Veronica Pravadelli is a professor of film studies and director of the Center for American Studies at Roma Tre University and a former visiting professor at Brown University. She is the author of several books including Performance, Rewriting, Identity: Chantal Akerman's Postmodern Cinema; Alfred Hitchcock: Notorious; and Le donne del cinema: dive, registe, spettatrici. The Italian edition of Classic Hollywood won two prizes for Best Book in Film Studies.

"Panoramic overviews alternate with convincing close readings of dozens of well-known films. . . . In confronting and developing these classic film texts, Pravadelli has produced her own outstanding reading of Hollywood classical style. Highly Recommended."--Choice  "Veronica Pravadelli looks back at the classical Hollywood cinema with a powerful magnifying glass. What comes into full view are not only new details, but an entire new geography. Trends, dividing lines, stylistic choices, plots, questions of gender, become much clearer. The result is a cutting edge analysis, surprising and convincing."--Francesco Casetti, author of Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity"Pravadelli's examination and contextualization of on-screen gender dynamics of the 1930s-1960s makes a valuable contribution to film studies."--Journalism History

• CoverTitleContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Film Studies1. The Early Thirties: Modernity, New Women, and the Aesthetic of Attractions2. Normative Desires and Visual Sobriety: Apogee of the Classical Model3. The Male Subject of Noir and the Modern Gaze4. (Dis)Adventures of Female Desire in the 1940s Woman's Film5. Excess, Spectacle, Sensation: Family Melodrama in the 1950s6. Performative Bodies and Non-referential Images: Excesses of the MusicalNotesWorks CitedIndex