[Review] Jans B. Wager (2017) Jazz and cocktails: rethinking race and the sound of film noir

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Chiller-dillers for the shiver-and-shudder set: The Whistler film series

This article explores the serial dynamics behind and within the succession of B-films Columbia Pictures developed from the popular CBS radio program The Whistler. It examines how this anthology series developed within Columbia’s ongoing strategy of low-budget production, while responding to specific industrial challenges facing 1940s B-films. Besides looking at broader synergies between radio and cinema during this period, the article also qualifies the tendency to categorize the Whistler movies as films noir, suggesting it is more productive to view them as products of a broader pulp serialscape that is shaped by alternative cultural and industrial logics

Exploring film seriality: an introduction

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Therapeutic horror? Olga Druce, House of Mystery and the controversy over children’s radio thrillers

From the 1930s to the 1950s, parents, educators, psychologists and others hotly debated the impact of US radio’s sensational genre programming on young listeners. While many condemned radio thrillers and chillers for subjecting children to excessive emotional arousal, or for encouraging juvenile delinquency, more progressive authorities argued for their cathartic potential. Drawing on a wide range of materials from contemporary newspapers, magazines, trade journals and radio shows, this article examines the post-World War 2 revival of this controversy over sensational programming. It explores the efforts of child education experts such as Josette Frank to contest the emotive denunciation of children’s radio, and children’s culture more broadly, as well as their attempt to develop child-centered programming that combined thrills with socially-enlightened content. The popular and award-winning House of Mystery (1945-49) was a key exemplification of this strategy. Building on the success Frank and producer Robert Maxwell enjoyed with the acclaimed juvenile serial The Adventures of Superman (1940-51), Maxwell’s House of Mystery was an audacious program that tailored horror scenarios to young listeners. Under the stewardship of visionary writer-director Olga Druce, this popular and award-winning program sought a strategic compromise between the pleasures and the perils of audio horror. While delivering the stimulation children desired from genre fare, House of Mystery served as a therapeutic intervention that countered both the morbid sensations peddled by crime and horror dramas and the predictable condemnation of youth programming

Something more than night: tales of the noir city

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Sex and slapstick: the Martin and Lewis phenomenon

Described by Canadian film director David Cronenberg as a witty, provocative and necessary re-evaluation of the phenomenon known as Jerry Lewis, "Enfant Terrible: Jerry Lewis in American Film" brings together new critical assessments of the work of this entertainer-actor-director by such distinguished scholars as Leslie A Fiedler, Marcia Landy, Andrew Horton, Krin Gabbard, Dana Polan, Lucy Fischer, David Desser, Peter Lehman and Frank Krutnik. The contributors address topics ranging from Lewiss on- and off-screen performances, the representations of disability in his films, the European obsession with Lewis, and the unusual representations of masculinity across his films. The chapter, Sex and Slapstick: The Martin and Lewis phenomenon was specially commissioned for this volume by editor Murray Pomerance, owing to the significance of Krutniks book "Inventing Jerry Lewis" (2000). This is the only chapter in the book to consider in depth Lewiss crucial 10-year partnership with crooner Dean Martin. Scrutinizing the teams work across a range of media (films, television, cabaret), the chapter explores their professional relationship in terms of a continuing instantiation of liveness that went far beyond the conventional opposition of comic and straight man to offer a complexly nuanced take on male homosocial relations. The chapter argues that beyond its intensively personal nature, this relationship permitted the articulation of a dizzying array of emotional and covertly erotic intensities between men that also performed a highly public, cultural function Locating the examination of Martin & Lewiss work and significance within scholarly debates on film stardom and screen comedy, the chapter also makes use of contemporaneous critical responses to the team within the mainstream press, the trade press and screen journals. It teases out the dynamics of the male partnership by examining in detail specific examples from their films and television show

The faint aroma of performing seals: the 'nervous' romance and the comedy of the sexes

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Gene Wilder’s genius was in portraying the deluded straight man

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In a lonely street: genre, film noir, masculinity

Taking issue with many orthodox views of Film Noir, Frank Krutnik argues for a reorientation of this compulsively engaging area of Hollywood cultural production. Krutnik recasts the films within a generic framework and draws on recent historical and theoretical research to examine both the diversity of film noir and its significance within American popular culture of the 1940s. He considers classical Hollywood cinema, debates on genre, and the history of the emergence of character in film noir, focusing on the hard-boiled' crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain as well as the popularisationof Freudian psychoanalysis; and the social and cultural upheavals of the 1940s. The core of this book however concerns the complex representationof masculinity in the noir tough' thriller, and where and how gender interlocks with questions of genre. Analysing in detail major thrillers like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and The Killers , alongside lesser known but nonetheless crucial films as Stranger on the Third Floor, Pitfall and Dead Reckoning Krutnik has produced a provocative and highly readable study of one of Hollywood most perennially fascinating groups of films