Analyzes the style and social themes of the comic films made in Hollywood by the director, Ernst Lubitsch

Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy

Biographies & Memoirs

PAUL, William

Arts & Literature

Columbia Univ. Pr.

Humor & Entertainment

William Paul's exploration of an extremely popular box office genre - the gross-out movie - is the first book to take this lowbrow product seriously. Writing about "movies that embraced the lowest common denominator as an aesthetic principle, movies that critics constantly griped about having to sit through, " Paul examines their unique place in our culture. He focuses on gross-out horror and comedy films of the seventies and eighties - film cycles set in motion by the extraordinary successes of The Exorcist and Animal House. What links these genres together, Paul argues, is their concern with the human body - and all its scatological and sexual aspects. These "films of license, " as Paul calls them, embrace "explicitness as part of their aesthetic." Tracing both of these culturally disreputable subgenres back to older traditions of festive comedy and Grand Guignol, Paul finds their precursors in horror films like The Birds and Night of the Living Dead as well as comedies such as M*A*S*H and Blazing Saddles that were produced under Hollywood's then recently liberalized censorship code. Moving on to mass tastes, Paul asserts that American audiences are "not without powers of discrimination." He argues that gross-out movies challenge social tastes and values, but without the self-consciousness of avant-garde art. Through interpretations of classics by Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, blaxploitation movies, horror films by David Cronenburg and Stanley Kubrick, and comedies starring John Belushi and Bill Murray, Paul establishes gross-out as a true genre - one that "speaks in the voice of festive freedom, uncorrected and unconstrained by the reality principle... aggressive, seeminglyimprovised, and always ambivalent."

Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (Film and Culture)

Movies

Columbia University Press

Traces the history of horror and comedy entertainment, and examines the two genres, dissecting and analyzing scenes from such movies as "Porky's" and "Alien"

Laughing Screaming

When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film (Film and Culture Series)

There was a time when seeing a movie meant more than seeing a film. The theater itself shaped the very perception of events on screen. This multilayered history tells the story of American film through the evolution of theater architecture and the surprisingly varied ways movies were shown, ranging from Edison's 1896 projections to the 1968 Cinerama premiere of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. William Paul matches distinct architectural forms to movie styles, showing how cinema's roots in theater influenced business practices, exhibition strategies, and film technologies.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Photography & Video

While investigating the murder of a wealthy old spinster, Detective Chief Inspector David Fyfe has a beautiful suspect whom he once let walk away from a murder scene come back into his life, only to discover that it can only mean trouble.

Sleeping Partner

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

St Martins Pr

The State: Its Origin and Function

History

Franklin Classics

Mummy's Boy

Macdonald

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Books by PAUL, William