| Nuclear Diva: Constructing Cinematic Divadom in American Film, 1950--1959 measures the fallout created by the collisions between an actress's star persona and her performance within the dramatic space of a particular film. Examining major works by directors Joseph Mankiewicz, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, and Douglas Sirk, this dissertation identifies a kind of cinematic divadom yielded from the explosive encounters between star and character. By considering the salience of a star's image to our understanding of these films that, since their release fifty years or more ago, have achieved their own canonical status in the American cinematic imagination, I explore the ways in which cinematic divadom traverses constructions of gender, class, and race. Ranging from Gloria Swanson, a screen queen from Hollywood's silent movie era, to Kim Novak, a prefab diva groomed by studio bosses, to Lana Turner, whose persona was always more glitter than gold, the actresses in these films participate in a sophisticated and smart cinematic pas de deux with their own external star images. To assume however that these actresses and characters exist only under the thumb or gaze of male authority---or ostensibly that of the director---ignores the manifestly different ways that these movies negotiate or recreate the divadom of these stars. Moreover, that foreign-born men direct these American women speaks to the richly duplicitous nature of these films and the work they undertake in subverting or repackaging standard genre pictures into surprisingly fresh, and sometimes disturbing, cinema. |
