Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation

Performers make a crucial contribution to the achievement of narrative films. By moving through exemplary sequences, this book closely follows the movement and behaviour of screen performers - Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Widmark - and by emphasising their relationship to other aspects of film style - camera, location and plot - it develops accounts that are specific and involved. This study concentrates on films from the ’Golden Age’ of Hollywood and moment-by-moment descriptions enable fresh interpretations to emerge and evolve. These reveal the significance and intensity of a performer’s engagement with the world of a film.

Andrew Klevan is a lecturer at the University of Kent in Canterbury. His previous books include Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film.