Description
Book SynopsisIda Lupino, Director shines a long-awaited spotlight on one of our greatest filmmakers, one whose movies depicted the plights of postwar women and exposed the dark underside of American society. The authors show Lupino as a trailblazing feminist auteur who created a distinctive style in film and television that was both highly expressionistic and grittily realistic.
Trade Review"[A] landmark study of this underrecognized director. The book couldn't be timelier… Grisham and Grossman do not consider their subject narrowly as a woman filmmaker. They present Lupino broadly as a pioneer independent moviemaker and director." * Film Quarterly *
"Exactly the serious study Ida Lupino deserves, this superb book sketches her directing career against larger developments in postwar Hollywood, demonstrating her feminist impact on a changing industry." -- Shelley Stamp * author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood *
"Low budget, unheralded and genre bending, Lupino’s work has never received its full due. Grisham and Grossman’s sensitive study, informed by thorough research and new paradigms, provides a welcome corrective." -- Sarah Kozloff * author of Overhearing Film Dialogue *
"One of Hollywood’s few female directors, Ida Lupino was a true maverick, making movies with the same steely determination and emotional sensitivity that characterized her work as an actor. Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman’s thoughtful study sheds a welcome light on an oeuvre that has been too long obscured." -- J. Hoberman * author of Film After Film: Or, What Became Of 21st Century Cinema? *
"Grossman and Grisham's book is an urgently needed and long overdue reclamation of the directorial work of Ida Lupino, one of the most significant auteurs of the twentieth century. Cineastes will be delighted by this dazzling, well written, and comprehensive book." -- Gwendolyn Audrey Foster * coauthor of A Short History of Film *
"[A] groundbreaking and judiciously comprehensive study." * South Atlantic Review *
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Note on Quotations
Part I. Introducing Ida Lupino, Director and Feminist Author
A Rejection of Hollywood
Lupino Directs
Director Lupino and Colleagues
The Filmakers’ Films
Lupino and the Censors
Lupino as Feminist Auteur
Postwar Hollywood, American Society and Culture
Close-up on
Outrage Empathy and a Cinema of Engagement
Italian Neorealism or American Realisms?
Looking Backward?
Outrage and
M Part II. Lupino’s Ingenious Genres: Early Films and
The Trouble with Angels (1966)
The Social Problem Film and Film Noir
Home Noir
Home Is Where the Noir Is
Doubled Dreams in
Hard, Fast and Beautiful Doubled Domesticity in
The Bigamist Doubled Trauma:
Outrage A Mighty Girl: Lupino and
The Trouble with Angels Part III: Lupino Moves to Television
Industrial Contexts: Film to Television
Directing for Television
“No. 5 Checked Out”
Ida Lupino, Television Director
On Close Readings of 1950s and 1960s Television
“The Return”: Norma Desmond and Ida Lupino Haunt the Small Screen
Mr. Adams and Eve Directed Episodes, 1956–1968
Comedies
Action, Thrillers, Mysteries
Westerns
Notes
Works Cited
Index
