or the musical and show how they function in the film that you analyze. Be sure to properly cite the authors who discuss these qualities in relation to the melodrama and/or the musical. These qualities might include:

Coincidence, emphasis on spectacle, and other lapses of realism;
Dual focus narratives, displacement of meaning onto the mise-en-scéne, parallelism in place of cause-and-effect narrative;
Reliance on characters who are not psychologically defined but who represent Good and Evil.

You may draw from the following list of films or choose another family melodrama or musical to discuss.
Melodrama

All that Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1955)
The Bad and the Beautiful (Minnelli, 1952)
Magnificent Obsession(Sirk, 1954)
Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942)
Stella Dallas (Vidor, 1937)
Written on the Wind (Sirk, 1957)
Musical

The Band Wagon (Minnelli, 1953)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953)
Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 1944)
The Pirate (Minnelli, 1948)
Shall We Dance (Sandrich, 1937)
Singin’ in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952)
Top Hat(Sandrich, 1935)
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