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ReFocus: The American Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox

Edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Joanna Hearne

Format

£100.00

In stock

About this book

Offers the first collection of critical essays on Wallace Fox, one of Hollywood’s first Native American film directors
  • Examines the entirety of Fox’s career in film and television
  • Provides focus on Fox’s major works in the areas of the horror film, the western, the women’s picture, and the movie serial
  • Analyses the importance of Fox's role as one of the first Native American directors working in Hollywood

Born in Oklahoma into the Chickasaw Nation, Wallace Fox directed films over the span of four decades. Known primarily for Westerns and mystery films, his output starred such famed actors as Bela Lugosi, Bob Steele, and Lon Chaney. ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox includes analysis of some of his best known films, including Wild Beauty, Gun Town, The Corpse Vanishes, Bowery at Midnight, Career Girl and Brenda Starr, Reporter. It reclaims the history and artistry of this major talent.

Reviews

Wallace Fox, a forgotten B-movie director who was one of the first Indigenous filmmakers to establish a career in American cinema, receives the Refocus treatment! Gary D. Rhodes and Joanna Hearne bring together eleven brilliant chapters that do much more than fill in a gap in film history; they expand and often rewrite it!
This ambitiously wide-ranging collection of film essays examines and reevaluates the work of forgotten B-movie director Wallace Fox.
Table of contents

Introduction: Wallace Fox and the B Film

  1. Between Compliance and Resistance: Mapping the Careers of Wallace Fox and Nipo Strongheart in Early Hollywood
  2. Indian Agents and Indigenous Agency at Universal: Wild Beauty (1946) and Gun Town (1946)
  3. Neglected Western Traditions and Indigenous Cinema in the 1945-46 Series Westerns of Wallace Fox
  4. The Corpse Vanishes and the Case of the Missing Brides
  5. “Like a crazy nightmare”: Noirish Vampirism and Deviance in Bowery at Midnight
  6. Voices and Vaults: Pillow of Death
  7. Wallace Fox and America’s “Career Girls”
  8. She Made Her Own Deadline: Fox’s Brenda Starr, Reporter
  9. Bathos in the Bowery
  10. Infernal Devices: Wallace Fox’s Aeroglobe, Cosmic Beam Annihilator, and the Pit of Everlasting Fire
  11. A Fox in the Wild: Ramar of the Jungle and the Crisis of Representation
About the contributors

Gary D. Rhodes

Gary D. Rhodes is Professor of Media, Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author of Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (2012), The Perils of Moviegoing in America (2012), and The Birth of the American Horror Film (2018). He is a founding editor of Horror Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Rhodes is also the writer-director of the documentary films Lugosi: Hollywood's Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004).

Joanna Hearne

Joanna Hearne is the Jeanne Hoffman Smith Professor in the Film and Media Studies department at the University of Oklahoma. Her books on Indigenous images and image-making in American film history include Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (2012) and Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising (2012).

More in this series

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