Underworld U.S.A (Cinema one, 20)

McArthur, Colin

Secker & Warburg/BFI

Viking Press

Underworld USA

Literature & Fiction

VIKING

The Big Heat first appeared in 1953, towards the end of the film noir cycle that had begun in the early '40s. It was greeted in the United States and Britain as a successful but modest product of the Hollywood system, "slickly written and directed" in the words of one critic. Only the extreme violence, as in the infamous scalding coffee scene, was singled out for special mention. Yet by the time the film was reissued in Britain in 1988 it had achieved undisputed classic status. How had this transformation come about? Colin McArthur takes The Big Heat as a case study in film criticism. He examines the film's changing critical fortunes under the influence of the so called auteur theory, and shows how other intellectual currents led to a reassessment of Lang's work in the 1970s. McArthur provides his own perceptive analysis of the film in the light of these revolutions in film criticism.

The Big Heat (BFI Film Classics)

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

British Film Institute

The Casablanca File

JOHN LIBBEY

Television and magazine advertisements; films and television plays; the names of night clubs, bars and restaurants; the routines of stage and television comedians; titles of books; sub-editors' headlines; even the exchanges of personal conversations: the film "Casablanca" figures in all of them and in a great deal else. "Casablanca" is perhaps the most prolific generator of secondary texts in the field of popular culture. In the language of semiotics, "Casablanca" is profoundly intertextual. Tracing "Casablanca"'s rich intertextuality from the mid-1950s to the present day, this book is concerned that the process of quoting, mis-quoting and re-quoting from "Casablanca" takes place within a very narrow range of meanings mostly concerned with the cult of Bogart and the related theme of romantic nostalgia. As well as documenting the sometimes delirious intertextuality of "Casablanca', the book describes the archaeological task of recovering the most important meaning that the hegemony of romantic nostalgia suppresses - "Casablanca"'s demand that the moral choices be made in the face of fascism.

The Casablanca file

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Half Brick Images

This book anthologises selected key works from the oeuvre of Colin McArthur, a pioneering figure within Anglophone Film and Scottish cultural studies since the 1960s. Collecting together thirty-seven essays written between 1966 and 2022, twenty-one of which were hitherto out-of-print, the book identifies and illustrates the central strands of scholarly interest that have defined one of British Film Studies and Scottish Cultural Studies' most influential careers: critical investigation and legitimisation of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema and popular American film genres; the cinematic representation of Scotland and the gradual development of a Scottish film production sector; and Scotland's status as a distinctive visual and material cultural signifier within a diverse range of international popular cultures from the eighteenth century to the present.

Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

Edinburgh University Press

This provocative book follows MGM's Gene Kelly musical Brigadoon through the worlds of 1940s Broadway theatre and 1950s Hollywood and documents the contempt the film has elicited, particularly from the Scots intelligentsia. McArthur succumbs to Brigadoon's charm, but finds no such mitigating features in Mel Gibson's 1995 blockbuster Braveheart. Tracing Braveheart's appropriation by political, touristic and sporting figures, he argues that, far from its being about Scottish history, it is primarily about Hollywood's generic forms and cinematic traditions. He looks too at the way the film distorts history and examines Braveheart's sinister appeal to the proto-fascist psyche. McArthur argues that both films have enormous resonance within Scottish culture and the Scots diaspora and, crucially, for a vast worldwide audience who may have no other knowledge of the Scots.

Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema (Cinema and Society)

I.B.Tauris

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Books by McArthur, Colin