American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli

by Robert Lang

Book Overview

"The difficulty for men or the impossibility for women of living up to patriarchal society's ideal order is the very stuff of melodrama," writes Robert Lang in this daring work on what the author sees as the central genre of American film. Lang contends that the true melodrama is essentially an Oedipal drama--a dramatization of the ways in which we are all formed within a matrix of familial imperatives. As he interprets them, these imperatives are...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691006067
• ISBN13: 9780691006062
• Release Date: March 1989
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.