Cowboy Hamlets and zombie Romeos

Shakespeare in genre film

Kinga Földváry

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526142115
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria de Shakespeare

The book presents a systematic method of interpreting Shakespeare film adaptations based on their cinematic genres. Its approach is both scholarly and reader-friendly, and its subject is fundamentally interdisciplinary, combining the findings of Shakespeare scholarship with film and media studies, particularly genre theory. The book is organised into six large chapters, discussing films that form broad generic groups. Part I looks at three genres from the classical Hollywood era (western, melodrama and gangster- noir ), while Part II deals with three contemporary blockbuster genres (teen film, undead horror and biopic). Beside a few better-known examples of mainstream cinema, the volume also highlights the Shakespearean elements in several nearly forgotten films, bringing them back to critical attention.

Part I

Classical Hollywood cinema

Introduction

The first part of our investigation into the ways Shakespeare has inspired commercial cinema takes us back to the earliest popular film genres, focusing on three classical types that defined Hollywood film production in the first half of the twentieth century, even though their conventions have remained recognisable until today. But before delving into the detailed interpretation of Shakespeare-inspired Hollywood films in the following chapters, a brief summary of the most significant features of the socio-historical backdrop of their production may be necessary. Naturally, within the scope of this introduction it would be impossible to offer a comprehensive introduction to all industrial, economic, demographic or otherwise relevant contexts, but a few key points might still prove useful before the individual film analyses.

As is commonly known, between the 1930s and the 1960s, the studio system had a direct impact on the production, distribution and exhibition of films, and since it was in each studio’s best interests to maintain successful formulas, or imitate other studios’ recipes for success, this system also paved the way for the cyclical production of genre films. These recipes typically included not only a narrative, often associated with a specific setting, or a conflict between certain recognisable character types, but also relied on the attraction provided by contracted stars in roles with which audiences were familiar. In this way, studios were able to repeat the lucrative investment as often and as long as it was profitable, in turn reinforcing audience recognition of film types, which often employed returning stars, recurring conflicts, settings, themes, as closely imitating previous successes as possible.

Even with the end of the Hollywood studio era, the significance of studios did not disappear entirely, although today they no longer have a monopoly over the production and distribution cycle; nonetheless, their inclination to repeat certain formulaic patterns is unchanged. But genres, formulas, conventions were never confined to a single studio even at the height of their popularity: they became part of the vocabulary of meaning-making applied by general audiences. This ability to recognise familiar patterns allows audiences even now, often many decades after the appearance of such successful patterns, to interpret new productions as descendants of a long line of earlier works.

It is true that the choice of the genres included in the volume – the western, the melodrama and the gangster-noir hybrid – may seem arbitrary, as these were clearly not the only genre patterns used in the studio era. Thomas Schatz discusses six classical genres: the western, the gangster film, the hard-boiled detective film, including film noir, followed by the screwball comedy, the musical and the family melodrama.¹ Out of these six, I will endeavour to summarise the most important features of three selected classic genre formulas; however, it must be remembered that the significance of genres for understanding the wherefores and whys of film production could equally be relevant in association with films that belong to the genres absent from the volume.

The western

The western is the most appropriate starting point in any genre-based study, since in its prime, which coincided with the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, it was probably the single most popular genre of mainstream cinema, making up as much as the quarter of all films produced in Hollywood.² Contributing to its popularity were the long-held myth of the frontier, widely discussed since Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 lecture on ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’,³ and a number of central issues that found their most perfect embodiment in the conventions of the western. In Colin McArthur’s summary,

the particular historical debates which underpin the Western [are]: whether the West is garden or desert; whether industrialization or agrarianism carries the greater moral cachet; whether the Indian is a cruel savage or a noble primitive; whether Western energy is to be preferred to Eastern refinement; and how the traditional West (and Western) copes with the onset of modernity.⁴

But naturally, the success of the western as a genre of popular culture was based not only on its ability to ask probing questions, but even more on its simple and easy-to-recognise iconography and a limited set of narrative patterns, which could nonetheless resonate with fundamental American values, from a Puritan work ethic to a belief in American exceptionalism. At the same time, despite this deceptive simplicity, the western created an extremely rich cultural tradition, which is testified by the sometimes controversial terminology and theoretical approaches that characterise its century-long critical evaluation. As Steve Neale quotes Edward Buscombe, ‘“the consistency and rigour” of the western’s world is “remarkable”’; however, ‘the visual conventions of the western are both highly distinctive and highly coded’, making it more the ‘generic exception than the rule’.⁵

The most defining feature that dominates western iconography is naturally the setting, known as the Wild West, which, as John G. Cawelti emphasises, is ‘not so much … a particular geographic setting like the Rocky Mountains or the Great Plains, but … a symbolic setting representing the boundary between order and chaos, between tradition and newness’.⁶ In other words, it is the frontier experience where the clash between nature and culture, savagery and civilisation, or in more abstract terms, the Norm and the Other, takes place. These binary concepts were first introduced by Henry Nash Smith in his seminal work Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth,⁷ and they ‘have shaped all subsequent writings on the West as myth’.⁸ Throughout the history of the genre, however, these binaries have acquired different meanings, as the western has naturally adapted to its socio-historical context, responding to contemporary concerns in various ways.

In the era of silent films, westerns tended to be ‘positive expressions of nationalistic sentiments, celebrating the West as a place of personal regeneration, egalitarian democracy, and the superiority of Anglo-Saxon culture’, and this attitude carried over to the post-war decades as well.⁹ The 1930s and 1940s western often presented the outlaw as a glorified, heroic figure, ‘who resists the evil influences of greedy industrialists or bankers’ – as if in response to the common belief that the latter social group could be held directly responsible for the great Depression of the interwar years.¹⁰ This attitude is tangible in Yellow Sky (1948, dir. William A. Wellman) and even in Broken Lance (1954, dir. Edward Dmytryk), discussed in Chapter 1. From the post-war decades onward, however, the representation of the western lifestyle took on increasingly dark overtones, emphasising the solitary, socially marginalised position resulting from the western hero’s engagement in violence, and the isolation of the hero could also reflect deeper social and psychological anxieties, as in Jubal (1956, dir. Delmer Daves).

At the same time, the post-war years brought about more and more positive representations of the Other in the western imaginary. Leaving behind the stereotypical image of the bloodthirsty savage or the comical crazy Indian, which still informs McLintock! (1963, dir. Andrew V. McLaglen) to a certain extent, post-war films began to ascribe individual features to Native Americans, while also showing how, in the glorious story of westward expansion, their role was that of the victim, a vanishing race that was swept away as collateral damage by industrialisation, which forged the future of a prosperous America. This idea of the ‘Vanishing American’ (the phrase became commonly used after the title of a 1925 silent film, directed by George B. Seitz), disappearing together with his landscape, became solidified into a cinematic myth, described with nostalgia, but with a resignation felt for a dying race that must be sacrificed for the sake of progress.

André Bazin wrote in 1953 that ‘the western does not age’,¹¹ but, as it turned out, the decades of popularity were followed by an inevitable decline. After the 1960s, the western tended to emphasise the moral ambiguity and violence inherent in the archetypal clash between wilderness and civilisation, which is particularly tangible in the European westerns made in the period, the so-called spaghetti westerns, among them such films as Johnny Hamlet (1968, dir. Enzo G. Castellari). At the same time, as American society felt increasingly like ‘a nation buffeted by a rapidly changing social order and war in Vietnam’, the earlier, straightforward value system of the American western was no longer acceptable, and thus the so-called revisionist western was born, characterised by violence and bitterness and a generally grim moral landscape.¹² Following this moral decline, from the 1970s the shattered remnants of a belief in former values tended to be represented nostalgically, as in the melancholy road movie Harry and Tonto (1974, dir. Paul Mazursky). Yet even if many scholars saw a final fading away of the genre in the late 1990s, the twenty-first century proved that there is still life in the old warrior. One reason for its continued, if uneven, popularity, may be connected to America’s unchanging belief in its own sacred mission, justifying its expansionist imperialism, and the way the image of the frontier lives on in the popular imagination and political rhetoric as well. As Gavin Jacobson summarises the longevity of the frontier myth in a book review: ‘From the Wild West to Trump’s border wall, the image of the frontier has enabled American imperialism’, and as a consequence, it explains ‘the racism, nativism and violent masculinity … that defines America’s political landscape’ to this day.¹³

This is the rough framework in which Shakespearean dramas were embedded when they were transformed into western narratives, although it is hard to say which of the two may have enhanced the popularity of the other. As Robert F. Willson suggests: ‘Shakespeare provides an appealing intertext that offers ready-made situations, characters, and speeches capable of being plugged into the appropriate scene or sequence.’¹⁴ What the more detailed analyses will show is how natural such a combination can feel when handled by masters of the genre, which in turn explains why – although neither Shakespeare, nor the western in itself, offers a fool-proof recipe for success – filmmakers continue to find the challenge irresistible even in the twenty-first century.

From woman’s film to melodrama

Not unlike the western, the melodrama, although a frequently used term both in everyday conversation and theoretical discussions of literature and cinema, proves to be a surprisingly challenging concept to define. Some scholars claim that it is the perfect complement to the western; for one, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith emphasises the parallel structures of western and melodrama when he argues that ‘in the American movie the active hero becomes protagonist of the Western, the passive or impotent hero or heroine becomes protagonist of what has come to be known as melodrama’.¹⁵ Others, however, suggest that the melodrama is rather the opposite of the western: the latter might be accused of being too straightforward and formulaic to be of much use for genre theories, whereas the melodrama is sometimes denied the status of a genre because it simply lacks recognisable semantic elements, as according to Rick Altman.¹⁶ Linda Williams also argues for melodrama being a mode, rather than a genre,¹⁷ and this seems to be the most commonly accepted consensus today, emphasising that ‘Rather than defining content, mode shapes different materials to a given end.’¹⁸ This end is the most distinctive feature of melodrama: the effect it strives to achieve, rather than any specific structural or narrative elements. Most theoreticians agree, moreover, that the melodramatic mode is not a marginal one, but one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Shakespeare meets genre film
• Part I: Classical Hollywood cinema
• Part II: Contemporary blockbusters
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index