Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2359756 in Books
• Published on: 1996-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 194 pages

From Library Journal
This series of essays popularizes the concepts behind 20 years of important feminist criticism from Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, and others. Maxfield (English, Whitman Coll., Washington) focuses on the obsession with dominance and resulting emotional vulnerability and self-destructiveness of the male characters in The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Murder My Sweet, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, White Heat, Vertigo, Point Blank, Mean Streets, Chinatown, Prizzis' Honor, Blue Velvet, The Grifters, and Thelma and Louise. While the treatment of classic film noir offers nothing new, the other films, with which readers will be more familiar, benefit from the extended character analysis. The essay on Thelma and Louise, for instance, effectively explicates the changing and complex interactions of both the female and male characters and their relation to traditional family roles. An excellent acquisition for general and special libraries.?Jane E. Sloan, Rutgers Univ. Lib., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Thoughtful analysis of the "Femme Fatale" in key noir films.
Author does a thought-provoking analysis of the femme fatale in several key noirs 1940-present.Especially interesting are essays on "Double Indemnity","Out of the Past", and "Thelma and Louise".Book does not rehash conventional explications on these films regarding the "fatal women" represented in each.Anyone interested in film noir or the theme of the "fatal woman" in many of these films will find this book hard to put down.This book assumes that the reader have some familiarity with the films it discusses, or else much of the analysis will seem obscure. Recommended for the reader with more than a passing interest in the film noir genre.