Great Big Girl Like Me
Regular price
€21.99
A01=Victoria Sturtevant
Academy Award
athletic
Author_Victoria Sturtevant
body
Category=ATC
Category=ATF
Christopher Bean
cinema
desire
dowager
Emma
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
figure
film
film history
film studies
forgotten
gender
Great Depression
Hollywood
industry
leading lady
Marie Dressler
MGM
Min and Bill
mother
movie
myth
old maid
Oscar
physicality
Politics and Prosperity
representation
role
screen
sexuality
slapstick
star
story
studio system
Tugboat Annie
ugly duckling
vaudeville
women and film
women's studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780252076220
- Weight: 286g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 08 May 2009
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In this study of Marie Dressler, MGM's most profitable movie star in the early 1930s, Victoria Sturtevant analyzes Dressler's use of her body to challenge Hollywood's standards for leading ladies. At five feet seven inches tall and two hundred pounds, Dressler was never considered the popular "delicate beauty," often playing ugly ducklings, old maids, doting mothers, and imperious dowagers. However, Dressler's body, her fearless physicality, and her athletic slapstick routines commanded the screen. Although an unlikely movie star, Dressler represented for Depression-era audiences a sign of abundance and generosity in a time of scarcity.
This premier analysis of her body of work explores how Dressler refocused the generic frame of her films beyond the shallow problems of the rich and beautiful, instead dignifying the marginalized, the elderly, women, and the poor. Sturtevant inteprets the meanings of Dressler's body through different genres, venues, and historical periods by looking at her vaudeville career, her transgressive representation of an "unruly" yet sexual body in Emma and Christopher Bean, ideas of the body politic in the films Politics and Prosperity, and Dressler as a mythic body in Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie.
Victoria Sturtevant is an associate professor of film and video studies at the University of Oklahoma.
