Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: Representing Rough Rebels

199 Pages·2013·1.69 MB·English

by  Daniel Smith-Rowsey (auth.)

Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance
Star Actors in the
Hollywood Renaissance
Representing Rough Rebels
Daniel Smith-Rowsey
Sacramento State University, California, USA
© Daniel Smith-Rowsey 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-31038-5
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-67214-1 ISBN 978-1-137-31039-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137310392
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To my wonderful, patient wife, Irena,
and our beloved sons, Darwin and Rainier
Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgments ix
1 How to Represent a Rough Rebel 1
2 Dustin Hoffman: The Artistic Star 33
3 Jack Nicholson: The Realistic Romantic 74
4 Elliott Gould: The Urban Don Quixote 113
5 Conclusion 153
Notes 163
Bibliography 172
Index 184
vii
List of Illustrations
2.1 Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Hoffman)
cross the street 36
2.2 Rizzo (Hoffman) reprimanding 40
2.3 Hoffman in elaborate makeup as 121-year-old Jack Crabb 46
2.4 Hoffman transitions from the Little Big Man to
the young Jack Crabb, with a Captain (Jack Bannon) 48
2.5 David (Hoffman) manipulates Amy (Susan George) 62
2.6 David (Hoffman) smiles the smile of the man
with the royal flush 64
3.1 Wyatt (Peter Fonda), Billy (Dennis Hopper),
and Hanson’s (Nicholson’s) liberating effect on them 79
3.2 Hanson (Nicholson) at the campfire 81
3.3 Bobby Dupea (Nicholson) on oil-rig fields 90
3.4 The “no substitutions” scene, with the waitress
(Lorna Thayer), Bobby (Nicholson), Rayette DiPesto
(Karen Black), Terry Grouse (Toni Basil), and
Palm Apodaca (Helena Kallianiotes) 93
3.5 Jonathan (Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel)
in college 102
3.6 Sandy (Garfunkel) and Jonathan (Nicholson),
gads about town 105
4.1 Ted (Gould) in bed with Alice (Dyan Cannon) 116
4.2 Ted (Gould) climbs into bed with Carol (Natalie Wood),
Bob (Robert Culp), and Alice (Cannon) 118
4.3 Trapper John (Gould) sporting the “luxuriant
Zapata mustache” 130
4.4 Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper (Gould) –
“something about a relationship between men” 132
4.5 David (Gould) clings to Karin (Bibi Andersson) 144
4.6 Karin (Andersson) in focus while David (Gould)
is out of focus and out of touch 145
viii
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my doctoral supervisors, Roberta Pearson and
Gianluca Sergi, for their seemingly inexhaustible patience and flexibil-
ity when it came to my topic, my writing, and my personal needs. None
of this would be possible without the generosity and support of Sharon
Monteith, Ann McQueen, and the entire department at the University
of Nottingham, including the amazing assistance from the faculty, staff,
and my fellow student colleagues. I also want to thank Peter Krämer for
help with early drafts. Any errors are my own.
ix
1
How to Represent a Rough Rebel
There is a book to be written on the importance of
ugly men in cinema.
Anthony Lane, 20071
Introduction
For its first 46 years, Time, America’s newsweekly of record, invariably
featured illustrations of important people or events on its cover. The
very first Time cover photograph, dated February 7, 1969, featured not
a world leader, astronaut, or international conflict, but Dustin Hoffman
and Mia Farrow, appearing in suggestive close-up and adorned by a
headline that read “The Young Actors: Stars and Anti-Stars.” The arti-
cle, written by Stefan Kanfer, Jay Cocks, and Carey Winfrey, positioned
Hoffman and Farrow as nothing less than Hollywood’s best response to
the counterculture. It read:
The Graduate and Rosemary’s Baby spin a new myth of lost innocence,
of the individual against the wicked system. The new young actors
themselves represent the death of many movie myths—among them,
the one of the movie star. The big press buildup, the house in Beverly
Hills baroque, the ostentation and the seven-picture commitment
are giving way to a stubborn kind of performer who is as suspi-
cious of the Hollywood system as a student rebel is of the university
trustees.
The article quoted Hoffman: “Art has never been for the masses, but
now people seem to see what’s good. The least I can do is try to make
1
2 Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance
what I do as artistic as possible.” The article eventually associated even
this kind of “anti-star” with artifice:
The anti-star attitude itself threatens to become a new pose or con-
vention in which the Hollywood swimming pool is replaced by the
interesting East Side pad, the Valley ranch by a Martha’s Vineyard
retreat, the antic table-hopping by frantic political activism.
This was a partial reference to Hoffman’s campaigning for Eugene
McCarthy; when more leftist candidates were available, Hoffman had
taken Mr. McCarthy’s daughter to the Oscars as his date (for his nomi-
nation for The Graduate (1967)), and had stumped for Mr. McCarthy on
college campuses, urging students to “Get Clean For Gene.” Time was
particularly interested in Hoffman as a representative of a new sort of
male movie star both offscreen and on:
As comedy grew steadily blacker and as audiences grew steadily
younger, hipper and more draftable, the old concepts began to erode.
The invulnerables like Peck and Holden and Wayne seemed lost in a
country full of people whose destinies were not in their own hands.
The nation of cities needed new images, and suddenly Hoffman
became an archetype.2
If Time was right that we needed new “images,” who or what were
the others? What exactly did Hoffman’s “archetype” represent? And
what effect did his type have on cinema and American culture more
generally?
In this book, I argue that male “anti-stars” of the late 1960s and early
1970s exerted deterministic power over the most transformative cinema
of the time. They were more than just actors in films; on magazine
covers and in popular discourse, they were positioned, promoted, and
received as Hollywood’s best possible response to the young educated
adults who ostensibly “did not trust anyone over thirty.” (The fact that
these men were at least thirty years old is only the first of their inter-
esting contradictions.) By close textual analysis of nine representative
films made and released in a crucible period, I show how the perfor-
mative styles of the most popular star-actors signified an absurdist,
ironic alienation as well as the exclusion of women. By sampling the
critical reception of the time, I show how these star-actors’ discursive
constructs were understood and contextualized. Overall, I show that
the star-actors functioned as privileged symbols for navigating the