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ReFocus: The American Directors Series

ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks

Edited by R. Barton Palmer and Homer B. Pettey

Format

£25.99

About this book

The first critical work to emphasize Richard Brook’s "literariness"
  • Offers a critical assessment by well-known film scholars
  • Explores Brooks’s engagement with intellectual and cultural trends
  • Discusses Brooks’s engagement with genres

ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks highlights the accomplishments of one of postwar America’s most important and successful directors, with an emphasis on the "literary" aspects of his career, including his work as a screenwriter and adaptor of such modern classics as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Lord Jim, and The Brothers Karamazov.

Reviews

In this volume, the rich and varied career of ‘literary director’ Richard Brooks finally receives its well-deserved re-evaluation. The fine set of essays commissioned by Palmer and Pettey describes Brooks as a writer-filmmaker equally committed to the respectful adaptation of literary fiction as he was to a socially concerned cinema.

A comprehensive and telling treatment of an often overlooked director, ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks includes incisive and elegantly written essays from major film scholars that appreciate a genial director and his oeuvre.

In this edited collection, scholars working in film and cultural studies give Brooks his critical due as a filmmaker of literary fiction. The essays contain a panoply of perspectives that engage and otherwise challenge, in the words of the series’s mission, “American culture—its myths, values, and historical precepts.”
Table of contents

AcknowledgementsIllustrationsNotes on Contributors

1. Introduction - R. Barton Palmer and Homer B. Pettey

2. The Brick Foxhole (1945): Richard Brooks’s American Vision - Matthew H. Bernstein

3. The Muted Voices of Conscience and Responsibility in Crisis (1950) - Alan Woolfolk

4. Deadline U.S.A. (1952): A Fox Film of Fact - R. Barton Palmer

5. "Man Against the Times": Conformity, Anti-Statism and the ‘Unknown’ Korean War in Battle Circus (1953) - Ian Scott

6. Captured Interiors: Female Performances in The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) and The Happy Ending (1969) - Daniel Varndell

7. Blackboard Jungle (1955): A Cinematic Education - Steven Rybin

8. Hunting and the Economics of Adaptation: The Last Hunt (1956) and The Professionals (1966) - Homer B. Pettey

9. The Curse of Money: Negotiating Marriage in A Catered Affair (1956) - Elisabeth Bronfen

10. Adapting Modernism: Richard Brooks and The Brothers Karamazov (1958) - Douglas McFarland

11. Haunted: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) - David Sterritt

12. A Bite of Salvation - Murray Pomerance

13. "Monstrous Cinemascope": Richard Brooks Adapts Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) - William H. Epstein

14. Adapting the Unadaptables: Lord Jim (1965) - Thomas Leitch

15. Adaptation as Mutation: In Cold Blood (1967) - Jennifer L. Jenkins

16. Looking for Mr. Good Guy: Anatomizing 70s Fracture and Fragmentation - Julie Grossman

17. Failing to Locate Wrong is Right (1982) and What that Reveals about Cinematic Reality - Allen H. Redmon

BiblioographyIndex

About the contributors

R. Barton Palmer

R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature Emeritus at Clemson University. He is the author, editor, or general editor of many books including Hollywood’s Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir (1994), After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality (2006), and A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film (2011). He is the series editor for EUP’s traditions in World Cinema, Traditions in American Cinema and International Film Stars series, and he is co-editor of five recent EUP books: Michael Mann, George Cukor, Film Noir, International Noir and The Other Hollywood Renaissance.

Homer B. Pettey

Homer B. Pettey is Professor Emeritus of Film and Comparative Literature at the University of Arizona. He serves as the founding and general editor for Global Film Directors (Rutgers U.P.), Global Film Studios (Edinburgh U.P.), and International Stars (Edinburgh U.P.).

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