Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton

571 Pages·2008·11.64 MB·English

by  Andrew Britton

00 Britton FM.indd 1 1/17/12 10:33 AM
Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series
A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu
General Editor
Barry Keith Grant
Brock University
Advisory Editors
Patricia B. Erens
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Lucy Fischer
University of Pittsburgh
Caren J. Deming
University of Arizona
Robert J. Burgoyne
Wayne State University
Tom Gunning
University of Chicago
Anna McCarthy
New York University
Peter X. Feng
University of Delaware
Lisa Parks
University of California–Santa Barbara
Jeffrey Sconce
Northwestern University
00 Britton FM.indd 2 1/17/12 10:33 AM
B r i t t o n   o n   F i l m
The CompleTe Film CriTiCism oF Andrew BriTTon
edited by Barry Keith Grant
with an Introduction by Robin Wood
wayne state university press
detroit
00 Britton FM.indd 3 1/17/12 10:33 AM
© 2009 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without
formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Britton, Andrew, 1952–1994.
Britton on film : the complete film criticism of Andrew Britton / edited
by Barry Keith Grant ; with an introduction by Robin Wood.
p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television
series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8143-3363-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8143-3550-5 (e-book)
1. Motion pictures. I. Grant, Barry Keith, 1947– II. Title.
PN1994.B68 2008
791.43—dc22
2008019046
00 Britton FM.indd 4 1/30/12 10:47 AM
To Art Efron, a mentor who taught me so much about criticism,
and Robin Wood, who first showed me how to be a critic of cinema
00 Britton FM.indd 5 1/17/12 10:33 AM
Andrew Britton was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in the United Kingdom in April 1952. He
graduated in 1974 with a first-class degree in English and American Literature from King’s
College, London, and went on to study as a postgraduate at the University of Warwick with
noted film critic Robin Wood.
Britton’s career as a lecturer in Film Studies began at the same university in 1978, and he
went on to teach at Essex University (1979–85), Trent University, Ontario, Canada (1985–88),
York University, Ontario, Canada (1988–89), and Reading University, England (1992–93).
He was also a guest lecturer at other universities in Britain, Canada, and the United States,
including a term as a visiting professor at Queens University, Ontario, Canada in 1983.
Britton was a member of the editorial boards of the film magazines Framework
and Movie and of the editorial collective of the Canadian magazine CineAction. In 1989–90,
he was involved in program research at the National Film Theatre in London, and in 1991, he
was editor of the official program of the London Film Festival. Britton was also a joint con-
tributor to The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film (1979) and the editor of Talk-
ing Films (1991). His book Katharine Hepburn: The Thirties and After (released in the United
States as Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist) was nominated for the British Film Institute’s
Book of the Year Award in 1985.
Britton died of complications from AIDS in April 1994.
00 Britton FM.indd 6 1/17/12 10:33 AM
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction by Robin Wood xiii
Part one: Hollywood Cinema
Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire 3
A New Servitude: Bette Davis, Now, Voyager,
and the Radicalism of the Woman’s Film 24
The Devil, Probably: The Symbolism of Evil 64
Sideshows: Hollywood in Vietnam 74
Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment 97

Part two: Hollywood movies
Meet Me in St. Louis: Smith, or The Ambiguities 157
Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound: Text and Countertext 175
Detour 194
Notes on Pursued 206
The Family in The Reckless Moment 219
Betrayed by Rita Hayworth: Misogyny
in The Lady from Shanghai 232
The Exorcist 243
Jaws 248
Mandingo 252
10 273
The Great Waldo Pepper 277
The Other Side of Midnight 281

Part three: European Cinema
Sexuality and Power, or the Two Others 287
00 Britton FM.indd 7 1/17/12 10:33 AM
contents
Their Finest Hour: Humphrey Jennings and
the British Imperial Myth of World War II 312
Metaphor and Mimesis: Madame de . . . 324
Thinking about Father: Bernardo Bertolucci 344
Living Historically: Two Films by Jean-Luc Godard 358
“Foxed”: Fox and His Friends 376
Part Four: Film and Cultural theory
In Defense of Criticism 383
For Interpretation: Notes Against Camp 388
The Ideology of Screen 394
The Philosophy of the Pigeonhole: Wisconsin Formalism and
“The Classical Style” 435
The Myth of Postmodernism: The Bourgeois Intelligentsia in
the Age of Reagan 468
Consuming Culture: The Development of a Theoretical Orthodoxy 497
Invisible Eye 512

Notes 517
Bibliography 523
Index 535
viii
00 Britton FM.indd 8 1/17/12 10:33 AM
Preface
Im et Andrew Britton only once, and that was just briefly. It must have been in late 1986 or

early 1987, when I was visiting Robin Wood and Richard Lippe in their Toronto apartment
to deliver (this was before the days of e-mail and the Internet) a final copy of my essay on
Tobe Hooper’s remake of Invaders from Mars for publication in their film journal, CineAction.
Although at that time the journal still had the exclamation mark attached to its name, certainly
the moment had nothing of the drama that Wood describes in his introduction to this volume
of his first meeting with Britton, whom he was taking on as a graduate student. In my case, I
had been chatting amiably with Robin and the other members of the magazine’s editorial collec-
tive when there was a knock at the door. It was Andrew, I believe just arriving or returning from
the UK, for there was an intense and joyful connection that immediately arose between him and
Robin when Andrew entered the room that implied a lengthy separation. I have a mental image
of Andrew’s face, politely saying hello to me when introduced but already looking beyond and
then moving past me, his attention fixed on Robin. The connection between them was so strong,
so palpable, that it seemed to exclude all else, certainly a stranger like myself. There was nothing
for me but to depart, and as quickly as possible, I humbly took my leave.
Although Britton had hardly taken notice of me, I certainly had been aware of him for
years through his writing. The horror film and the American Gothic had long been an inter-
est of mine, and I remember the pleasure I took upon first reading “The Devil, Probably,” his
contribution to The American Nightmare, the landmark book on the horror film based around
the retrospective that Wood programmed in 1979 for the Toronto International Film Festival
(then known as the Festival of Festivals). Periodically, I would come across an essay by Britton,
primarily through CineAction or Movie, and marvel at its erudition as well as the surgical pre-
cision with which he could critique a theoretical argument. Yes, he was merciless in his dissec-
tions, but he also was —there is no other word for it—funny. He possessed an inimitable ability
to demolish a critical position while at the same time demonstrating a remarkably rich sense
of humor. Coming to film studies with a background in literature, as I had—and suspected that
Britton did as well—I particularly admired his ability to move with intellectual ease and assur-
ance between cinema and prose fiction.
In the essay on Invaders from Mars that I discreetly deposited on the table on my way out
after meeting Britton, I compared the film to the 1953 original, directed by William Cameron
Menzies, in order to tease out the implications of what I called “Science Fiction in the Age
of Reagan.” At the same time, Britton was publishing his much more ambitious and impor-
tant piece “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment.” His essay was astonishingly
ix
00 Britton FM.indd 9 1/17/12 10:33 AM