List of Illustrations; Introduction: The Film of Value; Part I. Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics; Shooting the City: The Gangster, Manhattanites, and the Movies;Back to the Future, or the Vanguard Meets the Rearguard; Flags and Letters, Men and War; Farce, Dreams, and Desire: Some Like It Hot Re-viewed; Interlude; Switching Genres, or Playing to the Camera, Playing to the House: Stage vs. Screen Acting; On the Road Again: The Road Film and the Two Coppolas; The Coming-of-Age Fim a la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni; Early vs. Later Bergman: Winter Light and Autumn Sonata Revisited; "Everyone Has His Reasons": Words, Images, and La grande illusion in the Cinema of Jean Renoir; A Passage to Tokyo: The Art of Ozu, Remembered; Through the Looking Glass: The American Art Cinema in an Age of Social Change; Bibliography; Index

'Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics' offers close readings of genre films and acknowledged film classics in an attempt to explore both the aesthetics of genre and the definition of 'classic' - as well as the changing perception of so-called classic movies over time. Implicitly theoretical as much as it is unashamedly practical, this book is a model not only of text analysis, but also of the enlightened deployment of cultural studies in the service of film study. The book includes re-considerations of such classic films as 'I vitelloni', 'Grand Illusion', 'Winter Light', and 'Tokyo Story'; it features genre examinations of the war film ('Flags of Our Fathers' and 'Letters from Iwo Jima'), farce ('Some Like It Hot'), the road film ('The Rain People'), the New York-centered movie ('Manhattan'), and avant-garde pictures that privilege narrative ('3-Iron' and 'Eternal Sunshine of the Classic Mind'); and 'Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics' concludes with a searching investigation of the rise of the New American Cinema during a tumultuous decade of social change - from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.