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A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of Marie Dressler
In the first book-length 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 often played ugly ducklings, old maids, doting mothers, and imperious dowagers. However, her body...more
Paperback, 208 pages
Published
May 8th 2009
by University of Illinois Press
(first published April 1st 2009)
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This is a brilliant analysis of Dressler's rise to stardom in conjunction with the psychological necessities of audiences during the Great Depression. What sets Sturtevant's book apart from other studies of Dressler is her insight into the complexities of stardom as a system and as a means of performance standard. Using Bakhtin and Foucault, she illustrates how Dressler represented a positive force of liberation for older women and the working class at a time when all hope seemed to be lost.
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