Abstract
Genre films were the staple of Hollywood production in the heyday of the studio system. As Thomas Schatz puts it: ‘Simply stated the genre film — whether a western or a musical, a screwball comedy or a gangster film — involves familiar, essentially one-dimensional characters acting out a predictable story pattern within a familiar setting.’1 Academic studies of genre films have for the most part neglected the swashbuckler and preferred to concentrate on westerns, crime films, musicals, horror films and melodramas.
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Notes
Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres ( New York: Random House, 1981 ), p. 6.
Jeffrey Richards, Swordsmen of the Screen ( London: Routledge, 1977 ), p. 4.
Harry Sandford, ‘Leslie Selander’, in Jon Tuska (ed.), Close Up: the Contract Director ( Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1976 ), p. 241.
See, for example, Brian Taves, The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993 ), p. 72
Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros.’s Campaign against Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 68, 81–2.
See in particular Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood ( Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1980 )
Victor Navasky, Naming Names ( New York: The Viking Press, 1980 )
Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades ( New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997 )
Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War ( Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 ).
On the full corpus of Arthurian and Robin Hood films, see Kevin J. Harty (ed.), Cinerea Arthuriana ( New York: Garland, 1991 )
Kevin J. Harty (ed.), King Arthur on Film ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999 )
Scott Allen Nollen, Robin Hood: A Cinematic History of the English Outlaw and his Scottish Counterparts ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999 )
Jeffrey Richards, ‘Robin Hood on film and television since 1945’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2: 1 (2001), pp. 65–80.
John Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 12, 16.
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 ).
For a full account of the scripting and filming of Ivanhoe, see John Lenihan, ‘English Classics for Cold War America’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 20 (1992), pp. 42–51.
Dore Schary, Heyday ( Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1979 ), pp. 246–7.
Steve Neale, ‘Pseudonyms, Sapphire and Salt: “Un-American” Contributions to Television Costume Adventure Series in the 1950s’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23: 3 (August 2003), pp. 245–57.
For a full discussion of this phenomenon, see Jeffrey Richards, ‘From Christianity to Paganism: The New Middle Ages and the Values of “Medieval” Masculinity’, Cultural Values 3 (1999), pp. 213–34.
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Richards, J. (2007). The Politics of the Swashbuckler. In: Chapman, J., Glancy, M., Harper, S. (eds) The New Film History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/9780230206229_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/9780230206229_9
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