She Done Him Wrong

In contemporary film making, “Hollywood-ization” generally refers to the re-creation of a classic work in a form more vulgar and sexually explicit than the original in an effort to boost movie attendance. After all, sex and violence sell. However, from the mid-1930’s to the 1950’s, “Hollywood-ization” referred to the opposite case where controversial books had to be purified to abide by the Production Code of 1934.[1] This occurred to many of James Cain’s novels as they moved from text to the genre of “film noir.” As has been said about Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, “The property, bought several years ago, was kept in the studio’s archives until now

Mary McLeod Bethune will be remembered as “One of the nation's leading educators and activists.” Born as Mary Jane McLeod, she was 1 out of the 17 children of former slaves. Poverty gripped the family, so everyone toiled in the fields. When a missionary opened a school for African-Americans, Bethune became the one and only child in her family to go to

Before watching the film a viewer schooled in academia must consider how the original text may be altered to comply with Hollywood tradition. Miller goes on to

In any adaptation between a work of literature to film it is difficult to stay exactly true to the original material. The film 3:10 to Yuma directed by James Mangold is no exception to making creative choices that weren’t in the short story created by Elmore Leonard. Characters may be altered or added in order to make a film flow more smoothly or to add another element to the story. In this essay I will investigate how the deviation of the addition of characters from text to film in the 1957 adaptation of 3:10 to Yuma changed the meaning of the film.

Researching Edward Albee’s scandalous play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), my case study will focus on the adaptation from stage to film, outlining the issues faced with both the original artists and my own group as artists. This specific piece of work from playwright Edward Albee is “arguably the best American play of the 1960s” (Leff 1981, p. 453), which encouraged Warner Brothers’ to gain the screen rights and recreate it as a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. On Broadway, Albee’s play had been critized for its “lack of clarity” (Leff 1981, p. 456) however, when creating the film adaptation, Ernest Lehman, Jack Warner and Mike Nichols faced other issues regarding the release of the movie due to it’s profanity that would be subjected to the public, and

The Cinematic Features Displayed in Pleasantville and The Truman Show The following essay, which I have composed, is based on two important films of the last decade. Their titles are "Pleasantville" and "The Truman Show". Starting with the "Pleasantville", the general overview of the film's plot gets more complicated the further you get into it. It brings up several issues all of which I have commented on in this essay.

The book utilizes a wide variety of primary sources of films from the 1920s onward. Leff and Simmons also use many newspaper and magazine articles that analyze censorship in films. They utilize these sources to illustrate examples of how films went from having

But, it comes at a cost—a debt he must settle before he’s allowed to take his revenge.

What makes for a classic Hollywood film? Increasingly, films have evolved to the point where the standard by which one calls a “classic Hollywood film” has evolved over time. What one calls a classic film by yesterday’s standards is not the same as that of today’s standards. The film Casablanca is no exception to this. Although David Bordwell’s article, “Classical Hollywood Cinema” defines what the classical Hollywood film does, the film Casablanca does not exactly conform to the very definition that Bordwell provides the audience with in his article. It is true that the film capers closely to Bordwell’s definition, but in more ways than not, the film diverges from Bordwell’s definition of the typical Hollywood film.

Phillip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), P.I, is hired by the rich General Sternwood to out a blackmailer, but quickly finds himself tangled in the Sternwood family’s dirty laundry — it’s the classic film noir narrative. At the center of it all seems to be Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall), a Sternwood daughter, and the woman attempting to cover up the murder at the bottom of Marlowe’s case. I used Vivian’s tidy adherence to the femme fatale archetype to dig deeper into its true message about women’s nature, beyond the mysterious façade.

In this thesis the author is trying to explain how Faulkner depicts the fallen of Thomas Sutpen through the narrations of four characters: Miss Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson, Quentin Compson and Shrevelin McCannon. Throughout this work, it can be seen that Faulkner also used these narrations as an image of the Old South values. Following the view of Rosa, Sutpen was not a Southerner gentleman because he was unknown to the citizens and she had no background to judge his name. This shows how the Old South society judged other people by the background that they had. Also, it can see the position of the woman in this society as Rosa had to agree to marry with Sutpen in order to give him a heir and not losing his and her fortune. At the end, she refuses

Furthermore, Maltby debates that this may result in movies which are dogged by competing (and perhaps contradictory) impulses and it

The Hays Code was loosely enforced. Film companies can voluntarily choose to follow these rules while filmmakers had to in order to have their film played in American theaters. Some filmmakers were able to get around these restrictions however. For the film adaption of Gone with the Wind, the line "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" was kept because it was in the original novel. When the 1932 Scarface was being filmed it had many issues with the Code including, script rewrites, new endings, the addition of a moral statement in the beginning of the film and a sub-title addition ‘The Shame of The Nation’. Eventually, the producer of the film, Howard Hughes, became so fed up with the censors, He ordered the director, Howard Hawks, to shoot the film anyway saying,”Screw the Hays Office, make it as realistic, and grisly as possible". Other directors were able to avoid it in more subtle ways. Either by drawing the audience's’ attention to an event in the background or by making the ending of a movie seem unconvincing the audience was able to see the subtext hidden

“Sunset Blvd” is not subtle in stating illusion will win out over reality. After all, Norma Desmond, the aged silent movie star who deludes herself into believing that she will be famous again, kills Joe Gillis, our involved narrator and voice of reason. But before we analyze the dramatic pool scene, which dispels any idea that “Sunset Blvd” sides with reality, we must first look at the characters, the embodiments of dreams and of reality in this movie. Norma Desmond, who dreams of rising to greatness again, refuses to believe that time has passed and that she no longer has any fans. Max, her butler and first husband, feeds into this facade by writing her fan mail, encouraging her

Throughout the term I have begun experiencing movies in a different way. The class has taken ideas of cinematography, theory, and film history and practically applied it to physically watching movies. By breaking down scenes and movies as a whole, the way I look at films in general has developed. A reflection on two of the films from this term, Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942) and North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959) will carry the bulk of the essay. Though, I will also be discussing how this class changed the way I saw a movie just a few weeks ago. Casablanca’s script and acting are of particular caliber, and North by Northwest unfortunately does not deliver with the dialogue and casting of lead actor Cary Grant. Though, overall, they both