the magazine outlook is celebrating its 10 year anniversary with a series of articles on indian film, 1995-2005. the entire issue is here. one of the more interesting articles is this one which makes the case that while bollywood has swamped all other indian cinema in marketing terms, excellent regional and parallel cinema continues to thrive. after summing up the dominance of bollywood chatterjee writes:
Day: May 26, 2005
Male hysteria –> Stewart –> Hitchcock
(continuing from here.)
Stewart’s an emotional wreck in much of Hitchcock’s stuff. While Cary Grant maintains a kind of icy hauteur through the thick/thin of those thrillers, Stewart bubbles with barely-repressed confusion and turmoil. So–my wrongheaded snipe about melodramatics is completely, thoroughly wrong.
(I read an interesting little tidbit about Stewart yesterday in Jonathan Lethem’s collection, _The Disappointment Artist_–which I can’t recommend highly enough as a model of smart, personal criticism about art. He was noting how a biographer of Stewart had wondered how the “gentle†actor of early pictures turned, after his service in WWII, into the dark troubled soul of later pictures. And Stewart’s war record was, in part, sealed–protected as confidential. The biographer wondered if Stewart had been part of the Dresden bombing raid….)
There’s a project in here somewhere: Action films as male hysteria.