Celeste Holm Syndrome : On Character Actors from Hollywood's Golden Age

Lazar, David

University of Nebraska Press（2020/10発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 277 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781496200457
• DDC分類 791.430280922

Full Description

Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
In this essay collection David Lazar looks to our intimate relationships with characters, both well-known and lesser known, from Hollywood's Golden Age. Veering through considerations of melancholy and wit, sexuality and gender, and the surrealism of comedies of the self in an uncanny world, mixed with his own autobiographical reflections of cinephilia, Lazar creates an alluring hybrid of essay forms as he moves through the movies in his mind.

Character actors from the classical era of the 1930s through the 1950s including Thelma Ritter, Oscar Levant, Martin Balsam, Nina Foch, Elizabeth Wilson, Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, and the eponymous Celeste Holm all make appearances in these considerations of how essential character actors were, and remain, to cinema.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
On Characters: Preston Sturges's Ensemble
My Two Oscars: On Wit and Melancholy
Celeste Holm Syndrome: The Eyes of Sister Scholastica
Double Take: Jack Carson Agonistes
Comedy and Pain: Eric Blore, with a Side of Franklin Pangborn
Ma: Five Movie Mothers, with a Coda on Hitchcock
My Family Romance: Edward Everett Horton and Jessie Royce Landis
Martin Balsam: The Best Possible Arnold Burns