Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Quotations


Part I. Introducing Ida Lupino, Director and Feminist Author
A Rejection of Hollywood
Lupino Directs
Director Lupino and Colleagues
The Filmakers’ Films
Lupino and the Censors
Lupino as Feminist Auteur
Postwar Hollywood, American Society and Culture
Close-up on Outrage
Empathy and a Cinema of Engagement
Italian Neorealism or American Realisms?
Looking Backward? Outrage and M

Part II. Lupino’s Ingenious Genres: Early Films and The Trouble with Angels (1966)
The Social Problem Film and Film Noir
Home Noir
Home Is Where the Noir Is
Doubled Dreams in Hard, Fast and Beautiful
Doubled Domesticity in The Bigamist
Doubled Trauma: Outrage
A Mighty Girl: Lupino and The Trouble with Angels

Part III: Lupino Moves to Television
Industrial Contexts: Film to Television
Directing for Television
“No. 5 Checked Out”
Ida Lupino, Television Director
On Close Readings of 1950s and 1960s Television
“The Return”: Norma Desmond and Ida Lupino Haunt the Small Screen
Mr. Adams and Eve
Directed Episodes, 1956–1968
Comedies
Action, Thrillers, Mysteries
Westerns


Notes
Works Cited
Index

 

About the Author

THERESE GRISHAM is a lecturer in film and media studies in the department of humanities at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois, as well as an instructor at the Facets Multimedia Film School in Chicago. She is also an editor for the English translations of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso).

JULIE GROSSMAN is a professor of English, and communication and film studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. Her books include Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir, and Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny. She is also a coeditor of the forthcoming collection Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds.

 

Reviews

"[A] landmark study of this underrecognized director. The book couldn't be timelier… 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*

"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."
*author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood*

"Low budget, unheralded and genre bending, 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."
*author of Overhearing Film Dialogue*

"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. Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman’s thoughtful study sheds a welcome light on an oeuvre that has been too long obscured."
*author of Film After Film: Or, What Became Of 21st Century Cinema?*

"Grossman and Grisham's book is 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."
*coauthor of A Short History of Film*

"[A] groundbreaking and judiciously comprehensive study."
*South Atlantic Review*