Bruce Babington analyses the achievement of one of the central partnerships in British film history, the screenwriters of famous films by Hitchcock and Carol Reed, who became the producer-writer-directors of a succession of famous and well-loved films including Millions Like Us, Two Thousand Women, Waterloo Road, The Rake's Progress, I See a Dark Stranger, The Blue Lagoon and The Happiest Days of Your Life. This study of the pair is notable both for its contextualising of them within English and British culture over four decades, including British cinema's 'golden age' of the war and...

Deals analytically with the fascinating topic of the great film stars (and some thought-provoking lesser ones) of the British cinema, from Alma Taylor and Ivor Novello in the Silent period, up to the present day. Looks both at stars who attained worldwide fame through the Hollywood cinema, and those whose contribution is primarily to the national cinema. First collection of essays on the subject with a wide historical coverage including major figures, such as Connery, Mason, Trevor Howard, Deborah Kerr, Mary Millington, Albert Finney and James Mason. Major figures in UK film studies have...

A history of the New Zealand fiction feature film is the only comprehensive account of the New Zealand feature film from its beginnings to the present. Countering tendencies to think of New Zealand film as beginning in the 1970s, Bruce Babington discloses a longer saga showing how the present, for all its difference, can only be understood through the past: Gaston Melies' New Zealand films of 1912, Tarr's Hinemoa, the first feature made by a New Zealander, early Australian film makers' use of New Zealand for an Australasian audience, the English and American made 'Maoriland' films of the late...

A collection of original essays focusing on masculinity and film, particularly the representation of European masculinity. Spilt into four sections--stars, class and race, fathers and bodies--areas covered include the Carmen films, Yiddish cinema, romantic comedy and beur cinema.

After covering the genre's early history and theorizing its general characteristics, this volume then focuses on specific instances of sports films, such as the biopic, the sports history film, the documentary, the fan film, the boxing film, and explores issues such as gender, race, spectacle and silent comedy. Four major films are then closely analysed - Chariots of Fire, Field of Dreams, the Indian cricket epic Lagaan, and Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday. While recording American film's importance to the genre, the book resists the conventional over-concentration...