The updated edition of Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition, an in-depth exploration of Lupino’s film and television directing work, provides close readings of the films and TV episodes Lupino directed and accounts for the history of Lupino’s reception, continuing into the mid-2020s, in media and film scholarship. The book gives readers a fuller understanding of Lupino’s major contribution to the history of American cinema and media. The revisions update this book, the first on Lupino’s directing, to address recent scholarship on Lupino’s work and reinforce her abiding relevance for cinephiles and film scholars. It incorporates scholarly and popular culture references to Lupino in the last seven years. Updates include a foreword by writer and film critic Imogen Sara Smith, whose work in film scholarship and the public arena has drawn attention to Lupino and the importance of gender to film noir. Authors Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman have added a complete list of the TV episodes Lupino directed in the 1950s and '60s, as well as an updated epilogue.
This new edition addresses how our views of Lupino’s innovative cinema and her prodigious contributions to classic television have been taken up by others, proving that Lupino, whose reputation has waxed and waned since the middle of the twentieth century, is here to stay as a major figure in the history of American media.
"[A] landmark study of this underrecognized director. . . . Grisham and Grossman do not consider their subject narrowly as a woman filmmaker. They present Lupino broadly as a pioneer independent moviemaker and director."
---Film Quarterly
"A detailed and readable account of Lupino as a filmmaker whose work and contributions deserve greater attention in an industry still overly dominated by the male gaze. This volume should encourage further scholarship on the life and work of a pioneering filmmaker."
---The Journal of American Culture
"Groundbreaking and judiciously comprehensive."
---South Atlantic Review
“Recommended.”
---Choice
"Ida Lupino, Director fulfils a grand job in keeping her achievements in the public eye."
---Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
"An intelligent, thorough, and engaging book that expands our understanding of Ida Lupino’s career as a director, from a frequently simplistic view of her as 'a woman in a man’s profession' to her as a unique artist in her own right. Lupino’s socially conscious themes (which often required tricky dealings with the Breen Office) and savvy grasp of Hollywood economics are given due credit. Grisham and Grossman examine Lupino’s directing within the context of classic Hollywood, of feminism, and of auteurism, showing her vital importance to all of them."
"Exactly the serious study Ida Lupino deserves, this superb book sketches her directing career against larger developments in postwar Hollywood, demonstrating her feminist impact on a changing industry."
"Lupino’s work has never received its full due. Grisham and Grossman’s sensitive study, informed by thorough research and new paradigms, provides a welcome corrective."
"One of Hollywood’s few female directors, Ida Lupino was a true maverick, making movies with the same steely determination and emotional sensitivity that characterized her work as an actor. Grisham and Grossman’s thoughtful study sheds a welcome light on an oeuvre that has been too long obscured."
"An urgently needed and long overdue reclamation of the directorial work of Ida Lupino, one of the most significant auteurs of the twentieth century. Cineastes will be delighted by this dazzling, well written, and comprehensive book."
Foreword to the Second Edition by Imogen Sara Smith vii Preface xi Note on Quotations xv PART ONE Introducing Ida Lupino, Director and Feminist Auteur 1 A Rejection of Hollywood 3 Lupino Directs 6 Director Lupino and Colleagues 11 The Filmakers’ Films 13 Lupino and the Censors 20 Lupino as Feminist Auteur 30 Postwar Hollywood, American Society and Culture 41 Close-Up on Outrage 46 Empathy and a Cinema of Engagement 58 Italian Neorealism or American Realisms? 61 Looking Backward? 64 PART TWO Lupino’s Ingenious Genres: Early Films and The Trouble with Angels (1966) 73 The Social Problem Film and Film Noir 75 Home Noir 94
Home Is Where the Noir Is 98 Doubled Dreams in Hard, Fast and Beautiful 102 Doubled Domesticity in The Bigamist 109 Doubled Trauma: Outrage 113 A Mighty Girl: Lupino and The Trouble with Angels 123 PART THREE Lupino Moves to Television 133 Industrial Contexts: Film to Television 133 Directing for Television 137 “No. 5 Checked Out” 140 Ida Lupino, Television Director 148 On Close Readings of 1950s and 1960s Television 150 “The Return”: Norma Desmond and Ida Lupino Haunt the Small Screen 153 Mr. Adams and Eve 163 Directed Episodes, 1956–1968 176 Comedies 181 Action, Thrillers, Mysteries 189 Westerns 206 Epilogue 215 Acknowledgments 221 Appendix: TV Episodes Directed by Ida Lupino 223 Notes 233 Works Cited 249 Index 263
THERESE GRISHAM taught in the film and media studies program and in the departments of humanities and philosophy at Oakton College in Des Plaines, Illinois.
JULIE GROSSMAN is a professor of English and communication at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. Her publications include Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster and The Femme Fatale (Rutgers University Press).
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