Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s PDF
Preview Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s
Idols of Modernity http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield S T A R ★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩ AMERICAN CULTURE / AMERICAN CINEMA D E C A D E S Each volume in the series Star Decades: American Culture/American Cinema pres- ents original essays analyzing the movie star against the background of contempo- rary American cultural history. As icon, as mediated personality, and as object of audience fascination and desire, the Hollywood star remains the model for celebrity in modern culture and represents a paradoxical combination of achievement, talent, ability, luck, authenticity, superficiality, and ordinariness. In all of the volumes, star- dom is studied as an effect of, and influence on, the particular historical and indus- trial contexts that enabled a star to be “discovered,” to be featured in films, to be promoted and publicized, and ultimately to become a recognizable and admired— even sometimes notorious—feature of the cultural landscape. Understanding when, how, and why a star “makes it,” dazzling for a brief moment or enduring across decades, is especially relevant given the ongoing importance of mediated celebrity in an increasingly visualized world. We hope that our approach produces at least some of the surprises and delight for our readers that stars themselves do. ADRIENNE L.McLEAN AND MURRAY POMERANCE SERIES EDITORS Jennifer Bean, editor, Flickers of Desire:Movie Stars of the 1910s Patrice Petro, editor, Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s Adrienne J. McLean, editor, Glamour in a Golden Age:Movie Stars of the 1930s Sean Griffin, editor, What Dreams Were Made Of:Movie Stars of the 1940s R. Barton Palmer, editor, Larger Than Life:Movie Stars of the 1950s Pamela R. Wojcik, editor, New Constellations:Movie Stars of the 1960s James Morrison, editor, Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s Robert Eberwein, editor, Acting for America: Movie Stars of the 1980s Anna Everett, editor, Pretty People:Movie Stars of the 1990s Murray Pomerance, ed., Shining in Shadows: Movie Stars of the 2000s Idols of Modernity Movie Stars of the 192 0 s ★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩ EDITED BY PATRICE PETRO RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Idols of modernity : movie stars of the 1920s / edited by Patrice Petro. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–4731–2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978–0–8135–4732–9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Petro, Patrice, 1957– . PN1998.2.136 2010 791.4302'80922—dc22 [B] 2009021735 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2010 by Rutgers, The State University Individual chapters copyright © 2010 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America For Andy C O N T E N T S ★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩ Acknowledgments ix Introduction:Stardom in the 1920s 1 PATRICE PETRO 1 Douglas Fairbanks:King of Hollywood 21 SCOTT CURTIS 2 Buster Keaton: Comic Invention and the Art of Moving Pictures 41 CHARLES WOLFE 3 The Talmadge Sisters:A Forgotten Filmmaking Dynasty 65 LEA JACOBS 4 Rudolph Valentino:Italian American 87 AMY LAWRENCE 5 An Appetite for Living:Gloria Swanson,Colleen Moore, and Clara Bow 108 MARY DESJARDINS 6 Greta Garbo:Fashioning a Star Image 137 LUCY FISCHER 7 Anna May Wong:Toward Janus-Faced,Border-Crossing, “Minor” Stardom 159 YIMAN WANG 8 Emil Jannings:Translating the Star 182 GERD GEMÜNDEN 9 Al Jolson:The Man Who Changed the Movies Forever 202 KRIN GABBARD 10 African American Stardom Inside and Outside of Hollywood: Ernest Morrison,Noble Johnson,Evelyn Preer,and Lincoln Perry 227 PAULA J.MASSOOD 11 Marie Dressler:Thief of the Talkies 250 JOANNA E.RAPF In the Wings 270 PATRICE PETRO Works Cited 285 Contributors 297 Index 301 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩★✩ I would like to thank Leslie Mitchner, editor in chief at Rutgers University Press, as well as the Star Decades series editors, Murray Pomerance and Adrienne McLean, for their assistance with this volume. In the early stages of preparation, Chuck Wolfe and Natasˇa Dˇurovicˇová provided invaluable insights and ideas that helped me think through the shape and scope of this project. As always, I owe them both an enormous debt of gratitude for their friendship and boundless generosity over so many years. I would like to acknowledge the superb work of all of the contributors, whose essays are included here. I invited each of them to be part of this project, because I so admire their scholarship and commitment to the highest standards of our field. David Gerstner deserves special thanks for his contributions to this volume; although not included in this collection, his essay on Ramon Novarro helped to shape both my introduction and my thinking about stars in the 1920s and beyond. I would like to express my gratitude to the Cen- ter for International Education’s Research Coordinator, Thomas Maguire, for assisting me with the detailed logistics of putting this collection together. Sara Tully, my longtime colleague in the center, also merits special acknowl- edgment, not only for her help with all matters, large and small, but espe- cially for listening to me talk about this project for more than two years, and for reading several drafts of my own essays, which are stronger as a result. Finally, I would like to extend my deepest thanks to Andy Martin, the love of my life, for his help with this project and his unwavering sup- port of all that I do. For that, and for so much more, I dedicate this volume to him. ix
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