American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli

by Robert Lang

"The difficulty for men or the impossibility for women of living up to patriarchal society's ideal order is the very stuff of melodrama," writes Robert Lang in this daring work on what the author sees as the central genre of American film. Lang contends that the true melodrama is essentially an Oedipal drama--a dramatization of the ways in which we are all formed within a matrix of familial imperatives. As he interprets them, these imperatives are often crippling reflections of patriarchy. Revealing how melodrama both submits to patriarchal ideology and confronts it, he believes that we can learn from it either how to be happier on its terms--which are the terms of life in Western society--or how to find our way out of the familial labyrinth.
Lang traces the development of melodrama in the first fifty years of the American cinema by offering detailed interpretations of Griffith's Way Down East, The Mother and the Law, and Broken Blossoms; Vidor's The Crowd, Stella Dallas, and Ruby Gentry; and Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Some Came Running, and Home from the Hill. Drawing on the insights of Irigaray, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, Peter Brooks, and several contemporary film theorists, he focuses on the psychoanalytic aspects of the films to bring us new insights into the way we live our lives.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1989