Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ndmmz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-01T04:14:24.864Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Any Chance to Be Unrefined”: Film Narrative Modes in Anita Loos's Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Brooks E. Hefner
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay examines the underappreciated work of the Hollywood scenarist and humor writer Anita Loos. In general, Loos is known separately to film scholars, as a prominent writer of silent films, and to historians of American culture, as an important twentieth‐century humorist. However, her film‐writing career and her work in the theory of film writing influenced the narrative structure and assumptions of her fiction. Through readings of Loos's three early novels, the essay demonstrates how the humor and complex cinematic structure of these texts depend on a stark text‐image divide that stems directly from her ideas about writing for silent film. Looking at Loos's fiction in the light of her intimate familiarity with the film industry provides new insight into dialogues about high and popular culture and into the engagement of modernism with cinema. (BEH)

Type
Cluster on Textual Materialism
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 107 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Anderson, John. “Lorelei Goes on the Stage.” Harper's Bazar Oct. 1926: 117+. Print.Google Scholar
Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Beauchamp, Cari. Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Beauchamp, Cari, and Loos, Mary Anita, eds. Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Blom, T. E. “Anita Loos and Sexual Economics: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Canadian Review of American Studies 7 (1976): 39–47. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Print.Google Scholar
Carey, Gary. Anita Loos: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Cella, Laura J. C. “Narrative ‘Confidence Games’: Framing the Blonde Spectacle in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and Nights at the Circus (1984).” Frontiers 25.3 (2004): 47-62. Print.Google Scholar
Churchwell, Sarah. “‘Lost Among the Ads’: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Politics of Imitation.” Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s. Ed. Lisa Botschon and Meredith Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2003. 135–66. Print.Google Scholar
Dickstein, Morris. “What Price Hollywood? Dreams and Nightmares of the Great Depression.” Common Review 1.3 (2002): 22–31. Print.Google Scholar
Dime. Rev. of Come On In. Variety 27 Sept. 1918: 44. Print.Google Scholar
Dos Passos, John. U.S.A.: The Forty-Second Parallel, 1919, The Big Money. 1930-36. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Emerson, John, and Loos, Anita. Breaking into the Movies. New York: McCann, 1921. Print.Google Scholar
Emerson, John. How to Write Photoplays, with a Complete Scenario As Written by Them of The Love Expert. New York: McCann, 1920. Print.Google Scholar
Faulkner, William. “To Anita Loos.” Feb. 1926. The Selected Letters of William Faulkner. Ed. Joseph Blotner. New York: Random, 1977. 32. Print.Google Scholar
Fine, Richard. West of Eden: Writers in Hollywood, 1928-1940. Washington: Smithsonian Inst., 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Fred. Rev. of A Wild Girl of the Sierras. Variety 16 June 1916: 26. Print.Google Scholar
Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History. 4th ed. New York: Scribner's, 1921. Print.Google Scholar
Hall, Mordaunt. “The Screen.” Rev. of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. New York Times 16 Jan. 1928: 24. Proquest. Web. 25 Sept. 2009.Google Scholar
Hegeman, Susan. “Taking Blondes Seriously.” American Literary History 7.3 (1995): 525–54. Print.Google Scholar
Jolo. Rev. of Hit-the-Trail Holliday. Variety 14 June 1918: 29. Print.Google Scholar
Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers. New York: Morrow, 1975. Print.Google Scholar
Kobal, John. People Will Talk. New York: Knopf, 1986. Print.Google Scholar
Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Macmillan, 1915. Print.Google Scholar
Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Print.Google Scholar
Lood, . Rev. of A Temperamental Wife. Variety 19 Sept. 1919: 54. Print.Google Scholar
Lood, . Rev. of A Virtuous Vamp. Variety 21 Nov. 1919: 55. Print.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. “The Better Things of Life!” Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan June 1930: 30+. Print.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. “The Biography of a Book.” Preface. Loos, Gentlemen xxxvii-xlii.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. Loos, Gentlemen 125–243.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. A Cast of Thousands. New York: Grosset, 1977. Print.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. Fate Keeps on Happening: Adventures of Lorelei Lee and Other Writings. Ed. Ray Pierre Corsini. New York: Dodd, 1984. Print.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Loos, Gentlemen 1–123.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. A Girl like I. New York: Viking, 1966. Print.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. “The Handwriting on the Screen.” Interview by Karl Schmidt. Everybody's Magazine May 1917: 622-23. Print.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. Kiss Hollywood Good-by. New York: Viking, 1974. Print.Google Scholar
Loos, Anita. The Talmadge Girls: A Memoir. New York: Viking, 1978. Print.Google Scholar
Lutes, Jean Marie. “Authoring Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Mass-Market Beauty Culture and the Makeup of Writers.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 23 (1998): 431–60. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matthews, John T. “Gentlemen Defer Blondes: Faulkner, Anita Loos, and Mass Culture.” Faulkner, His Contemporaries, and His Posterity. Tubingen: Francke, 1993. 207–21. Print.Google Scholar
McGurl, Mark. The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
McKible, Adam. “Lothrop Stoddard and Racial Pseudoscience in the 1920s.” City U of New York Graduate Center, New York. 4 Nov. 2005. Lecture.Google Scholar
Morey, Anne. “‘Would You Be Ashamed to Let Them See What You Have Written?‘: The Gendering of Photoplaywrights, 1913-1923.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 17.1 (1998): 83-99. Print.Google Scholar
North, Michael. Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Powdermaker, Hortense. Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers. Boston: Little, 1950. Print.Google Scholar
Rosen, Marjorie. Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream. New York: Coward, 1973. Print.Google Scholar
Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Schrader, Richard J. “But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes: Anita Loos and H. L. Mencken.” Menckeniana 98 (1986): 1–7. Print.Google Scholar
See, Carolyn. “The Hollywood Novel: The American Dream Cheat.” Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties. Ed. Madden, David. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1968. 199–217. Print.Google Scholar
Sid. Rev. of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Variety 18 Jan. 1928: 13. Print.Google Scholar
Silverman, Jonathan. “Lorelei's Doomed Performance: Anita Loos and the American Dream.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 27 (2002): 547–68. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoddard, Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy. New York: Scribner's, 1920. Print.Google Scholar
Tibbetts, John C., and Welsh, James M. His Majesty, the American: The Cinema of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. South Brunswick: Barnes, 1977. Print.Google Scholar
Tucker, Jean E. “Voices from the Silents.” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 37.3-4 (1980): 387–412. Print.Google Scholar
Veitch, Jonathan. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust. 1939. New York: Signet, 1983. Print.Google Scholar
Wilson, Harry Leon. Merton of the Movies. 1922. Berkeley: Heyday, 2004. Print.Google Scholar