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Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain explores the relationship between classic American films about juvenile delinquency and British popular youth culture in the mid-twentieth century. The book examines the censorship, publicity and fandom surrounding such Hollywood films as The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock alongside such British films as The Blue Lamp, Spare the Rod and Serious Charge. Intersecting with star studies and social and cultural history, this is the first book to re-vision the stardom surrounding three extraordinarily influential Hollywood stars: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley. By looking specifically at the meanings of these American stars to British fans, this analysis provides a logical and sustained narrative that explains how and why these Hollywood images fed into, and disrupted, British cultural life. Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain is based upon a wide range of sources including censorship records, both mainstream and trade newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts and memoirs, as well as the films themselves. The book is a timely intervention of film culture and focuses on key questions about screen violence and censorship, masculinity and transnational stardom, method acting and performance, Americanisation and popular post-war British culture. The book is essential reading for researchers, academics and students of film and social and cultural history, alongside general readers interested in the links between the media and popular youth culture in the 1950s.
Introduction In the United Kingdom the 1980s were characterised by the avaricious individualism of the Thatcherite agenda, which dismantled the industrial economy on which the nation’s class-based and regionally-distinctive culture had historically rested, promoted narcissistic consumerism as acme of human aspiration through wholesale valorisation of the cultural products of American capitalism and turned to military action in the Falklands and the Gulf as a means of ensuring electoral victory and cementing the much-vaunted ‘special relationship’ with the United
with our own national allegiances bitingly reveals the satirical connection between Veep 's use of schadenfreude (literally German for ‘harm joy’) and its contrasting duality. ‘Special Relationship’ One moment in Veep which most impressively toys with the tensions inherent in schadenfreude occurs in ‘Special Relationship’ (Season 3, Episode 7). The episode begins with Selina and her campaign team in London, where they are gathered ostensibly to commemorate fallen soldiers from the First World War, although, in fact, Selina
of realism, fantasy and comedy. Television has long been regarded as a medium that has a special relationship with its viewers’ everyday lives. In a sense, the scholarly study of television – in particular what we could call the aesthetic study of television drama – is a process of ‘making strange’ the most familiar of media, of attaining some kind of critical distance from that which is quotidian and taken for granted. Yet it is television’s very familiarity, and its conventional focus upon the familiar, the present time and the everyday, that opens up
of ‘quality’ becomes ever more of a priority in high-end television drama, it is perhaps an open question as to whether such programming in the future will have anything to say for or about the nation. Notes 1 Maggie Brown, ‘BBC’s new £20m spy thriller “the most radical ever” le Carré adaptation’, The Guardian (12 February 2016), www.theguardian. com/tv-and-radio/2016/feb/12/bbcs-20m-spy-thriller-le-carre-adaptation. 2 Elke Weissmann, Transnational Television Drama: Special Relationships and Mutual Influence between the US and UK (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
: University of Chicago Press, 2008 ), pp. 87–177; Andrew Campbell, Unlikely Allies. Britain, America and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007 ), p. 240. 36 The Times (17 October 1937). 37 Jeffery Richards
. What home audiences might have been responding to in these films was a proud but restrained Englishness that made a welcome contrast to American brashness. (There is a separate book to be written about the depiction of Americans in British films of that time: some way from a special relationship.) In any case, is it not an oversimplifiation to recall the service portrayal of, say, Jack Hawkins, Richard Todd and Kenneth More
the Deansgate Picture House and café, was built for the Alliance Cinematographic Company. 49 Samuelson used his special relationship with Sixty Years a Queen to introduce a new form of distribution that had been successful for the high-investment film in the USA, but which had not yet been seen in Britain – the road show. Adolph Zukor had toured Queen Elizabeth ( Les Amours de la Reine Elisabeth
sequences are linked not just by the way they echo each other (movement in/movement out), but because in both cases two men are locked into a ‘special relationship’. The final sequence, Mathilda’s ‘coming of age’, is almost bolted on as a sentimental coda to the real matter of the film, which is, arguably, less the relationship between Léon and Mathilda, or the recovery of innocence through the female muse, as an
national identity, it seeks to understand to what extent the musician is represented as having a special relationship to brasilidade or ‘Brazilianness’, a term that encompasses the qualities that are thought to define the nation and distinguish Brazilians from other people. A key reason for the popularity of documentaries about music legends is the audience’s wish to get ‘up close and personal’ with their