This volume presents detailed interpretations of singular performances by several of the most compelling actors in cinema history, asking in many different and complementary ways what makes performance meaningful, how it reflects a director's style, as well as how it contributes to the development of national cinemas and cultures. Whether noting the precise ways actors shape film narrative, achieve emotional effect, or move toward political subversion, the essays in these books innovate new approaches to studying screen performance as an art form and cultural force.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Close-up: great American performances - Kyle Stevens and Murray Pomerance
• 1 Ethel Waters in The Member of the Wedding - Anna Everet
• 2 Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth - Steven Rybin
• 3 Cary Grant in His Girl Friday - Adrienne L. McLean
• 4 Janet Gaynor in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans - Janet Bergstrom
• 5 Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter - Homer B. Pettey
• 6 Bette Davis in Dangerous - Lucy Fischer
• 7 James Stewart in Vertigo - William Rothman
• 8 Carole Lombard in To Be or Not to Be - Alex Clayton
• 9 James Mason in Lolita - Rebecca Bell-Metereau
• 10 Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun - George Toles
• 11 Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success - John Bruns
• 12 Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther - Daniel Varndell
• 13 Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - R. Barton Palmer
• 14 Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy - Murray Pomerance
• 15 Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night - Frances Gateward
• 16 Gene Hackman in The Conversation - Brenda Austin-Smith
• 17 Gena Rowlands in Gloria - David Greven
• 18 Jack Nicholson in The Passenger - Rick Warner
• 19 Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man - Jason Jacobs
• 20 Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye - Douglas McFarland
• 21 Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco - Timotheus Vermeulen
• 22 Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple - Lester D. Friedman
• 23 Cate Blanchet in Blue Jasmine - Shonni Enelow
• 24 Oscar Isaac in A Most Violent Year - Charles Ramírez Berg
• 25 Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria - Elliot Logan
• The cast
• The contributors