Bøger i BFI Film Classics serien

The first computer-generated animated feature film, Toy Story (1995) sustains a dynamic vitality that appeals to audiences of all ages. This lively study explores how its depiction of a glimmering commercial world both deconstructs and affirms modern popular culture and in doing so provides a distinctive alternative to the usual Disney formula.

Ground-breaking in its departure from its predecessors, When Harry Met Sally (1989) established classic romantic comedy themes and tropes still being employed today.

Offering a fresh perspective on The General, arguably one of the most successful American films of the silent era, this insightful text analyses its initial critical reception and the thematic and stylistic characteristics of the film that made it difficult for critics to appreciate at the time, but led to its celebration by later generations.

Eminent Hitchcock specialist Murray Pomerance offers an illuminating account of one of Hitchcock's most successful films, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring James Stewart and Doris Day.

Made on a low budget, The Terminator was one of the most influential films of the 1980s. Combining explosive special effects and an intricate time-travel plot, it set Arnold Schwarzenegger on the road to superstardom and allowed its director, James Cameron, to go on to make some of the most expensive films of all time. The Terminator quickly found a cult following who appreciated its deadpan humour, comic-book violence and elaborate variations on standard science fiction themes. Resolutely populist, accomplished and instantly memorable, The Terminator has dramatically outlived its humble beginnings. Sean French's insightful study traces the film's production history, its sources and the extent of its influence. He argues that The Terminator's visual flair, stylised acting and choreographed violence are so compelling not so much because they offer intellectual rewards but because they traffic in the darker, more visceral pleasures of moviegoing. In his foreword to this new edition, Sean French reflects on Terminator sequels and reboots, suggesting that the original film has more in common with the gritty visions of the New Hollywood than present-day action blockbusters.

James Naremore's study of Max Ophuls' classic 1948 melodrama, Letter from an Unknown Woman, not only pays tribute to Ophuls but also discusses the backgrounds and typical styles of the film's many contributors--among them Viennese author Stephan Zweig, whose 1922 novella was the source of the picture; producer John Houseman, an ally of Ophuls who nevertheless made questionable changes to what Ophuls had shot; screenwriter Howard Koch; music composer Daniéle Amfitheatrof; designers Alexander Golitzen and Travis Banton; and leading actors Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan, whose performances were central to the film's emotional effect. Naremore also traces the film's reception history, from its middling box office success and mixed early reviews, exploring why it has been a work of exceptional interest to subsequent generations of both aesthetic critics and feminist theorists. Lastly, Naremore provides an in-depth critical appreciation of the film, offering nuanced appreciation of specific details of mise-en-scene, camera movement, design, sound, and performances, integrating this close analyses into an overarching analysis of Letter's "recognition plot;" a trope in which the recognition of a character's identity creates dramatic intensity or crisis. Naremore argues that Letter's use of recognition is one of the most powerful in Hollywood cinema, and contrasts it with what we find in Zweig's novella.

Caravaggio (1986), Derek Jarman's portrait of the Italian Baroque artist, shows the painter at work with models drawn from Rome's homeless and prostitutes, and his relationship with two very different lovers: Ranuccio, played by Sean Bean, and Lena, played by Tilda Swinton. It is probably the closest Derek Jarman came to a mainstream film. And yet the film is a uniquely complex and lucid treatment of Jarman's major concerns: violence, history, homosexuality, and the relation between film and painting. In particular, according to Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio is unlike Jarman's other work in avoiding a sentimentalising of gay relationships and in making no neat distinction between the exercise and the suffering of violence.Film-making involves a coercive power which, for Bersani and Dutoit, Jarman may, without admitting it to himself, have found deeply seductive. But in Caravaggio this power is renounced, and the result is Jarman's most profound, unsettling and astonishing reflection on sexuality and identity.

The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami burst onto the international film scene in the early 1990s and was widely regarded as one of the most distinctive and talented modern-day directors. His major features - including Through the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) - are relatively modest in scale, contemplative and humanist in tone. In 2002, with 10, Kiarostami broke new ground, fixing one or two digital cameras on a car's dashboard to film ten conversations between the driver (Mania Akbari) and her various passengers. The results are astonishing: though formally rigorous, even austere, and documentary-like in its style, 10 succeeds both as emotionally affecting human drama and as a critical analysis of everyday life in modern Tehran.In his study of the film, Geoff Andrew considers 10 within the context of Kiarostami's career, of Iranian cinema's renaissance, and of international film culture. Drawing on a number of detailed interviews he conducted with both Kiarostami and his lead actress, Andrew sheds light on the unusual methods used in making the film, on its political relevance, and on its remarkably subtle aesthetic. He also argues that 10 was an important turning-point in the career of a film-maker who was not only one of contemporary cinema's most accomplished practitioners but also one of its most radical experimentalists.

The Matrix (1999), directed by the Wachowski sisters and produced by Joel Silver, was a true end-of-the-millennium movie, a statement of the American zeitgeist, and, as the original film in a blockbusting franchise, a prognosis for the future of big-budget Hollywood film-making. Starring Keanu Reeves as Neo, a computer programmer transformed into a messianic freedom fighter, The Matrix blends science fiction with conspiracy thriller conventions and outlandish martial arts created with groundbreaking digital techniques. A box-office triumph, the film was no populist confection: its blatant allusions to highbrow contemporary philosophy added to its appeal as a mystery to be decoded. In this compelling study, Joshua Clover undertakes the task of decoding the film. Examining The Matrix's digital effects and how they were achieved, he shows how the film represents a melding of cinema and video games (the greatest commercial threat to have faced Hollywood since the advent of television) and achieves a hybrid kind of immersive entertainment. He also unpacks the movie's references to philosophy, showing how The Matrix ultimately expresses the crisis American culture faced at the end of the 1990s.

Pedro Almodóvar's 1988 black comedy-melodrama Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown established its director as one of the most exciting of European film-making talents. An often hilarious study of sexual mores, Women on the Verge has a central character, Pepa (Carmen Maura), as warm and richly drawn as any modern film heroine. Made strong and self-reliant by suffering in a troubled relationship, Pepa is the centre of a network of lovers, friends and family who represent a vivid cross-section of Spanish society. Peter William Evans provides a formidable analysis of Almodóvar's insights into gender, sexuality and identity. Evans sees Women on the Verge as concerned with the often tyrannical spell of sexual desire and the anxieties of relationships and families, but also with the possibilities for personal liberation. He discusses the film in the context of the history of Spain and the social revolution that occurred after the death of Franco. In his foreword to this new edition, Evans reflects upon Women on the Verge in the light of Almodóvar's subsequent films, and the impact of Carmen Maura's performance as Pepa on the representation of women in Spanish cinema.

Inspired by an alleged real case of demonic possession in 1949, The Exorcist became an international phenomenon on its release in 1973. A blockbusting adaptation of a best-selling novel, it was praised as 'deeply spiritual' by some sections of the Catholic Church while being picketed by the Festival of Light and branded 'Satanic' by the evangelist Billy Graham. Banned on video in the UK for nearly fifteen years, the film still retains an extraordinary power to shock and startle. Mark Kermode's compelling study of this horror classic was originally published in 1997, and then extensively updated and expanded in 2003 to incorporate the discovery of new material. This revised edition documents the deletion and reinstatement of key scenes that have now been integrated into the film to create The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen. Candid interviews with director William Friedkin and writer/producer William Peter Blatty reveal the behind the-scenes battles which took place during the production. In addition, exclusive stills reveal the truth about the legendary 'subliminal images' allegedly lurking within the celluloid.

In 1996 Trainspotting was the biggest thing in British culture. Brilliantly and aggressively marketed, it crossed into the mainstream despite being a black comedy set against the backdrop of heroin addiction in Edinburgh. Produced by Andrew Macdonald, scripted by John Hodge and directed by Danny Boyle, the team behind Shallow Grave (1994), Trainspotting was an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's barbed novel of the same title. The film is crucial for understanding British culture in the context of devolution and the rise of 'Cool Britannia'. Murray Smith unpicks the processes that led to Trainspotting's enormous success. He isolates various factors - the film's eclectic soundtrack, its depiction of Scottish identity, its attitude to deprivation, drugs and violence, its traffic with American cultural forms, its synthesis of realist and fantastic elements, and its complicated relationship to 'heritage' - that make Trainspotting such a vivid document of its time. Although it heralded a false dawn for British film-making,Trainspotting is, Smith concludes, both authentically vernacular and yet transnational in its influences and ambitions.In his afterword to this new edition, Murray Smith reflects on the original film 25 years after its release, and its 2017 sequel T2: Trainspotting also directed by Boyle. Smith also considers Danny Boyle's subsequent directorial career, with highlights including Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony.

The Marx Brothers are universally considered to be classic Hollywood's preeminent comedy team and Duck Soup is generally regarded as their quintessential film. A topical satire of dictatorship and government in general, the movie was a critical failure and box-office let-down on its initial release in 1933.J. Hoberman's study of the film traces its reputation history, from the initial disappointment of its release, to its rise to cult status in the 1960s when the Marx's anarchic, anti-establishment humor seemed again timely. Hoberman places Duck Soup, alongside analogous comedies-Dr. Strangelove (1964), the Beatles films, Morgan! (1966), The President's Analyst (1967) and The Producers (1968). It attained canonical stature as a touchstone for Woody Allen and would be recognized by the Library of Congress in the 1990s.Hoberman's analysis provides a historical and political context as well as an in-depth production history, drawing on primary sources and emphasizing director McCarey's prior work along with the Marx Brothers as well as the situation at Paramount, a substantial synopsis, and an account of the movie's initial reception, concluding with its subsequent elevation to comic masterpiece.

Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) was released at a critical moment in cinema history, just after the advent of synchronized sound technology and just before the full implementation of the production code. By the time of its release, Lubitsch had already directed more than 50 films, but it was unlike anything he had done before. Aside from being his first non-musical talking picture, the film introduced a level of sophistication and visual subtlety that established the benchmark for classic Hollywood cinema for years to come. In his study of the film, David Weir explores its significance within Lubitsch's career, but also its larger cultural significance within the history of cinema, and the social context of its release during the Great Depression. Paying careful attention to the film itself, Weir discusses its source material, its mise-en-scène and art deco production design, and its inventive use of post-synchronized sound. Drawing on original archival research, Weir traces Trouble in Paradise's reception history, including its critical reception, and the effect of the Motion Picture Production Code, which led to the film being denied approval for re-release in 1935.

"Lucid, lively and extremely knowledgeable." Sight & SoundCatherine Fowler's study positions Jeanne Dielman as a 'contrary' classic, its contrariness arising from director Chantal Akerman's decision to frame an unliberated housewife through a kind of 'slow looking'. By choosing to stay with Jeanne in the kitchen, the film both 'differences' the canon and diverges from Akerman's liberated early films, which involved the rejection of domestic space, married life and the heterosexual script.Fowler draws on original footage, scripts, unmade and unseen projects, interviews and other documents to painstakingly piece together the making of the film, discovering an alternative origin story which centers upon female alliances, forged through a combination of shared film culture and lived sexism. Those viewers who take up Akerman's invitation to spend time with Jeanne will find their expectations of cinema are changed. Because more than any other film before or since, it reminds us that we give our time to a film; and in making us look both harder and for longer it asks us to feel time slipping away, for ourselves as much as for its protagonist.

An extra-terrestrial alien, capable of replicating any living form it touches, infiltrates an isolated research base in the Antarctic, and sows suspicion and terror among the men trapped there. Which of them is still human, and which a perfect alien facsimile? John Carpenter's The Thing, the second adaptation of John W. Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There?, received overwhelmingly negative reviews on its release in 1982, but has since been acknowledged as a classic fusion of the science fiction and horror genres. Now a regular fixture in lists of the greatest movies of all time, it is acclaimed for its inspired and still shocking practical special effects, its deftly sketched characters brought to life by a superb cast, elegant widescreen cinematography, ominous score, and a uniquely tense narrative packed with appropriately ever-changing metaphors about the human condition.Anne Billson's elegant and trenchant study, first published in 1997, was one of the first publications to give the film its due as a modern classic, hailing it as a landmark movie that brilliantly redefined horror and science fiction conventions, and combined them with sly humour, Lewis Carroll logic and disturbingly prescient metaphors for many of the sociopolitical, scientific and medical upheavals of the past three decades. In her foreword to this new edition, Anne Billson reflects upon The Thing's changing fortunes in the years since its release, its influence on film-makers including Tarantino and del Toro, and its topicality in an era of melting ice caps and with humanity besieged by a deadly organism.

Released in 1990, The Silence of the Lambs is one of the defining films of late twentieth century American cinema. Adapted from the Thomas Harris novel and directed by the late Jonathan Demme, its central characters are now iconic. Jodie Foster is Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee investigating 'Buffalo Bill', a serial killer who flays his victims. Anthony Hopkins plays Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer and former psychiatrist who assists Starling in exchange for personal details.With its pairing of a perverse, invasive anti-hero and a questing, proto-action heroine, The Silence of the Lambs unfolds as a layered narrative of pursuit. In this study, Yvonne Tasker explores the film's weaving together of gothic, horror and thriller elements in its portrayal of insanity and crime, drawing out the centrality of ideas about gender to the storytelling. She identifies the film as a key genre reference point for tracking late twentieth century interests in police procedural, profiling and serial murder, analysing its key themes of reason and madness, identity and belonging, aspiration and transformation.A new afterword explores the legacies of The Silence of the Lambs and its figuring of crime and investigation in terms of gender disruption and spectacular violence.

For many, Blue Velvet is David Lynch's masterpiece. It represents a unique act of cinema: an 80s Hollywood studio film as radical, visionary and cabalistic as anything found in the avant-garde; a mysteriously symbolic and subterranean 'cult' movie that nevertheless has recognisable stars and was broadly distributed; a genre piece with the ambience of a fearsome, hyper-composed nightmare; an American 'art film' by Hollywood's only reputable 'art film' director. Michael Atkinson's intricate and layered reading of the film shows how crystallises many of Lynch's chief preoccupations: the evil and violence underlying the surface of suburbia, the seedy by-ways of sexuality, the frightening appearance of the adult world to a child's eyes, presenting it as the definitive expression of the traumatized innocence which characterizes Lynch's work.In his afterword to this new edition, Atkinson situates Blue Velvet within a culture that has changed drastically in the 35 years since its release, and in doing so, he considers the film's lasting significance as it slowly turns from contemporary phenomenon to an interpretable artifact.

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) is widely regarded as one of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's most remarkable achievements and a cinematic tour de force. A simple moral tale set in the wild Scottish Highlands, it follows the journey of a headstrong young woman forced by her encounter with this magical, mythic world and its exotic customs to revise her materialistic priorities. Pam Cook traces the film's production history, exploring its place in Powell and Pressburger's canon and showing how it wove into its narrative the memories and aspirations of an international group of film-makers working in 1940s Britain. Focusing on the extensive use of special effects, she reveals a technologically ambitious masterpiece. I Know Where I'm Going! is, for Cook, a multilayered work rich in allusions whose emotional power reaches beyond boundaries of time and place to touch profound human desires.In her foreword to this new edition, Cook argues that I Know Where I'm Going!'s ability to be both of its time and timeless is what ensures that it continues to captivate successive generations of viewers.

Produced in the aftermath of the Second World War, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) stars David Niven as an RAF pilot poised between life and death, his love for the American radio operator June (Kim Hunter) threatened by medical, political and ultimately celestial forces. The film is a magical, profound fantasy and a moving evocation of English history and the wartime experience, with virtuoso Technicolor special effects. In the United States it was released under the title Stairway to Heaven, referencing one of its most famous images, a moving stairway between earth and the afterlife.Ian Christie's study of the film shows how its creators drew upon many sources and traditions to create a unique form of modern masque, treating contemporary issues with witty allegory and enormous visual imagination. He stresses the teamwork of Powell and Pressburger's gifted collaborators, among them Director of Photography Jack Cardiff, production designer Alfred Junge, and costume designer Hein Heckroth, and explores the history of both British and international responses to the film. Christie argues that the film deserves to be thought of as one of the greatest achievements of British cinema, but of all cinema.

"Brisk [and] forceful." Sight & Sound"Lucidly argued." Total FilmMargarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) was a pivotal film for the New German Cinema movement. Julian Preece considers what makes Katharina Blum new and radical, in particular in respect of women's cinema and its portrayal of the ordeal of its female lead in a world run by men. Drawing on archival material including drafts of the screenplay, brochures and props, reviews and interviews, Preece traces the conception of the film and its development from Heinrich Böll's original novel.Preece analyses how the film continues to resonate with our contemporary moment and has influenced film-makers from the German-Turkish director Fatih Akin to the British screenwriter Peter Morgan.

John Ford's masterpiece The Searchers (1956) was voted the seventh greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound's most recent poll of critics. Its influence on many of America's most distinguished contemporary filmmakers, among them Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, and John Milius, is enormous. John Wayne's portrait of the vengeful Confederate Ethan Edwards gives the film a truly epic dimension, as does his long and lonely journey into the dark heart of America. Edward Buscombe's insightful study provides a detailed commentary on all aspects of the film, drawing on material in the John Ford archive at Indiana University, including Ford's own memos and the original script, which differs in vital respects from the film he made, to offer new insights into the film's production history.

Federico Fellini's masterpiece 8 1/2 (Otto e mezzo) shocked audiences around the world when it was released in 1963 by its sheer auteurist gall. The hero, a film director named Guido Anselmi, seemed to be Fellini's mirror image, and the story to reflect the making of 8 1/2 itself. Whether attacked for self-indulgence or extolled for self-consciousness, 8 1/2 became the paradigm of personal filmmaking, and numerous directors, including Fassbinder, Truffaut, Scorsese, Bob Fosse and Bruce LaBruce, paid homage to the film and its themes of personal and creative ennui in their own work.Now that 8 1/2's conceit is less shocking, D.A. Miller argues, we can see more clearly how tentative, even timid, Fellini's ground-breaking incarnation always was. Guido is a perfect blank, or is trying his best to seem one. By his own admission he doesn't even have an artistic or social statement to offer: 'I have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway.' 8 1/2's deepest commitment is not to this man (who is never quite 'all there') or to his message (which is lacking entirely) but to its own flamboyant manner. The enduring timeliness of 8 1/2 lies, Miller suggests, in its aggressive shirking of the shame that falls on the man - and the artist - who fails his appointed social responsibilities.

In Seven Samurai (1954) a whole society is on the verge of irrevocable change. Akira Kurosawa's celebrated film, regarded by many to be the major achievement of Japanese cinema, is an epic that evokes the cultural upheavalbrought on by the collapse of Japanese militarism in the 16th century, but at the same time echoes also the sweeping cultural changes occurring in the aftermath of the American Occupation that followed Japan's defeat in the Second World War.The plot is deceptively simple. A village of farmers is beleaguered by a horde of bandits. In desperation, the farmers decide to hire itinerant samurai to protect their crops and people and defeat the bandits. There had never been a Japanese film in which peasants hired samurai, or an evocation of the social transformation that made such an idea credible.There are six samurai and one who is accepted as such. Together they reflect the ideals and values of a noble class near the point of extinction. Seven Samurai may be the greatest action film, a technical masterpiece unmatched in its depiction of movement and violence, but running beneath the sound and fury is a lament for a lost nobility, 'a dirge for the spirit of Japan,' writes Joan Mellen, 'which will never again be so strong.'Mellen's study contextualises Seven Samurai, marking its place in Japanese cinema and in Kurosawa's film-making career. She explores the film's roots in medieval history and, above all, the astonishing visual language in which Kurosawa created his elegiac epic.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) marked a transition in American film-making, and its success - as a work of art, as a creative 'property' exploited by its studio, Paramount Pictures; and as a model for aspiring auteurist film-makers - changed Hollywood forever. Jon Lewis's study of The Godfather begins with a close look at the film's audacious visual style (the long, theatrical set pieces; the chiaroscuro lighting, the climactic montage paralleling a family baptism with a series of brutal murders). The analysis of visual style is paired with a discussion of the movie's principal themes: Vito and Michael's attempt to balance the obligations of business and family, their struggle with assimilation, the temptations and pitfalls of capitalist accumulation, and the larger drama of succession from father to son, from one generation to the next. The textual analysis precedes a production history that views The Godfather as a singularly important film in Hollywood's dramatic box-office turnaround in the early 1970s. And then, finally, the book takes a long hard look at the gangster himself both on screen and off. Hollywood publicity attending the gangster film from its inception in the silent era to the present has endeavoured to dull the distinction between the real and movie gangster, insisting that each film has been culled from the day's sordid headlines. Looking at the drama on screen and the production history behind the scenes, Lewis uncovers a series of real gangster backstories, revealing, finally, how millions of dollars of mob money may well have funded the film in the first place, and how, as things played out, The Godfather saved Paramount Studios and the rest of Hollywood as well.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974) is a magisterial cinematic work, a gorgeous, stylized, auteur epic, and one of the few sequels judged by many to be greater than its predecessor. This despite the fact that it consists largely of meetings between aspiring 'Godfather' Michael Corleone and fellow gangsters, politicians and family members. The meetings remind us that the modern gangster's success is built upon inside information and on strategic planning. Michael and his father Vito's days resemble those of the legitimate businessmen they aspire or pretend to be. Jon Lewis's study of Coppola's masterpiece provides a close analysis of the film and a discussion of its cinematic and political contexts. It is structured in three sections: "The Sequel," "The Dissolve," and "The Sicilian Thing" - accommodating three avenues of inquiry, respectively: the film's importance in and to Hollywood history, its unique, auteur style and form; and its cultural significance. Of interest, then, is New Hollywood history, mise-en-scene, and a view of the Corleone saga as a cautionary capitalist parable, as a metaphor of the corruption of American power, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate.

Ozu Yasujiro's moving family drama, Tokyo monogatari/Tokyo Story (1953), is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant Japanese films ever made, and regularly cited as one of the greatest films of all time in polls of leading critics and filmmakers around the world. Telling the story of an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children, the film contrasts the behaviour of their children, who are too busy to pay their parents much attention, and their widowed daughter-in-law who treats them with hospitable kindness. In its complex portrait of human motivation and lively sense of social space, it offers a profound and poignant insight into the generational shifts of postwar Japan. Alastair Phillips combines a close analysis of the film and its key locations - the city of Tokyo, the town of Onomichi and the coastal resort of Atami - with a discussion of its representation of Japanese society at a time of great cultural change. Drawing upon Japanese and English language sources, he situates the film within various contemporary critical and industrial contexts and examines the multiple international dimensions of Tokyo Story's long after-life to understand its enormous contribution to global film culture.

Peter Weir's haunting and allusive Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), set in 1900, tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher on a trip to a local geological formation. The film is widely hailed as a classic of new Australian cinema, seen as exemplary of a peculiarly Australian style of heritage filmmaking.Anna Backman Rogers' study considers Picnic from feminist, psychoanalytic and decolonialising perspectives, exploring its setting in a colonised Australian bushland in which the Aboriginal people are a spectral presence in a landscape stolen from them in pursuit of the white man's 'terra nullius'. She delves into the film's production history, addressing director Weir's influences and preoccupations at the time of its making, its reception and its lasting impact on visual culture more broadly. Rogers addresses the film's treatment of the young schoolgirls and their teachers, seemingly, as embodiments of an archetype of the 'eternal feminine', as objects of the male gaze, and in terms of ideas about female hysteria as a protest against gender norms. She argues that Picnic is, in fact, highly subversive: a film that requires its viewers to read its seductive surfaces against the grain of the image in order to uncover its psychological depths.

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard was a critical and commercial success on its release in 1950 and remains a classic of film noir and one of the best-known Hollywood films about Hollywood. Both its opening, with William Holden as the screenwriter Joe Gillis floating facedown in ageing star Norma Desmond's (Gloria Swanson) pool, and lines such as 'I am big, it's the pictures that got small' are some of the most memorable in Classical Hollywood cinema.Steven Cohan's study of the film draws on original archival research to shed new light on the film's production history, and the contribution to the film's success and meanings of director Wilder, stars Holden and Swanson but also supporting actors Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson (who plays Betty Schaefer), Cecil B. DeMille, and Hedda Hopper, as well as costumier Edith Head, and composer Franz Waxman. Cohan considers the film both as a 'backstudio' picture (a movie about Hollywood) and as a film noir, and in the context of McCarthyism, blacklisting and the Hollywood Ten. Cohan explores how the film was marketed, its reception and afterlife, tracing how the film is at once a product of its own particular historical moment as the movie industry was transitioning out of the studio era, yet one that still speaks powerfully to contemporary audiences, and speculates on the reasons for its enduring appeal.