Gaylyn Studlar

Have Gun – Will Travel

One of the most successful series of its time, Have Gun—Will Travel became a cultural phenomenon in the late 1950s and made its star, Richard Boone, a nationwide celebrity. The series offered viewers an unusual hero in the mysterious, Shakespeare-spouting gunfighter known only as "Paladin" and garnered a loyal fan base, including a large female following. In Have Gun—Will Travel, film scholar Gaylyn Studlar draws on a remarkably wide range of episodes from the series’ six seasons to show its sophisticated experimentation with many established conventions of the Western.

• Wayne State University Press

Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema

In Precocious Charms, Gaylyn Studlar examines how Hollywood presented female stars as young girls or girls on the verge of becoming women. Child stars are part of this study but so too are adult actresses who created motion picture masquerades of youthfulness. Studlar details how Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones, and Audrey Hepburn performed girlhood in their films. She charts the multifaceted processes that linked their juvenated star personas to a wide variety of cultural influences, ranging from Victorian sentimental art to New Look fashion, from nineteenth-century children’s literature to post-World War II sexology, and from grand opera to 1930s radio comedy. By moving beyond the general category of “woman,” Precocious Charms leads to a new understanding of the complex pleasures Hollywood created for its audience during the half century when film stars were a major influence on America’s cultural imagination.

• University of California Press

John Ford Made Westerns

In John Ford Made Westerns, nine major essays by prominent scholars of Hollywood film situate the sound-era Westerns of John Ford within contemporary critical contexts and regard them from fresh perspectives. These range from examining Ford’s relation to other art forms (most notably literature, painting, and music) to exploring the development of the director’s reputation as a director of Westerns. While giving attention to film style and structure, the volume also treats the ways in which these much-loved films engage with notions of masculinity and gender roles, capitalism and community, as well as racial, sexual, and national identity.

• Indiana University Press

Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster

In 1997, James Cameron’s Titanic, the most expensive and technologically advanced movie ever made, hit theaters. In 13 weeks, it became the highest-grossing film in North America, and shortly thereafter, the first motion picture to earn a billion dollars worldwide.

The cultural studies and film scholars who have contributed 13 essays to this collection ask the key question—Why? What made Titanic such a popular movie? Why has this film become a cultural and film phenomenon? What makes it so fascinating to the film-going public?

• Amazon

Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film

The Sheik. Pépé le Moko. Casablanca. Aladdin. Some of the most popular and frequently discussed titles in movie history are imbued with orientalism, the politically-charged way in which western artists have represented gender, race, and ethnicity in the cultures of North Africa and Asia. This is the first anthology to address and highlight orientalism in film from pre-cinema fascinations with Egyptian culture through the "Whole New World" of Aladdin. Eleven illuminating and well-illustrated essays utilize the insights of interdisciplinary cultural studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, and genre criticism.

• Amazon

This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age

Studlar looks at four major Hollywood male stars of the silent era – Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, and Lon Chaney – to illuminate the cultural, ideological, and historical implications of these stars in relation to contemporary debates over changing sexual and social norms.

• Columbia University Press

Reflections in a Male Eye

In a career that spanned six decades, the legendary John Huston directed 38 films, including The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, Prizzi's Honor, and The Dead, as well as three documentaries on the experience of World War II combat and its aftereffects.

Despite his achievements, Huston's work has often been spurned by movie critics and film scholars. This anthology, the first in-depth study of Huston's films since his death in 1987, challenges the conventional wisdom through a vigorous reassessment of the director's work. Bringing together recent essays, classic pieces by Andrew Sarris and James Agee, as well as two Huston short stories and an interview with the filmmaker, Reflections in a Male Eye explores the ideology of Huston's films, their social and political backdrop, and his vision of the American male.

• Amazon

In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic

In a major revision of feminist-psychoanalytic theories of film pleasure and sexual difference, Studlar's close textual analysis of the six Paramount films directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich probes the source of their visual and psychological complexity.

• Columbia University Press