Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s

111 Pages·2015·0.888 MB·English

by  Wheeler Winston Dixon (auth.)

Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s
DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0001
Dark Humor in
Films of the 1960s
Wheeler Winston Dixon
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0001
dark humor in films of the 1960s
Copyright © Wheeler Winston Dixon, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-56420-7
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN:978-1-137-56250-0 PDF
ISBN:978-1-349-85032-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2015
www.palgrave.com/pivot
DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500
For Gwendolyn
DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0001
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
About the Author viii
1 Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s 1
2 A Cinema of Violence: The Films of
D. Ross Lederman 32
3 Juan Orol, Phantom of the Mexican Cinema 64
4 Missing in Action: The Lost Version of
Vanishing Point 72
5 The Invisible Cinema of Marcel Hanoun 79
6 The Noir Vision of Max Ophüls, Romantic
Fatalist 88
Works Cited 94
Index 99
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0001
Acknowledgments
Most of the materials in this volume originally appeared
in abbreviated versions in the online edition of Film
International, Daniel Lindvall, editor and publisher, and
are reproduced here by gracious permission; the essay
on the films of D. Ross Lederman originally appeared in
a severely edited form in the journal Film Criticism – my
thanks to Lloyd Michaels, editor and publisher, for
permission to republish. All the materials in this volume
have been considerably expanded, updated, and revised
for publication here, and thus appear in their complete
versions in this text for the first time. As always, I wish to
thank Richard Graham, Love Library, at the University of
Nebraska, Lincoln, for his unstinting research help in all
my recent work.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0002 vii
About the Author
Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Professor of
Film Studies, Coordinator of the Film Studies Program,
and Professor of English at the University of Nebraska,
Lincoln. With Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, he is the editor
of Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture, a new series of
books from Rutgers University Press. His latest books as an
author include Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access
(2013); Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood
(2012); 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of
Transformation (2011, coauthored with Gwendolyn Audrey
Foster); A History of Horror (2010); and Film Noir and the
Cinema of Paranoia (2009). Dixon’s book A Short History of
Film (2008, coauthored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster)
was reprinted six times through 2012. A second, revised
edition was published in 2013; the book is a required text
in universities throughout the world. As a filmmaker, his
complete works are archived in the permanent collection
of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
viii DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0003
1
Dark Humor in Films
of the 1960s
Abstract: In the 1960s, themes which had previously been
dealt with only in the most serious fashion were suddenly
subject to burlesque, or parody, as filmmakers and
audiences sought to move beyond the strained seriousness
that characterized many of the most respected problem
films of the 1960s. In such films as Roger Corman’s The
Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and A Bucket of Blood
(1959), Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964),
Theodore J. Flicker’s The President’s Analyst (1967), and
many others, viewers embraced a new vision of the world
unfettered by the constraints of prior censorship.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. Dark Humor in Films of the
1960s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137562500.0004.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137562500.0004 