Pre-Code in Synthetic Flesh

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan K. Rode
Keyword(s):  
Monte Carlo ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Bette Davis ◽  
Key Driver

Curtiz’s career is summarized during the pre-Code era of Hollywood films. The evolution of the Production Code from the 1922 appointment of Will Hays as the czar of the MPPDA to the lack of enforcement of the Code is contextually chronicled as a key driver of the nature of Warner Bros. pictures during the early years of the Depression. Zanuck pioneered the “ripped from the headlines” gangster dramas that struck a chord with audiences. After he directed The Mad Genius, with John Barrymore, Curtiz’s pay was cut as Warners lost $8 million in 1931.Following The Woman from Monte Carlo and the visually creative Alias the Doctor, Curtiz was assigned the contemporary Strange Love of Molly Louvain, starring Ann Dvorak.He hit box-office gold with Doctor X (1932), a gruesome pre-Code horror film starring Fay Wray, who recounted Curtiz’s cold, sometimes cruel behavior on the set. Curtiz’s production of The Cabin in the Cotton included his racial faux pas and his alienation of Bette Davis during their first film together.His masterly direction of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing concluded a year of worsening economic conditions for the country.

A Duet for Sailors and Pansies: Queer Archival Work and Male Same-Sex Dancing in Follow the Fleet (1936) and Other Depression-Era Films

2021 ◽  
pp. 186-213
Author(s):  
David Lugowski
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Contextual Analysis ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Production Code ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Navy ◽  
Mass Entertainment ◽  
Archival Work ◽  
Depression Era

This chapter explores a queer all-male dance lesson for partnered sailors in the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet (1936), using archival research (scripts, Production Code Administration records) and comparative textual and contextual analysis. It raises the queerness of Rogers and Astaire before exploring two intersecting axes. The association of sailors with queer behavior and effeminate “pansies” occurs in military scandals, paintings, and Depression-era Hollywood films, including Sailor’s Luck and Son of a Sailor (both 1933). The queerness of male same-sex dancing arises in ballet and in film, including Suicide Fleet (1931). Various institutions criticized or attempted to censor such representations, but they also found acceptance. The US Navy, for example, wanted the comical dance lesson removed from Fleet; instead, it was only rewritten, suggesting the inability to remove queerness from culture and its essential role in mass entertainment.

Spellbound (1945)

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-117
Author(s):  
John Billheimer
Keyword(s):  
Box Office ◽  
Production Code

In one of the earliest films to depict the budding field of psychoanalysis, Alfred Hitchcock dealt with oversight from David O. Selznick’s personal psychiatrist as well as the Production Code. Both the psychiatrist and the censors found an abundance of erotic symbolism in the dream sequence created by Salvador Dal’, which was cut significantly in the final film. The Production Code office was also concerned about the suggestion of an illicit affair between psychiatrist Ingrid Bergman and her patient Gregory Peck, the new head of the asylum where much of the story takes place. The film did well at the box office, but its simplistic view of psychoanalysis has caused it to age poorly.

scholarly journals Internal Mobility: The Greater Responsiveness of Foreign-Born to Economic Conditions

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-98
Author(s):  
Gaetano Basso ◽  
Giovanni Peri
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Lower Sensitivity ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Internal Mobility ◽  
Secular Decline ◽  
Recession Period

In this article, we review the internal geographic mobility of immigrants and natives in the United States in the recent decades, with a focus on the period since 2000. We confirm a continuing secular decline in mobility already pointed out by the existing literature, and we show that it persisted in the post great recession period. We then focus on foreign-born and establish that, on average, they did not have total mobility rates higher than that of natives. However, their mobility response to local economic conditions was stronger than the response of natives in the period from 1980 to 2017. A review of recent research reveals that the higher elasticity of mobility of immigrants to economic conditions is a combination of lower sensitivity to local prices, higher propensity to move in the early years after immigration, and strong economic success of cities that were immigrant enclaves in the 1980s.

Customer-Base Concentration, Profitability, and the Relationship Life Cycle

2015 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 883-906 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J. Irvine ◽  
Shawn Saeyeul Park ◽  
Çelim Yıldızhan
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Fixed Costs ◽  
Customer Base ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Specific Investments ◽  
Key Driver ◽  
Operating Leverage ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACT Using a recently expanded dataset on supplier-customer links, we introduce a dynamic relationship life-cycle hypothesis. We hypothesize that the relation between customer-base concentration and profitability is significantly negative in the early years of the relationship, but becomes positive as the relationship matures. The key driver of this dynamic is the customer-specific investments that the relationship entails. These investments result in larger fixed costs, greater operating leverage, and a higher probability of losses early in the relationship, but can significantly benefit the firm as the relationship matures. Although many of these money-losing firms in early-stage relationships were not studied in Patatoukas (2012), we find a market reaction to increases in customer concentration similar to that in his paper. This result provides powerful confirmatory evidence of the value of customer concentration. We document one of the intangible benefits of customer concentration, technology sharing, and show how this benefit increases as the relationship matures. JEL Classifications: L25; M41; G31; G33.

Conclusions

Dear China ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 176-184
Author(s):  
Gregor Benton ◽  
Hong Liu
Keyword(s):  
Urban Growth ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
The South ◽  
International Networks ◽  
Coastal Cities ◽  
Key Driver ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter argues that the qiaopi trade was the basis for one of China’s earliest excursions into the modern world economy. The trade quickly progressed from the one-man operations of the early years to the piju formed by qiaopi entrepreneurs to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the swift growth of Chinese emigration and remittance. It eventually matured into a stable industry with its own perfected mechanisms, patched onto China’s other modern institutions like banks and the post office and linked to modern forms of communication and transport. The trade gave an impetus to other forms of transnational and domestic industry and to urban growth in coastal cities adjacent to the qiaoxiang. Initially based on networks of blood, place, and tongue, it later joined or created national, transnational, and international networks based on trade, finance, and general migration, mainly in territories around the South China Sea but also in the gold-rush Pacific—the Americas, Australia, and the South Pacific. These networks, maritime and terrestrial, were not just economic but also had deep cultural and social dimensions. Along them ran not just cash, capital, and goods but also people, ideas, and information. The flow of capital, ideas, and population between Chinese in diaspora and their families and communities in China was a key driver in the remaking of China along modern and transnational lines.

Saboteur (1942)

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-97
Author(s):  
John Billheimer
Keyword(s):  
Box Office ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Dorothy Parker ◽  
Common Enemy ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Common

This chapter examines the influence of Production Code censors and wartime conditions on the production of Saboteur. War with Germany freed moviemakers from the shackles of the Neutrality Act, so that the common enemy could be identified without fear of censorship. Censors instead focused on several class-conscious remarks inserted in the script by left-leaning author Dorothy Parker suggesting a disdain for the police and the upper classes. The film did well at the box office and less well with critics, but Hitchcock created a memorable finale on the Statue of Liberty and succeeded in his attempt to make a thriller warning the US of the dangers of internal sabotage and the pro-German leanings of the America First Party.

Classic Hollywood

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Pravadelli
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Textural Analysis ◽  
Classic Period ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Film Style ◽  
Women's Films

Studies of “Classic Hollywood” typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. This book complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, the book breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases. The book's analysis follows Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the “Transition Era” and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films. The book's analysis is set apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. The book views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency. The result is a synthesis of theoretical approaches to a legendary cinematic era.

Genre

2010 ◽  
pp. 19-26
Author(s):  
Tanya Jones
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Box Office

This chapter discusses genre as a categorization of films that have standard conventions. It explains how Genres of film can go in and out of fashion or become reignited because of the success of one particular film at the box office. It also talks about the financial motivation behind genres that dominate a particular period of cinema scheduling, such as the dominance of superhero films like The Batman and Spider-Man franchises. The chapter mentions Guillermo Del Toro's interest in the fantasy and horror genres and his three favourite actors: Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, who are recognized for their horror film credentials. It describes Pan's Labyrinth as a film in which visual elements are designed specifically to engage, shock, and provoke.

Doing Cultural Studies: Youth and the Challenge of Pedagogy

1994 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Giroux
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Cultural Stereotypes ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Two Sides

In this article, Henry Giroux explores two sides of one question: 1) why scholars working within the area of cultural studies do not take seriously pedagogy and the role of schools in shaping culture and politics; and 2) why educators have not engaged the possibilities inherent in a cultural studies framework to analyze central questions of teaching and learning. In particular, Giroux analyzes how youth are increasingly being addressed and positioned through the popular media, changing economic conditions, and an escalating wave of violence. He illustrates, both through theory and examples of his own teaching, how the pedagogy and the mobilization of desire implicit in several recent Hollywood films about youth culture reinforce dominant racist and cultural stereotypes, but also how the use of various critical pedagogical strategies in the classroom can create the conditions for rewriting such films.

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