Hollywood is, as Murray Smith suggests, ‘a multi – facetted creature’ and cannot be reduced to a single essence, ‘Old’ or ‘New’. Changes at one level; are related to changes at another, but there is no guarantee that they match up tidily. Much has changed in Hollywood since the ‘classical’ or ‘studio’ era, a period that is itself subject to conflicts of definition.
But a good deal has remained the same. In some cases different strategies have been used to secure more familiar ends. Sweeping definitions of ‘New’ Hollywood as something entirely different overlook important continuities and are often based on simplified generalizations about the earlier period. How do we find a way around these confusions?
We need to establish precisely what is and is not new about ‘New’ Hollywood, to identify its distinctive characteristics – sometimes contradictory – and its points of similarity with the Hollywood of the past. As a multi – faceted creature, Hollywood is shaped by a combination of forces ranging from the most local and industry – specific detail to the scale of national or global social and economic movements.
The stylistic and industrial levels of New Hollywood cinema obey their own distinctive logics, but they are far from autonomous. The industrial level sets particularly important horizons of possibility, as should be expected in a form of cultural production so strongly governed by commercial imperatives.
Hollywood remains, above all, a business. Hollywood cinema, ‘Old or New’, is regularly subjected to critical interrogation for what it tells us about the society in which it is produced and consumed. It is often taken to ‘reflect’ or ‘express’ something about its time and place. These kinds of reading can be based both on the subject matter of Hollywood films and the stylistic devices employed.
But analysis of this kind that ignores the industrial dimension can be misleading or, at least, incomplete. Do the features of a particular blockbuster reflect and or tackle issues of social concern? Or are they merely the components of a particular strategy designed to attract audiences.
The answer is probably: both, but in a manner that requires a distinct awareness of the part played by each element in the process. If New Hollywood is to be understood in terms of stylistic, industrial and socio – historical contexts – and interrelations between them – there is still no single definition available for any one of these perspectives.
The term gained widespread use initially to describe a wave of films and filmmakers that came to critical attention from the mid to late 1960s to the mid to late 1970s, a phenomenon also labeled as the Hollywood ‘Renaissance’. Some insist that the term Hollywood should still be reserved for this period, little more than a decade.
Subsequently, there has been applied in two additional ways. ‘New Hollywood has been used since the 1980s to define a brand of filmmaking almost entirely opposite to that of the Hollywood Renaissance: the Hollywood of giant media conglomerates and expensive blockbuster attractions. Alternatively, the term can be used to encompass both, and a broader context dating back to the 1950s, the Hollywood renaissance being viewed as one specific phase.
Film style: ‘post – classical’
Does New Hollywood cinema represent a significant shift in film style? New Hollywood style has been defined in a number of different ways, as might be expected given the existence of contradictory versions of ‘New Hollywood.’ One proposition is the New Hollywood has seen a move away from what is defined as the ‘classical’ Hollywood style.
Some have argued for the establishment of a distinctly ‘pots classical’ style. In style – oriented accounts, the term ‘pots classical Hollywood’ is often used instead of New Hollywood. The classical style forms the main point of departure of inclined definitions of New Hollywood. What, then, is ‘classical’ Hollywood style?
A brief definition will be sufficient for now, focusing on two principal aspects of the classical style. One concerns short arrangement and editing style, the other focuses on the centrality of a particular form of narrative organization. The films of classical Hollywood are in general shot and put together according to the conventions of continuity edition.
A range of different camera positions and movements are used to present the viewer with a selection of different viewpoints on the action, an approach often described as offering something close to an ‘ideal’ perspective on the key events of a scene or sequence. The conventions of continuity editing are designed to ensure a smooth and continuous flow across and between these various perspectives.
Close up shots of detail, for example, are preceded by longer ‘establishing shots’ designed to provide general orientation. The 180 degree ‘rule’, according to which the cameral should stay on the same side of an imaginary line drawn through the action in any one set – up, serves to ensure a consistency of space and direction.
Techniques such as the eye line match (cutting from the look of a character to the object of the gaze) and match – on – action (cutting in such a way as to continue a particular action across the cut) are used to link one image to that which follows. The aim is to render the editing itself largely ‘invisible’, to lead the viewer seamlessly into the sound and images but on the narrative events.
The narratives of classical Hollywood are usually characterized as quite tightly organized sequences governed by rules of cause – and – effect. Each development in the story is meant to be given careful motivation and explanation.
A post – classical style in New Hollywood has been described in terms of departure of both levels, some films of the Hollywood renaissance are characterized at both levels. Some films of the Hollywood renaissance are characterized partly by breaches of the continuity editing regime of classical Hollywood, inspired largely by thee films of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, some also undermined aspects of classical narratives such as the clear motivation f the actions of the hero.
A different set of departures from classical style has been identified more recently as a result of developments such as the contemporary corporate blockbuster format and the growing importance of video and broadcast media to the Hollywood economic equation. Traditional editing regimes are said by some to have been undermined by the importation into feature films of the rapid cutting and ‘shallow’ imagery advertising or MTV.
The concern of the contemporary blockbuster to offer a spectacular big – screen experience and to generate profitable spin – offs in other media, ranging from computer games to theme parks, has lead others to heralds the demise of the narrative coherence said to characterize classical Hollywood.
The Hollywood Renaissance
A giant pair of red lips fills the screen. The face turns away and we see the reflection in a mirror. The distinctive arched features of Faye Dunaway half a smile as she peers into the glass before turning away. Cut to amid – shot in which Dunaway continues to turn and rises. But the match between shots is not quite right.
An instant of transition is missing. The cut is abrupt, disarming, Dunaway pouts, naked to the waist but framed above the line of breasts. She looks around her, moves to lie down on a bed. Cut to the final movement from a lower angle and a different position. Again she is not quite what we expect. Jumpy. As if a number of frames have been omitted.
Dunaway’s character grabs at a passing insect. Thumps the bedstead in frustration. She pulls herself up, head framed through the horizontal bars. A sultry pose. The camera lurches awkwardly into a big close – up on her eyes and nose, focus is lost momentarily in the process.
Thus begins Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and with it, arguably, the version of New Hollywood that became known and widely celebrated as the Hollywood ‘Renaissance’. The jump cuts and other disorienting effects are direct borrowings from the fuels of the French New wave, but used here to potent and specific effect. The impression created is one of restlessness, edginess and a palpable sense of sexual hunger and longing.
These are expressions of the state of the fictionalized character played by Dunawat, the depression era bank robber to be Bonnie Parker, but also perhaps of the moment in which the film appeared.
Parker is presented, in a few bold stylistic strokes, as a figure as barely contained by her humdrum surroundings as the opening off the film is constrained by the ‘rules’ of classical Hollywood style. She is bursting with desire to escape. So it seems, were some of the filmmakers coming to the fore in the late 1960s, along with a whole stratum of American culture and society.
The same year saw the release of The Graduate. Dustin Hofman is Bejamin Braddock, a brilliant student and track star, newly home from college and also imprisoned, if in a wealthier suburban milieu. His parents buy him a diving suit to celebrate, in which he lurks at the bottom of their swimming pool.
Another expressive image of youthful alienations and incipient rebellion. Both films were box office hits, although Bonnie and Clyde was not initially given a very wide release, two years later, in 1969, two unkempt figures high on drugs and laid back on motorcycles dispelled any doubts about whether these films were part of what was becoming significant shift within the Hollywood landscape.
The period from the late 1960s until the mid or late 1970s has gained almost mythical status in the annals of Hollywood, its advent marked usually by thee appearance and success of Bonnie and Clyde. It is remembered as an era in which Hollywood produced a relatively high number of innovative films that seemed to go beyond the confines of conventional studio fare in terms of their content and style and their existence as products of a purely commercial or corporate system.
For some, this period represented the birth (or rebirth) of the Hollywood ‘art’ film, or something very like it. For others, it was a time when Hollywood made a gesture towards the more liberal or radical forces in American society. The period if often taken as a benchmark for measuring the state of Hollywood in subsequent decades. The products of the 1980s, 1990 and early 2000s are generally found wanting by comparison. Occasional signs of intelligent life in Hollywood today are often referred back to this earlier period.
But what exactly happened in the Hollywood of the late 1960s and the 1970s, and why has it gained such resonance? A distinctive group of films did appear in this period, although exactly how far they stray from more familiar Hollywood themes and forms remains subject to debate. It was, quite clearly to some extent a product of a particular social and historical context: form the fervid of 1960s radicalism and counterculture to the icy paranoia of the pots – Watergate period.
The ability of this context to become translated into the cinema was conditioned to a large extent by developments in the industrial structure and strategies of Hollywood from the 1950s onwards. The distinctive nature of the Hollywood Renaissance also needs to be considered at the level of film style, this us related in part to the social dimension.
To question dominant myths and ideologies entails at least some departure from the formal conventions that play a significant part in their maintenance. The stylistic innovations from the Renaissance also have their own dynamic, however, traceable to sources such as the European ‘art’ film.
Characteristics of the New Hollywood films
There are several aspects which made the new filmmakers to have a major characteristic. In this era, most of them were school educated. Furthermore, they were young and counterculture – bred. This team of new filmmakers who were known as the New Hollywood brought to the fore a new perspective of filmmaking. This included energy, sexuality, and an obsession for passion for films as a medium which was artistic in nature.
The emphasis of this as it is depicted in the movie Bonnie and Clyde was an emphasis on what many scholars called realism. This realism was based on character, the infusion of rock music and sexuality when it came to shooting of the films. It is worth noting that the Hollywood Renaissance films reflected what was happening at that’s particular point in time in terms of social changes which were taking place. The social context
The civil rights movement, race riots : ‘black power’. The counterculture, hippies, drug trafficking: ‘flower power’. Youth, popular music and fashion. Protests against the war in Vietnam. Student radicalization and the ‘New Left’. A new wave of feminism and demands for gay rights.
Political hopes, dreams and nightmares. Kennedy, the Kennedy assassination. My Lai, Cambodia and shooting of students at Kent state. Battles on the streets of Chicago. Nixon. Watergate. Humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam. The oil crisis and a reduced scale of global American economic power. Making connections between Hollywood movies and the times in which they appear is not as straightforward business as it might often appear.
Sometimes, however the case seems more clear cut; the times are such that they appear to be impose themselves forcefully on our consciousness, unmistakably invading the terrain of popular entertainment such as Hollywood cinema. The late 1960s and early 1970s appears to be such a time.
These were years of quite extraordinary upheaval and drama in American society. Far for everyone in America was directly involved in the events sketched above. Many probably continued to live their lives more or less unchanged. But these events had an undoubted impact on American culture, if only through their pervasive courage in the media. Single issues such as Vietnam and Watergate were potent enough in themselves.
What is most striking about the period, however, is the sheer number of crises and upheavals. Their cumulative impact in a relatively short period of time is what gives grounds for assuming a further – reaching challenge to some American values and assumptions. Images of America as a place of freedom and democracy were dented, if not more seriously damaged.
How, though, were these events reflected in the films of the Hollywood Renaissance? A major ingredient of many f these films are a foregrounding of youthful alienation and or rebellion. Bonnie and Clyde is essentially, the story of two handsome, if rather mixed up, people who seek escape from the limitations of small town life.
Their chosen pursuit, bank robbery, appears to be a means to this end, rather than an end in itself. Neither seems to be in it for the money, little of which appear to be accumulated. They do it for the hell of it, for the freedom, celebrity and sheer style offered by a life of crime. Nods are made in the direction of a ‘robin Hood’ agenda.
The point is made that Bonnie and Clyde rob the banks that are foreclosing against poor farmers. They become popular heroes but more for the fantasy of escape they enact than for any very specific action. Relevance to the youth rebellions of the 1960s is implicit rather than explicit, thee upheavals of the 1930s and the depression a loose surrogate for these of the later decade.
It is possible, at the risk of some simplification, to divide the social context of the Hollywood renaissance into two main currents. One celebrates aspects of 1960s rebellion. The other explores or manifests elements of a darker mood in which alienation leads towards fear and disillusion.
If the counterculture, ‘flower power’ and 1967’s proclaimed ‘summer of love’ represents one side of the equation, Vietnam and Watergate are pervasive reference points for the other. The two are not entirely separate, of course, ether in the history of the period or in its reflection in Hollywood.
Vietnam, especially, was a major catalyst for a host of oppositional currents, a key factor in whatever coherence is found in the various strains of 1960s alienation and radicalism in America landmark films such as Bonnie and Clyde contain elements of each, appearing almost on the cusp between one mood and the other.
The analysis
The foregoing analysis should suggest some of Bonnie and Clyde’s intricate architecture. To watch this movie three decades after its premier is to be stuck by the film’s emotional generosity towards its character, its unflagging sense of the gangster’s existential absurdity, and equally, its visual panache.
Reviewers noted from the outset how the film continually throws the spectator off guard – and not just because of the sporadic outbursts of violence that confound its conception of Bonnie and Clyde as engaging, glamorous, overgrown children. The film’s fusion of American can d European “art” filmmaking was another source of spectator disorientation, albeit one Arthur Penn had previously explored in Mickey One (1964).
Although critics and devotees of the film have acknowledged Bonnie and Clyde’s complex, hybrid visual style from its premiere until the present day, it has never been documented with the benefit of a close analysis. Arthur Penn’s earlier comments suggest, the film’s visual style is closely linked to Bonnie and Clyde’s personal traits, their quirks of personality. Visual style is also, as always, a vehicle for the film’s narration.
Before considering visual style proper (editing and camerawork), it is worth pausing over the gang members’ characterizations and the way the film conveys information to the audience. Bonnie and Clyde’ varied film style is related to the contradictory traits of the gang members in the script. The script opposes Bonnie and Clyde against unusually comical representatives of convectional morality.
Essentially, this movie’s combination of amorality and childlike innocence is the major paradox of the film, and the one most closely keyed to the film’s visual style; but they also display other traits worth noting. Clyde has acute insight into people’s circumstances, but he is utterly oblivious to their thoughts.
He cannot, for example, understand why a butcher would want to kill a robber, or why Bonnie is upset with his regret over the gang’s impractical bank robbing routine rather than over their outlaw life, as they recuperate in the Moss home. Bonnie’s style consciousness (and repeated mirror checks) makes her a fashion plate (with or without a cigar in her mouth), yet she remains rooted in her poor southern milieu and is perfectly comfortable with the earthy, burping.
Like the opening sequence, this remarkable shot combines various motifs that have informed the entire film: the prevalence of rural landscapes that connote both dreariness of impoverished lives and the potential for freedom; the constricted visions and viewpoints of characters who live on the run and on the road, who contend with the advantages and limitations of mobile domesticity (the car as a dining room when they eat hamburgers with Velma and Eugene; the car as recovery room after the ambush in which Buck is fatally shot).
When the gang captured Homer, we saw him, his nose pressed to the rear window of a car, from the back seat. Now, at the conclusion of this elaborate shot, we see him from a reverse angle, looking down at his former tormentors. For all of Bonnie and Clyde’s stylistic variety, however, the film’s editing and pacing are its distinguishing features.
The building up of scenes out of quickly edited shots begins with the credit sequence; the ambush sequences in Joplin, Platte City, and Dexter pick up and extend the intense fragmentation of space and time that marked the film’s opening scene in Bonnie’s room, increasing the pace of cuts with each attack.
In the current learning dispensation, it is worth noting that teachers and students are used to thinking of letters, diaries, and newspaper editorials as primary sources, but any product of popular culture – music, magazines, television shows, commercials, websites – is potentially a primary source for the historical and social moment in which it was created. Each is a historical artifact of that particular context, influenced by and influencing the braider public consciousness and popular culture at the time.
It is no mistake that Bonnie and Clyde could have been made in 1967 but not 1947 – the film emerges from the confluence of conflicting attitudes about sexuality, violence and civic authority in 1960s America that were not part of the public consciousness in the 1940s. Hence, Bonnie and Clyde is a primary source reflecting a particular perspective on the cultural conflicts and social changes in the society and time in which it was created.
Recognizing that Bonnie and Clyde is a specific, if partial, perspective is essential to its educative value. It is not a neutral detached commentary about American society. The film sympathizes with its gangster protagonist against the establishment figures who hunt them down.
They are rebels against an exploitative American social order, in which banks and conservative elements hold all the power. Perhaps only through violence can humble people hope to claim any power and control. Early in the film, Bonnie and Clyde come across an impoverished Dust Bowl farmer whose home is being reposed by the bank that owns his mortgage. They lend him one of their guns to shoot up the house, as it is no longer his home and is instead now bank property.
When the Barrow gang is finally caught at the end of the film, the death of Bonnie and Clyde is not depicted as the triumph of justice or law over criminal recklessness: it is an ambush led by resentful authority figure, a brutal assassination of two young renegades who resisted the establishment forces of their society.
From this point of view, Bonnie and Clyde is a historical fantasy using events and characters of the 1930s to comment on the 1960s. Much like most letters or diaries, the film expresses just one perspective on its time, the perspective embraced by the film creators. Hence, the film includes only personal details about the protagonists that advance their roles as rebels against authority but not historical details that would interfere with expressing the filmmakers’ social critique.
Briely’s careful guided instructional use of film positions his students to recognize historical themes reflected by a film such as Bonnie and Clyde. He took care to mentally equip his students to watch the film in a particular way observing its distinctive perspective and not blindly accepting it as an accurate or authoritative account of Barrow gang.
This was possible only through Briely’s thoughtful planning, reinforcement through multiple sources, and scaffolding of student activities. In the Rebel without a Cause, we find a wholly different feeling associated with onscreen violence. Underlying the confrontation and the fight, called the “blade game,” which occurs after the visit to the planetarium, is atonal music, marked by odd time signatures and dissonant blaring brass.
The use if the timpani and horns, along twith the timing, give the music a Stravinsky – like flavor, as well, the music is sometimes recorded low, and, then abruptly, the recording level is raised. The dissonance imparts a brooding feeling to the scene, a sense of latent, almost muscular violence that flashes out when the brass blares or the recording level shoots up. The uneasy, unstable quality of the music serves to characterize the psychological turmoil – the play of repression and explosive release – with which the scene is concerned.
In 1956 Rebel Without a Cause had been among the most popular films at the box office, while many critics choose it as one of the best movies of the year. This had much to do with the Dean cult, which in Europe might have been less spectacular than in the United States of America, but whose long term influence on youth culture cannot be underestimated.
It remains difficult to speculate about the influence of one single cultural; product or a star, certainly upon the influence of one single cultural product or a star, certainly upon the audience. But it is astounding how the movie had been successfully released in the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, while Dean’s mood and attributes were largely taken up – as well as commercially exploited. Rebel without a casus takes place in a Los Angeles suburb.
The director, Nicholas Ray, and the scriptwriter, Stewart Stern, set off to portray the life of a contemporary American teenager. The story is organized around Jim Stark, recently arrived with his parents in the hope that their son will conform and lose his rebellious streak and take “a right step in the right direction.”
But Jim manages to get into trouble quickly. After being challenged by Buzz, the popular kid in town, to a “chickie run” (two drivers of stolen vehicles drive toward a cliff; the one that jumps out first is considered to be a chicken, that is, a coward or not a man), Jim finds himself surviving while Buzz plunges off the cliff and dies. Against his parents’ advice, Jim goes to the police to report the event, but, not finding Ray, the sympathetic officer, he knows, he leaves.
At the same time, Buzz’s friends fear that Jim has reported the event to the police and pursue him. Jim hides in a deserted mansion with Julie – who had been Buzz’s girl but couples with Jim after the chickie run – and Plato, a younger marginalized teen. Running towards the safe haven turns out badly. When Buzz’s friends and the police discover the three, Plato shoots and injures one of Buzz’s friends before running to the planetarium to hide, fearing that the police will shoot him.
Jim and Judy run after Him, and the police surround the planetarium. An alternative approach in locating the movie’s influence is to put it into a wider flow of cultural products. If we look at the European cultural debate of the 1950s, and even later, it is astonishing how important the trope of America has been. Dean’s attributes – as portrayed in its purest form in Rebel without a Cause – were often identified as another clear example of the further Americanization of Europe.
In the 20th century, America played a key role in European cultural criticism and in its theoretical mapping of art, popular culture, and modernity. Exemplifying the wider American cultural industry, Hollywood embodied ever since the 1920s the “America – as – threat” paradigm.
In many European countries, intellectuals, politicians, and cultural critics from different ideological origins were unanimous in their negative consensus around the influence of American mass culture. This debate was intensified after the Second World War and into the 1950s, when the reconstruction of Europe was accompanied by an increasing flow of U. S movies and other cultural symbols.
However, in the postwar cultural debate on Americanization, some dissenting voices were raised. The latter strongly denounced the pejorative and ideologically inflected character of the traditional elitist views upon the American popular culture, while for many young working class people and critics, American culture represented a “force of liberation against the grey critics of (British) cultural life.”
Writing about the postwar cultural development of Italy, David Forgacs argued that “from the mid – 1950s rock ‘n’ roll music……..and films like rebel Without a cause…helped give shape to a new model of youth autonomy and rebellion.” Among young people cultural symbols of Americanism were increasingly associated with modernity and a loosening of traditional authority, hence underlining its potential for models of resistance.
From this perspective, it remains interesting that throughout Western Europe, this type of controversial material from the U.S was able to whip up a vivid debate. Not only on American social and moral issues, but also on local forms – in this case – delinquency, juvenile rebellion, and so on.
Although official censors, religious classifiers and conservative parts of the press tried to resolve the ambiguity or to flatten out the critical engagement in ray’s movie, one is struck by the persistence of counter voices in the public debate – defending Rebel Without a Cause in its mood and analysis of youth’s essential rebellion and identity crisis.
It also remains astonishing how mainly European filmmakers later claimed to be influenced by this type of American movie, Rebel Without a Cause in particular. Especially in France where anti – American feelings have been so high on the cultural and political agenda – sadly, up till today – it is hard to underestimate the importance of Ray’s movie. Dean’s performance in this case can still be admired through French performance such as Johnny Halliday.
Teen films
Teen films were nothing new when they enjoyed a renaissance in the 1980s. During the 1930s, Hollywood had promoted teenage stars like Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, and Mickey Rooney. Aware of the Americans’ concern with juvenile delinquency during the 1950s, Hollywood produced a number of youth films, all of which had sexual under – or overtones. At one end of the spectrum was Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
Starring Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo as discontented middle – class suburban teenagers, the film clearly implicated the youths’ repressed sexuality in their rebelliousness. At other end the youths’ repressed sexuality in their rebelliousness. At the other end of the spectrum were pseudo exposes.
By the early 1980s, sexuality intimacy had become a convectional narrative for viewers that two characters had cemented their relationship. Either they were a couple and they were in love, or they were intensely attracted to one another physically, which could lead to either love or disaster, depending on the story.
The correlation of nudity and sex with frankness and cinematic realism that had once been associated with European films and independent American films in the 1950s and 1960s had become a Hollywood convention in PG 13 or R rated films by the end of the 1980s.
Throughout the 1980s, films consistently revealed a plurality of sexual attitudes and quite a bit of naked (especially female) flesh. Nudity or non marital sex featured in films ranging from comedies to the other genres. The substantial Americans who saw these films revealed that a lot of Americans had or were comfortable with a liberal attitude toward representations of nudity and sex, even the sexual antics of teens.
While Hollywood films could arguably be said to reflect the liberalization of attitudes towards sex in clear when a specific form of non normative sex – adultery – is an element of a film’s narrative. While majorities Americans have never expressed approval for adultery, they have not shied away from films with adulterous main characters. In conclusion, the time between 1967 and 1982 a generation of filmmakers came to the fore in America.
This generation gained prominence in this town as it was regarded as the new generation in the American film industry. The classic example was the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde. The introduction of this move led to a new way of producing and marketing the Hollywood movies.
Historically speaking, the advent of television and the court decisions which led to the end of studios’ which were near monopoly control, Hollywood studios had to find a new way of producing films and maintain the kind of profits that they had been used to.
Some of the new advances which were made during this time included technical advances such as Cinemascope and the famous stereo sound among others. This was done with the intention of ensuring that the audiences did not dwindle from their productions. Essentially, the 1950s and 1960s film production had a major characteristic which was musicals, historical epics among others.
Reference List
Friedman, LD 2000, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, illustrated edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
King, G 2002, New Hollywood cinema:an introduction, illustrated edn, I.B.Tauris, New York.
Marcus, AS 2010, Teaching history with film:strategies for secondary social studies, illustrated edn, Taylor & Francis, New York.
Monaco, P 2010, A history of American movies:a film-by-film look at the art, craft, and business of cinema, illustrated edn, Scarecrow Press, New York.
Pennington, JW 2007, The history of sex in American film, illustrated edn, Greenwood Publishing Group, London.